Category Archives: National Folk Festival

Fall Fests: Risky Business?

National Folk Festival, ,

Last weekend, I helped out at the National Folk Festival in Salisbury, Maryland. My role was quite small – coordinating the volunteers in the Maryland Traditions Folklife area (featuring some really cool MD-based artists). But the effort was made so much more complex, and to me a bit edgier, than anticipated back in the Vaccine Optimism days of the spring and early summer.

The festival crowd was a microcosm of America’s current response to COVID’s Delta variant surge. People wearing masks diligently. People wearing masks half-heartedly (down around their chins somewhere or hanging off their ears). People not wearing masks at all – and leaning in a bit too closely for comfort. There was a well-intentioned scheme to hand out free masks to the maskless – which didn’t go over very well. There were also designations of where to stand within tents for social distancing – which no one paid the least attention to.

The Eastern Shore of Maryland is a mixed bag of humanity, and add to that the wide variety of people that free folk festivals attract. So, many people attending the event could have been vaccinated. But then again, many – for whatever their reasoning – were probably not.

I felt uneasy the whole weekend, which put a damper on what should have been a celebratory time. Back outside with hundreds of strangers, sharing folk traditions with the masses…this is my milieu after all, having worked for over 30 years on our Smithsonian Folklife Festival. I’d missed it, but still, it was not exactly a carefree return to (semi-)normality.

The potential for disaster – personally, a break-through infection for me or one of my vaccinated friends and colleagues, and worst yet turning into a super-spreader event – was ever present in our minds. A week later, and so far so good.

The whole thing reminded me of our own Festival in 2002, after 9/11, when Fourth of July on the National Mall with thousands of people seemed to many to be a big red flag. This time around, the “potential terrorists” are microscopic bugs. More subtle, and in many ways, more deadly.

Still, I feel the need to cautiously go forth into the world. Here are some pictures to remind us what we will miss if we don’t.

The Das family from Delmar, MD (originally from West Bengal) created beautiful rangoli art with rice, lentils, and spice seeds, which took shape during the two days of the area.

Quilters Sylvia and Stephanie Stephens of Hyattsville, MD filled a tent with the handiwork of five generations of family needlework. Sylvia went head to head with many interested visitors, speaking quite effectively through her mask.

My friend Dorey and were sitting in the tent of the Salisbury Area Filipino Community group while they prepared to take the stage, which was across the way a bit. It was really fun to be “on the inside” of this excitement.

Dorey and I swapped selfies with our colleagues working on the North Carolina Folk Festival in Greensboro. Fellow soldiers in the Folk Festival battle for normality.
Comical sign in the downtown Salisbury visitor center bathroom evokes local culture, but also our necessary, COVID fueled obsession with hand washing and sanitizing. Did plenty of that over the weekend.

A Spark in Salisbury

culture, National Folk Festival, tourism

This past weekend, I attended and helped present some artists at the National Folk Festival in Salisbury, Maryland.   The National is a long weekend event organized by the National Council for the Traditional Arts in partnership with local organizations, which moves every three years (theoretically at least) between cities willing to give up a substantial portion of their downtown to street closings, endure the infrastructure that it takes to put up stages on said streets, and brave throngs of locals and tourists who (hopefully) swarm to the event.

It’s a huge gamble for a relatively small city.  But, to their credit, Salisbury bought into it (thanks to the persuasive organizers and a feeling that the city “deserved” such an honor as a prestigious national festival) and the result seems positive.  Even though it rained most of the weekend, people came out with their umbrellas and their rain slickers in numbers not expected in such weather.

As usual, the line up of artists was stellar, including some things that Salisburians have surely never experienced and never even imagined existed.  Inuit throat singers?  Peruvian scissors dancers?  Tap dancing feet as a percussion instrument?  Check.  And some local things that tourists didn’t know was a thing… like muskrat skinning and cooking.

 

On the Sunday, I worked with participants from the Pocomoke Indian National during a sort of pop-up presentation at their demonstration area.  They decided to show the visitors huddling under the tent, sheltering out of the persistence drizzle, how to make fire with friction, using a board and a sort of reed.  The visitors watched patiently as the participants tried time and again to coax a spark out of the damp wood.  Finally, a tiny spark emerged and took hold into an ember, which was nurtured into a warm flame.  Cheers arose from the small but attentive audience.

I thought that spark and the resulting flame an apt metaphor for the National in Salisbury.  From the spark of the idea to stage the National in the city, the flame of the festival resulted, and will hopefully bloom (despite the damp and other obstacles that might be thrown in the way) into two more years of an exciting event showcasing excellent folk practitioners from the region and the world.