The Winnipeg Folk Festival: A Full Spectrum Event

By Jeannette Madden
Staff Writer

It’s a great beginning for the annual Winnipeg Folk Festival as it gets ready to celebrate its 37th year. One of North America’s premier outdoor Festivals, this year the Winnipeg Folk Festival will be held Wednesday, July 7 through Sunday, July 11, at Birds Hill Provincial Park in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Tickets are available now.

Executive Director Tamara Kater explains the Festival as “An event, people coming together around music and a sense of discovery. People have the chance to discover different sounds and new artists.”

“One of the most important things to know about the Festival is that it is a full spectrum event. Again, it’s centered around performance but there are family activities. There’s really something for everyone and it is like stepping into a community for a few days and just having a wonderful time. People make lifelong friendships, we have people who meet each other at the Festival and want to get married at the Festival…”

“Sure, we do put up a stage and people want to sit in front of the stage and watch things but they’re doing that because they’re neighbors…one of the things that’s unique about a folk festival is that in the evening we have a stage with multiple acts performing but in the daytime we have a collaborative workshops where we will take, like musician A with musician B, and they have never played together before. They do a lot of collaboration onstage and that is when we actually talk to the audience and find out what it is that really motivates them to come.
Every performance is unique because you may never see those artists that are playing together again so for people who are seeing that, they walk away saying ‘Oh my gosh, I can’t believe I got to see that.’”

The Festival is sponsored by the Winnipeg Folk Festival, a not-for-profit organization that does more than just put on the yearly Festival. Said Kater, “We like to say we bring music to the community year around. We do more than thirty concert presentations thought the year. We have a fifty-seat venue where we do smaller, more intimate concerts. We also have a community outreach program year-round as well. Our venue has rotating exhibits on the walls so we’re also involved in visual arts. We have a music store in downtown Winnipeg, a CD store, so we’re really in the community 365 days a year.”
Last year, the Festival featured musicians ranging from Elvis Costello to Jamaican Reggae artist Burning Spear, and that’s just two of the more than fifty acts that appeared. How does the Festival fit them all under the genre “folk music?”

“That’s a big question that we debate a lot.” Kater said. “For us at the Winnipeg Folk Festival folk music is way beyond the singer/ songwriters. It’s really music that is from people and I’d say probably one of the best ways to define it is really about it being non-commercially driven. If it is music that’s coming up from the grass roots, and that can be a lot of different art forms, people would argue that hip-hop is actually a form of folk music, you know it came out of almost a social movement. Folk music has really evolved beyond that kind of late ‘60’s classic definition of someone singing with a guitar in their hands, although that is still very much a part of it and that’s why you see in the program such an immense range of sounds.”

The Festival includes a number of programs and projects. “So much of what the Festival is about is learning,” explained Kater, “and as an organization it’s not just about putting up a stage and having an audience there. We really want people to learn about music, to interact with music, so we have a really well-developed family area. Last year we had an instrument petting zoo where children could pick up instruments and try them out.”

“Our Young Performer Program is really about mentoring the next generation of emerging artists and being cognizant of the fact that folk music isn’t necessarily taught in schools. It’s learned by doing.”

“We also have Folk Retreat, which happens a few days before the Winnipeg Folk Festival, where performers who are playing the Festival come in a few days early and teach. It’s not a professional training program at the Festival. It’s open to anyone and is for people that love to play music as a hobby. It offers people in the community the chance to learn from some professionals and spend time with artists that they like, learning about how they play music.”

Other offerings include the Young Performer Program, which is open to emerging musicians ages 14 – 24, offers a day of workshops and mentoring with professional musicians performing at the Festival and a chance to perform on-stage at the 2010 Festival.

The Festival partners with the Winnipeg Art Gallery to present the Young Artists Program, a “traveling studio” for 14 – 18 year old artists.
The Winnipeg Folk Festival Artistic Achievement Award recognizes outstanding artistic achievement by folk musicians. The award is presented annually to an artist who has performed at the Winnipeg Folk Festival, who has demonstrated musical excellence, and who has contributed at an exceptional level to the field of folk music and to the community as a whole.

Kater also explained camping at the festival as well as the Campground Exhibition and Animation project. “We actually have three camping areas in the Festival and about ten thousand people camp, out of the eighteen thousand who attended [in 2009]. The camping community is an integral part of the Festival.”

“The biggest campsite that we have is adjacent to the actual Festival site and where the campground animation project takes place and it’s really because there are six thousand people in that campground coming together to live together for five days. It’s not just about sleeping, it’s about that sense of community as well, so we take a lot of the spirit of what’s going on in the Festival site and bring it into the campground by having those projects. Those are projects that come out of the community itself like the campground people design them. It’s actually campers who come up with ideas and we support and facilitate that so that the campgrounds reflect their own community.”
These projects have included the Red Willow Tipi Village, The Castle, and Fire-spinning Performances.

Because of the growing demand for camping, this year the Festival is bundling festival and camping passes. Their hope is that this will make camping fair and accessible to everyone and preserve audience experience. A first-ever attendance cap is also being introduced because of the growth in Festival attendees.

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If You Go

What: Winnipeg Folk Festival
Where: Bird’s Hill Provincial Park, Winnipeg MB
When: Wed-Sun, July 7-11, 2010
How Much: 5-day pass: CA$238.25 (Feb 22: US$228.45), http://www.winnipegfolkfestival.ca