Festivals and Folklife: Project Planning

for Cultural Festivals

An Introductory Guide

By Ryan Davis
2010

1.1 What is a folklife festival?

Described as an exposition of intangible cultural heritage, a folklife festival is just one way to
help encourage the celebration of traditions and recognize tradition-bearers. A folklife
festival strives to provide the opportunity for people of varying backgrounds to come
together and explore the many aspects of particular traditions. A folklife festival attempts to
achieve the goals of cultural understanding and cultural transmission, as encouraged by
UNESCOs policies on intangible cultural heritage.
Since 1967 the Smithsonian Institution's Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage in
Washington has been producing an annual folklife festival and has served as a model of a
research-based exposition of intangible cultural heritage. They describe their folklife festival
as an exercise in cultural democracy, in which cultural practitioners speak for themselves,
with each other, and to the public. Incorporating the approach and methodology of the
Smithsonian model, however, does call for due attention to differences in context.
At the heart of a folklife festival is the aspiration to represent collective cultural knowledge in
a grassroots way. This approach encourages the free and informed participation of traditionbearers who, it is hoped, will play a central role in the shape of the festivals development and
overall outcome.
The folklife festival is an opportunity for cultural exchangea place where audiences can feel
free to engage with particular traditions and their respective tradition-bearerswithin a
museum without walls context. The folklife festival is an invitation for audiences to
participateto learn, dance, dress, move, sing, and interact with tradition-bearers and each
other.

1.2 What are the aims and values of a folklife festival?

A folklife festival aspires to represent traditional knowledge in a grassroots way. But what
does that mean exactly? And, how does this perspective inform what choices we make as we
plan a festival?
A grassroots approach refers to principles of organization in which matters and decisions are
best managed by the smallest, lowest or least centralized authority. It is based on the idea
that central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which
cannot be executed at a more local level. It means that democratic power is best exercised
when it is vested in local community rather than isolated, factional members of hierarchical
organizing structures.

When we talk about grassroots in the folklife festival context, we mean that agendas are
driven and informed by a range of individuals who are closely connected to their respective
traditions and/or the communities involved. The decisions made while planning the festival
should ideally reflect the views of many individuals within a community who are intimately
connected with the traditions on display. This process has been described as natural,
spontaneous, and from the ground up. It refers to producing festivals with due attention to
local groups.
Referring to its political nature, Richard Kurin of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival (SFF)writes
that the folklife festival becomes, an advocate for human cultural rights, for cultural equity,
for cultural diversity in the context of the Smithsoniana national institution founded with
democratic, enlightenment ideals... (10).
Our mission is to promote the understanding and continuity of diverse, contemporary
grassroots cultures (Smithsonian Folklife Festival website)

1.3 Cultural democracy

The Smithsonian Folklife Festival describes their festival as a rite of cultural democracy. It
has been thought of as a tool of peaceful dialogue and intercultural understanding
(Diamond 11). Cultural democracy should strive to represent a wide cross-section of the
population, including those whose voices are seldom heard. In brief, cultural democracy
entails:

promoting and protecting cultural diversity; the right to culture for everyone in our
society;
encouraging active participation in community cultural life; granting people the right to
participate in policy decisions that affect our cultural lives
safeguarding fair and equitable access to cultural resources and support.

1.4 Giving Voice

A folklife festival strives to give a voice to regional cultureto the many tradition-bearers
whose diverse backgrounds produce many different interpretations of a tradition. Our hope
is that the opinions of tradition-bearers are represented in the festival. Tradition-bearers will
have differing and often competing opinions and agendas when it comes to the expression of
their traditions. Folklife festivals can be a grounds for debate, contestation, dialogue, and
intercultural understanding. We should work toward providing a space for multiple voices
to emerge.

1.5 Legitimization
A folklife festival attempts to legitimize many different representations of culture. A folklife
festival can be a place where the important messages are communicated through cultural
expression by all people. This process can provide validity to the cultural expression of many
different people that otherwise might go unnoticed and unrecognized.
Visitors [to a folklife festival] can only understand and interpret performances in terms of
their own cultural endowment; visitors generally respect the cultural authority of the
institution whose endorsement participants have won and are willing, certainly on account of
their own advantages of class and education, to appreciate, however imperfectly, cultural
difference. (Cantwell 161)

2.1 Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH)

Intangible Cultural Heritage (what we think of in Newfoundland and Labrador as our Living
Traditions) is an important new development in the heritage world. We have long thought of
heritage as comprised mainly of tangible things (i.e. our buildings, our furniture, our
clothing) that have been handed down to us, and that we can preserve in our homes,
museums and historic sites. However, many communities and peoples around the world
recognize that this is only a part of what makes up their heritage, and that intangible ideas,
customs and knowledge are equally important for cultural identity.
Generated inand held collectively bymembers of a community, such knowledge is
dynamic. It is transmitted across generations and shaped anew as each generation innovates,
experiments and adapts to changing social norms and values. Specific ICH processes and
practices include: oral traditions, customs, languages, music, dance, celebrations, and special
skills needed to create and use tools and crafts that emerge from the local habitat and
economy.

2.2 Cultural Conservation

The ICH approach to issues of representation are based largely in theories of cultural
conservation, a perspective described by Mary Hufford as grounded in subjective
assumptions about how nature and society fit together(4). This perspective views habitat
and culture as an indivisible whole, acknowledging that traditions are intimately tied to the
people who use them and the conditions for their use. This ecological approach places value
on culture as pluralistic, dynamic, adaptable, and mobile. This perspective thus challenges

who controls culture, questions for whom culture is mediated, and reflects an interest in how
folklore can be used to combat forms of essentialized identity.
Preserving and safeguarding culture does not suggest the protection of traditions from
outside forces, but rather, supports the conditions necessary for cultural reproduction. In line
with cultural conservation, ICH policies encourage the sustainability of traditions by taking a
natural heritage as living systems approach that seeks to sustain the whole system as a living
entity and not just to collect 'intangible artifacts'. As Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett explains,
this marks a progressive shift in ICH policy that conceptualizes intangible heritage to
include not only the masterpieces, but also the masters (53).
Ethnography refers to how we describe culture and, as the primary tool of cultural
conservation, it seeks to understand the full range of cultural resources people use to
constitute their own living heritage. Within the context of a folklife festival, ethnography
helps planners conceptualize events that affirm, strengthen, and sustain those relevant
resources for use by local groups. But this is not to say that cultural conservation facilitates an
unmediated pathway for the transmission of traditions. Ethnography describes the cultural
landscape and thus, ethnographers become collaborators in the creation of culture. Further,
when applying ethnography to a folklife festival, the culture broker is put in a position of
selecting what to include and exclude.

2.3 Traditions
While the word tradition has been commonly thought of as something of the
pastreferring to static, unchanging, relics of the pastthey are also connected and
expressed in the present. Folklorists have come to understand tradition as something more
fluid. Traditions are always changing shape by those who use them, making them
contemporary and relevant to current social situations. While there is value in presenting
how traditions once were in the past, when showcasing traditions at a folklife festival, we
should focus on their contemporary expressions to provide a nuanced and varied view.

2.4 Inventing Tradition

Traditions need good reasons to continue. If not, they tend to die out or go dormant. We see
that, for each generation, traditions that do stay strong will change to suit a new time and
place, and continue for new reasons. For traditions to continue, people need to feel a sense of
ownership. All continuing traditions are reinterpreted by individuals and made new to suit

their own purposes. As we plan for a folklife festival, we should consider how the festival
stage can provide opportunity for the invention of tradition.
It is the participants own resourcefulness and imagination, not the festival makers
ingenuity, that has produced the magic; the magic is a sign not of the folklorists sovereignty,
or of the festivals influence, but of the participants independence of these factors. This is not
culture induced or culture reproduced or culture renewed or even culture conserved but
culture invented: the original response of particular people, informed by a culture of their
own, to new conditions in which they learn to shape, at a particular historical moment, a
reality in conformity with their own beliefs and values. It is festive culture, not only in a local
and accidental sense, but comprehensively and totally (Cantwell 161).
As festival planners, we can create new contexts for traditions. But the people who participate
and attend the festival are the ones who make it what it is. Finding out what will be the
appropriate context for a festival will come from consulting with tradition-bearers and the
expected audience. One goal of folklorists in public sector work is to extend the reach of
traditional cultures through collaborative recontextualization into varied appropriate forms
of representation....Such representations should assist traditional communities in recreating
their own metaphors. (Spitzer 82).

2.5 Consulting with tradition-bearers

Understanding traditions as they are lived, known, and remembered in your community is
very important to how you plan a festival. We can gather information from books, journals,
newspapers, television, video, and online as supplementary information. However, the most
important information will come from tradition-bearers and community members.
We can find out about how traditions are actually experienced and used today by speaking
with tradition-bearers and community members. But also, we can consult with them as we
try to figure out new ways of presenting a tradition. We should ask them if they like our
ideas for presentation formats, how we could improve on our ideas, and if there are better
and more beneficial ways to showcase traditions.
The relationship of folklorist to folk should be one of cooperation and mutual benefit in the
representation of culture, (81) writes Nicholas Spitzer. He continues: Folklorists wherever
employed should apply their intellectual energy to creating metaphors and methods of public
practice in dialogue with members of folk communities. (Spitzer 81)

3.1 Social Events

A folklife festival is focused on traditions, and thus, the planning discussions, and language
used, often revolve around notions of culture and education. However, a festival is a social
event, and more attention should be paid to discussions about social interaction. The
discussions need to be move beyond the educational rhetoric and should focus more on social
cohesion.

3.2 Transport
Transport, in this sense, refers to an overwhelmingly strong emotion. Many studies on the
structure of festivals identify the ways in which they mark time and space as something
entirely different from everyday life. Often described as liminal or liminoid, these timeout-of-time experiences often have the effect of feeling transported amongst participants.
The success of festivals are ultimately measured by the degree to which participants are
swept away, or transported by the temporary collective unity that can occur during festival
time. While we can talk about folklife festivals in terms of cultural democracy, tradition and
culture, in the end, it is the language of emotion that can help shed light on what makes
festivals worthwhile and meaningful. Transport is used to describe that feeling of getting
lost, for example, in a piece of music, or becoming completely absorbed in making pottery,
performing surgery, playing sports, or dancing. It refers to experiences that transport you
into an immediate present.
For festival scholars, like Robert Cantwell, this describes the magic of festivals. He writes
that the Smithsonian Folklife Festival can, at times, create an 'induced natural context,'
through which, by a kind of transport, simulated experiences become real ones, and the 'inner
audience,' through which members of one cultural group feel themselves swept on a tide of
enthusiasm into copartnership with another, feel their hearts swollen with the intimation of a
brave new world that has such people in it. (Cantwell 159).
Cantwell gives us some examples and praise for magic at a folklife festival: The counterfeit
shrine that practice sacralizes, the imitated trance state that in performance becomes
harrowingly genuine, the craftsworker who momentarily forgets himself and stoops to wash
his hands in a creek that isn't there, the Saint's Day procession in which participants and
visitors from other parts of the Catholic world spontaneously participatethese 'enviable
moments in which displayed enactments and real activity merge,' as Richard Bauman puts it
(1987), are, again, what Smithsonian folklorists consistently point to as indications of the
success of their enterprise. (Cantwell 158)

The magic of a folklife festival happens amongst the people who participate (the presenters
and the audience), and not in the control of the planners. We can only plan for so much. But
thoughtful planning can help facilitate magic and transport. In Cantwell's discussion of
magic, he identifies some of the ways in which this occurs. This includes notions of,
Similitude: the quality or state of being similar to something.
Resemblance: the state of resembling or being alike
Affinity: a spontaneous or natural liking or sympathy for someone or something
Collective energy
Unity
Commonality
Reciprocity
Ideals of spontaneity and unpredictability
The ultimate effects of a folklife festival are to call down...cultural forces into the Festival
and to animate the participants and visitors with them; to create, in effect, what the staff
folklorist calls 'life,' or what Richard Kurin calls 'emergent, non-predictable cultural
creation.' (Cantwell 158)

3.3 Mutual Negotiation

Mutual negotiation is intimately connected to the idea of transport when talking about
folklife festivals. It describes the ways in which people accommodate difference in each
otherhow different people can come together and connect with one another on another
level. Within the context of the festival, it's usually on the level of cultural understanding.
Talking about mutual negotiation, Cantwell writes, I consider...my experience and that of
the participants to be connected somehow to these expectations [of transport]that the
participant has something to gain by winning my appreciation of his or her art, and that I
have something to gain by appreciating it, in more than a merely 'educational' sense. The out
come of this mutual negotiation is what the ideology of cultural conservation is largely
designed to account for. But the terms of that negotiation are a unique form of representation
whose formal cause is not, as we casually suppose, folk culture or cultures, but social
encounter itself. (Cantwell 160)
Much like how in theatre, the actor might pretend to open a door that isn't there. The
audience must suspend their disbelief. If they do so, the actor's action has been justified.
Both actor and audience have been transported into another realm through mutual
negotiation. If the actor is especially skilled and makes the imaginary realm feel realistic, the
audience will often connect in a deeper way and react approvingly.

When an audience shows appreciation for a performance, there is a reciprocity. When we can
bring performer and audience close together, on even planes, we can potentially increase the
chances of reciprocity.
It is magic when the frightful and tangled forces that divide human beings suddenly vanish,
effaced by the sheer power and excellence, the authenticity, of performance on the one hand
and by the willingness of visitors on the other hand to recognize power and excellence as
such, even if they are unacquainted with the specific cultural values that inform it. To
suppose that the festival maker can induce or in any other way summon up this moment is
to fall into the most persistent intellectual infirmity of science and magic, the illusion that
what we conjure we can control. The festival maker can prepare for this moment; but only
the participant and visitor together can create it. (Cantwell 160)

3.4 Audience
Who is this festival for? This becomes a very important question as you plan a folklife
festival. As a grassroots festival, the aim is inclusionpeople of all walks of life should be
encouraged to attend and get involved. Some of the choices we make when planning a
festival might deter or exclude certain pockets of a community. For example, charging
admission to events might create economic barriers for some people. Making events free or
low-cost can be one way of helping to reduce economic barriers.
Location can also affect who attends a folklife festival. Schools or community centres, for
example, may be (but not always) considered neutral ground. Hosting events in places that
do not exclude sections of society is an important consideration. Outdoor venues, such as
parks, are often good spaces for a meeting of diverse groups of people. We should also
consider the ways we promote and advertise our folklife festivals. By what means are we
promoting our events, and who is the audience that receives notice of the festival?
We should also consider the concerns of the tradition-bearers when it comes to whom they
will presenting their tradition. For example, at the Mummers Festival, some of the mummers
interviewed and asked to present felt comfortable coming from their respective communities
and into St. John's to present. However they did not wish to present in their own
communities. Some felt that they didn't want to be placed on a pedestal amongst community
members, as experts of a tradition that the whole community was familiar with. However,
for a larger audience, less familiar with the tradition, they were willing to present. Initially
this was counter-intuitive to what we, the planners had thought. We felt that if we were to
present the mummering tradition, that we should do so for the community from which the
tradition-bearers belonged. We must consider our audience for such presentations and

always voice our ideas with the people we wish to involve.

In another scenario during the planning of the Mummers Festival, we were considering the
issues of ending the Mummers Parade at the Rooms. The Rooms tends to draw a select group
of people in society. Many of the people whom we hoped would come to the parade have
never been to the Rooms. However, by starting the parade at a school, and parading through
public streets (both more neutral territory), ending it at the Rooms did not seem deter a more
diverse group of people from attending the Christmas Concert and Mummers Jam. A diverse
audience was now at a place that, in the past, has attracted and been advertised to a more
select group of people.

3.5 Participation
Participation is a very important concept in planning a folklife festival. The more people
invest themselves in the festival, it is hoped, the more they will get out of it. Encouraging
participation should be a major concern as you try to conceptualize the festival and try to
attract an audience. We can encourage participation, by simulating traditions and involving
an unfamiliar public. The level of involvement by the audience, will, of course, vary. But the
audience might engage by acting out traditions, participating in workshops, posing questions
and creating dialogue with tradition bearers, or taking photos or video to document their
own experiences. We should encourage active involvement as much as possible. It's a move
away from spectatorship and a move toward participation.
For example, The Mummers Parade was framed as a peoples' parade. It says on the
website, We hope for more mummers than onlookers in our first Mummers Parade. This is a
participant-driven event. The Mummers Parade is open to interpretation so your presence
will add colour and shape the outcome. You make it what you want it to be. In addition,
there were a series of events that led up to the final parade that helped build momentum and
gave people multiple ways to engage creatively in the parade. We hosted a Hobby Horse
Making Workshop where people could make their own horse for the parade. We invited
mummers from Ferryland to give a talk about how they mummer for an audience to learn
some of the tricks of the trade. We hosted a Rig-Up so people could create a disguise just
before the parade started. At the Mummers Jam after the parade, we opened the
microphones up to the public to add their own entertainment to the event. On the festival's
website we provided information about the mummering tradition and provided links to
photos and video to help people new to mummering, become acquainted with the tradition.
The poster and postcard offered up a number of visuals for people to engage with and think
about as they planned to participate in the parade.

Giving people multiple ways to get involved played an important role in the parade's success.
While only some people might be musical and willing to perform on stage at the Mummers
Jam, piecing together a disguise from provided clothes, and walking the parade route was
accessible to many.
Some other examples of participant-focused public events:
Accordion Revolution at the Newfoundland and Labrador Folk Festival
The Great Fogo Island Punt Race
The George Street Mardi Gras
The New York City Halloween Parade
The Burning Man Festival
All these events invoke a rhetoric of participation that engages community members and
community groups.

4.1 The (Re)presentation of Culture

The representation of culture embraces all forms of documentation and presentation,
scholarly and popular, that introduce ideas, images, and information about folklore and
folklife into the public sphere. (Cantwell 149)

4.2 (Re)presentation Formats

You have done your research, consulted with tradition bearers, come to understand traditions
in more detail, but then what? How do we bring these traditions to the public's attention?
We are taking traditions out of their natural context and putting them on display, often in
very different settings.
One of the most challenging goals in producing a folklife festival is determining a suitable
presentation formatone that represents a tradition in a way that tradition-bearers and the
audience find useful, appropriate, and engaging. Coming to understand the many reasons
why people engage in a particular tradition could be one way to help choose a presentation
format.
The Smithsonian Folklife Festival is described as containing aspects of the zoo, museum,
theme park, carnival, concert, community center, and traveling theatre (Diamond 3).
Determining an entertaining format for a tradition is one of the greatest challenges when

trying to plan a folklife festival.

The preliminary research of a tradition will help with this challenge. For example, with the
Mummers Festival, we had to consider the problem that a primarily private customthe
mummers house visitneeded an appropriate place in the public sphere. Looking at the
details of how the tradition is enacted helped decide on a Mummers Parade (and the events
leading up to it) as a suitable representation format. Mummering today often involves:
an aspect of walking/moving (from house to house)
disguising/costuming
dancing
music
socializing with friends and family
While not all elements of the tradition can be represented in a parade, it did appear to contain
many of the aspects of mummering.
We need to think about the different genres/formats that are suitable for public spaces. Many
formats have a playful nature. Here are a few other examples of presentation formats:
Public Interviews
Competition
Parades
Public Interviews
Workshops
Promenades
Demonstrations (i.e. cooking, building boats or homes, ritual, sport, games, home
remedies)
Musical performance
Dance performance
Expositions of drama, narrative, poetry, storytelling, joke-telling, etc.

4.3 Relaxing Boundaries and Redefining Space

Relaxing the perceived boundaries between a diverse group of people can help encourage the
ideals of unity, mutual negotiation, commonality, and reciprocity. How we set up space is
one way of relaxing boundaries. Stages that divide presenters from the audience can be a
hindrance. Setting presentation spaces that put everyone on even ground can be subtle, but
might have profound effect in relaxing boundaries. If we host public interviews, encouraging
dialogue between presenters and audience can also help. At the Mummers Parade, a group

of diverse people all dressed in a mummers disguise, helps to remove the boundaries that our
day-to-day clothing might establishwhen everyone is a mummer, notions of difference
might melt away. We can consider the many ways that structuring a festival can put people
of differing backgrounds on an even playing field.
Festivals in general, have that levelling quality. When diverse groups of people come to a
festival, their day-to-day life gets put on hold. Therefore, making day-to-day spaces into
festival spaces can have an effect on people that helps to relax boundaries. If people can
contribute to the ways in which day-to-day spaces get converted into festival spaces, even
better. A good example of this is the St. John's Lantern Festival that, for one day, transforms a
public park into a festival space using homemade jar lanterns and other bamboo paper
lanterns. It is the participants that transform the space with their own creativity.
The Festival of American Folklife has over the years elaborated a complex set of framing
devices that mark and replace daunting and often insurmountable barriers of class, race,
language, and the like, reducing them to a set of ephemeral physical structures symbolic in
their slightness and ephemerality but in their physicality capable of shaping socially and
psychologically the nature of the encounter framed by means of them. (Cantwell 160)

4.4 Folklife in Schools

If one of our goals includes the continuation of tradition, involving youth can be an important
component as you plan a festival. Making connections and consulting with local schools is
one way to get youth involved. Arranging for tradition-bearers to present at schools is just
one way. project, perhaps more suitable for high-school aged students, is for students to do
their own fieldwork on a particular tradition in their community and present it in their own
way, based on their research.
For example, one idea that was considered (but due to time restraints was not possible)
during the Mummers Festival was a project whereby students in Torbay would search out
people in their community who were familiar with the Ribbon Fool tradition. They would
conduct interviews to find out about how the tradition was enacted. The students would
then work together as a group and enter the Mummers Parade as a group of Ribbon Fools,
creating their own unique presentation, but informed by the interviews with community
members.

5.1 Some questions to consider while planning a folklife festival.

What are the aims/goals of the festival?
What are some of the ways in which those aims/goals may be achieved?
What are the values that govern the planning of the festival?
Does the festival contribute anything to the continuing vitality of traditions?
Are the voices, opinions, and perspectives of tradition-bearers being heard (both
during the festival and in the planning process)?
Are there any limitations that might create obstacles for the free expression of
tradition-bearers?
Why celebrate traditions?
What are the virtues of celebrating traditions?
How is the festival being framed?
What are the beliefs that structure the shape of the folklife festival? And festivals in
general?
Who are the tradition-bearers that you will contact? Why choose some people over
others?
Once you've established relationships with tradition-bearers, what do you ask of them?
Are you consulting tradition-bearers as you plan a festival?

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