More than 50,000 attendees and 70 artists packed Prince’s Island Park for the 47th annual Calgary Folk Music Festival this weekend. “It was really great, despite all of our challenges with smoke and even just with the temperatures,” said the festival’s executive director Sara Leishman. “I love the run-ins, I love dancing, I love how the island becomes really activated into like a social third-space. I feel like we can have more of those spaces in Calgary, so Folk Fest is a really nice time to explore that,” said attendee Rebecca Reid, who says she looks forward to it every year. Wildfire smoke dominated the skylines Thursday and Friday, reaching dangerous levels and forcing several outdoor venues to shut down due to health concerns. However, Folk Fest was able to stay open, with Leishman saying it was a challenging couple of days, but fortunately things went as planned. “We’ve experienced a smoke event over the past couple of years in June; we just launched a guidebook for dealing with wildfire smoke. It’s something that you can’t change, you can only attempt to manage it,” she said. “If artists were expressing concern about the fire smoke, we have plans to take them right from the hotel directly to their stage to be able to perform and then take them right back to the hotel if they wanted to. We didn’t end up having any of that,” she continued, explaining parts of the guidebook. Lots of Halls cough drops and tea For performers like the Mbira Renaissance Band, they say performing in the smoke was difficult, but tea, lots of Halls cough drops, and wearing a mask, all helped manage the initial days of serious smoke. And taking those extra steps was certainly worth it to perform at the Festival, as the band says it loved the energy Calgary brought. “It gives me more energy, I just want to keep on going, I don’t want to stop. I want to keep teaching more dancers to get the vibes going, and when the crowd gets up, it’s a sign of their appreciation of our music, and we just appreciate them right back,” said the band’s mbira player and singer Chaka Zinyemba. Zinyemba and his band were one of 70 performers over the weekend, and Zinyemba and the audience both say they love the variety of performers you can see, as you can experience music of many cultures all in one location. “We have a great diversity of music as well, which means you get a great diversity of people coming through, and they all have different tastes and they all get up and dance, and they appreciate us, the artist, so much. We love it, it’s been amazing,” Zinyemba said. “All the bands are so much fun, and I’m loving the different sessions where different bands that play very different music or are from different cultures, they’re all playing together and they get to jam together and just have so much fun,” added festival attendee Elizabeth Wells. Strong attendance Leishman says the 50,000+ attendees maintained the status quo for attendance, but adds beer sales and gate sales both went up this year. She credits a mix of a strong core audience and newcomers both for the continued strong attendance, even with weather challenges. “It’s the community that keeps bringing people back, whether they be patrons, whether they be volunteers, so I think that despite the adverse conditions, the desire for folks to be within the folk fest community made them think to themselves, ‘okay, how am I going to manage the smoke?’” Leishman said. Leishman added last year’s folk fest had to contend with rain, so the festival has become somewhat accustomed to battling Mother Nature, and is thankful that both performers and attendees continue to bring the energy regardless of what the forecast may hold.
