Stress rehearsal Producers tour Bangor to anticipate – and eliminate – problems at National Folk Festival

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It’s hot inside the small bus, and the air smells of sticky vinyl.

“Where to?” the driver asks, pulling away from Pickering Square in Bangor.

“The Holiday Inn,” Dennis Blackledge replies. “I think we have an issue at the hotel.”

Identifying “issues” is what Blackledge, 50, does best. As production director for the National Council for the Traditional Arts, which produces the National Folk Festival, it’s his job to foresee technical problems and come up with solutions. With the help of Amy Grossmann, the National’s logistics coordinator, and Jim Ring, Bangor’s city engineer, Blackledge will do his best to make sure that this year’s festival – his fourth – goes off without a hitch.

“The game is to present as large and seamless a beast as you can,” Blackledge said of the festival, which takes place Aug. 23-25 along the Bangor waterfront. “It’s an incredible amount of detail that, with any luck, the public will never see.”

While festival programmers are concerned with what the public will see, Blackledge, Grossmann and Ring take care of what happens behind the scenes. They deal with traffic flow and airport shuttles, electricity and water supply, schedules and information booths. They think about all the not-so-fun details so that festival-goers won’t have to.

At the Holiday Inn, where the performers and staff will stay, the issue at hand was a left turn onto Main Street. If traffic is heavy, it could delay the shuttles that take performers to and from the airport. With the assistance of Keith Durrah, a volunteer transportation director, the group decided that the bus could cut through a side lot and turn at a traffic light.

Then the team headed back to the bus. Blackledge, Grossmann, Ring and Durrah were on board, as were local directors Susan Pierce and Heather McCarthy.

“Shall we do the railroad stage?” Blackledge asked as the bus made its way toward the recently bulldozed parcel on the corner of Railroad and Main.

“The topic here and the topic at all the stages is how close can I get the vehicle to the backstage,” Blackledge said. “If I had my druthers, I’d literally drop the performers backstage.”

Ring whipped out a map of the site, with squares identifying where the stages will be. They can drop the performers off backstage, he said, but the shuttle would have to drive through the crowd to get there. They had two options: Volunteers can walk in front of the bus, urging festival-goers to get out of the way. Or they could simply mark a pathway with colored barrels. After a debate, Blackledge made a decision.

“I’m beginning to think aesthetically it’ll be better to have the four people rather than having the barrels,” he said, and off they went to the next stage.

It takes a lot of driving. A lot of sitting around a table with maps and a pencil. A lot of meetings to determine whether schedule signs should have two or three sides. But that’s what it takes to make things run smoothly.

In Jim Ring’s case, it takes a 100-foot pole. And some imagination.

“It’s a big chunk of wood,” he said of the log he needed to find for the Papantla Flyers performance, in which the Central American group will scale the pole and dive from a height of 90 feet (the other 10 feet will be buried underground for support). “I could see that was going to be an issue. I didn’t think they’d bring it with them unless they floated it [up the river].”

Ring bounces between his day-to-day duties and this new project. It’s a lot of extra work, but he doesn’t complain. He’s the type of guy who’s quick to turn the conversation away from his accomplishments. But after 30 years with the city, he knows its inner workings better than anyone. He’s the man who adjusts the timing on traffic lights, the man who oversees the paving on Main Street, and perhaps the only man in town who can get a 100-foot telephone pole.

“There’s an amazing level of details and steps,” Ring said. “Even the simplest of things, we try to look for what can go wrong and how to deal with it.”

For Amy Grossmann, details are her bread and butter. Though she appears quiet on the bus, she’s not shy, she’s just soaking it all in. At 27, Grossmann clearly has it together, from her polished, classic appearance to her enviable organizational skills. She calls herself “obsessive compulsive” about certain things and says she’s “very into numbers.”

She juggles the airline schedules of about 150 performers in her head and on a notepad that goes everywhere with her. During a late-afternoon visit to Bangor International Airport, she met with security staff to allay any concerns about shuttle buses waiting at the curb. The meeting was short, sweet and absolutely necessary.

“It’s going to be one of the easiest airports we’ve come in and out of,” Grossmann said in the BIA parking lot. “National Airport in Washington – whew, that’s tough.”

Grossmann joined the NCTA for last year’s festival in East Lansing, Mich. When she came to Bangor this winter, it was the farthest north the New York native had ever been.

“I like Bangor,” Grossmann said. “It was really pretty seeing the snow when we came here in January. It’s a very pretty town, very pretty area.”

Blackledge had a similar impression when he came to Bangor in 2001 to consider the city as a possible host for the National. He had visited the city in the 1970s, and was pleasantly surprised on his return.

“My recollection of it then is not as cosmopolitan as it is now,” Blackledge said. “The Bangor I was seeing today, I thought it was beautiful. I thought the proposed site was beautiful. … It’s aesthetically pleasing, and I don’t think you could find a more ready-made location to plop things down in.”

That beauty didn’t come without its drawbacks, however. The fact that Bangor is the smallest city ever to host the festival presented its own set of problems. For starters, the flight frequency at the airport limited the amount of people that could get in and out of Bangor on any given day. And while festival organizers prefer to get all of their tents or supplies from a single source, there were no local vendors that had the resources to meet all of their needs. So they found a few different sources.

“There’s a real spirit here of coming up with ways to deal with these kind of issues, a positive spirit, but these issues still exist,” Blackledge said.

If anyone can overcome these issues, it’s Blackledge. He’s a good-natured, smiling man who is ready for everything. In his four years with the NCTA, he has learned to expect the unexpected – and to deal with it.

“You don’t have a lot of control over certain things, so you’ve gotta roll with the punches,” Blackledge said. “There’s a lot of improvisation that goes along with producing things. You’ve got a plan and you need to work things around that plan, knowing that there are things you can’t control.”

His background in television and theater production helped prepare the Rhode Island native for his work on the National and other events that the NCTA puts on throughout the year. There was a “steep learning curve” at his first festival, in East Lansing, but after that, he knew what sorts of things to look out for.

“You never quite know what to expect the first year,” he said.

So he rides around town on a hot bus, trying to figure out the best route from Point A to Point B. He sits at a conference table at the Convention and Visitors Bureau, sketching information booths and sign locations onto a blueprint of the city. He takes care of thousands of details so that festival organizers can focus on the larger picture.

“Hour after hour around the table with a little map can get tiring after a while, but the end product is so terrific,” Blackledge said. “You have to keep sight of that. It’s a heck of a feeling of accomplishment when you get the first one pulled off.”