Festival moving south Richmond, Va., to get Folk in ’05

The National Folk Festival will move south next year, to the Virginia capital of Richmond.

“It’s exciting to bring the festival to an area that has its own rich cultural history,” Heather McCarthy, executive director of the 66th National Folk Festival to be held August 27-29 in Bangor, said when she made the announcement Wednesday.

“I’m looking forward to providing assistance to Richmond as they enter their learning curve.”

The event, to be co-sponsored by CITYCELEBRATIONS, the city of Richmond and the Richmond Metropolitan Convention & Visitors Bureau, will be held June 17-19, 2005, and the following two years in and around the riverfront area of Brown’s Island. The Brown’s Island special-events venue is bordered by the James River on one side and the canals on the other.

“It’s a very nice site with a lot of potential,” said Julia Olin, associate director of the National Council for the Traditional Arts, a group that promotes and preserves indigenous culture in the United States.

First presented in 1934, the National Folk Festival is the oldest multicultural arts celebration in the nation. This “movable feast” of American heritage, produced by the NCTA in conjunction with a host city, has traveled to 27 municipalities around the country to celebrate traditional music, dance, storytelling, crafts and food.

The festival fulfills several criteria that Richmond officials had sought in a summer event, according to K Alferio, executive director of CITYCELEBRATIONS, a nonprofit performance-arts provider in the city.

“This gives us a signature summer festival,” Alferio said. “It gives us all the things we were looking for in an event for Richmond and a chance to showcase all we have here. It gives us a chance to bring in something that’s already a success and a chance to bring in so many cultures to a multicultural city.”

Olin said Richmond was chosen for a number of reasons. One is that the festival will be a centerpiece of Richmond’s celebration of the 400th anniversary of the founding of the Jamestown colony.

Another selling point was the people.

“There’s a group of people there who are really revitalizing the city,” Olin said. “There’s a critical core of motivated people there. And that’s the kind of place we like to be.”

Alferio said that some of her staff will be in Bangor for this year’s festival, and she’s hoping to get here as well, if she doesn’t have to remain in Richmond for an already scheduled CITYCELEBRATIONS performance.

Richmond, named for the English city of the same name located on the Thames River, had a population of 192,000 in 2000, with a regional population of nearly a million. It boasts the Virginia State Capitol, the oldest English speaking legislative body in the Western Hemisphere, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the first state-supported art museum in the United States. It was the capitol of the Confederacy during the Civil War. Famous residents include L. Douglas Wilder, the nation’s first African-American governor, and Arthur Ashe, the first African-American to win Wimbledon.

The National Folk Festival came to the Bangor waterfront in 2002 from East Lansing, Mich. Despite being one of the smallest cities ever to host the event, Bangor has drawn 80,000 visitors in 2002 and 110,000 visitors in 2003, its first two years of hosting the festival, with this year’s happening set to take place Aug. 27-29.

After the National Folk Festival leaves town, plans call for the American Folk Festival to replace it Aug. 26-28, 2005. The new event will be similar in scope to the national festival, and will be co-produced by the National Council for the Traditional Arts.

McCarthy is ambivalent about this transition.

“As sad as I am to see the festival leave Bangor, I’m excited about our plans to continue the cultural celebration,” she said.

Olin is optimistic about the proposed festival in Bangor.

“Performers have commented a number of times that they found the Bangor audiences particularly warm, appreciative and attentive,” Olin said in a March interview. “If you have happy artists and happy audiences, there’s a wonderful synergy that builds. I’d be hard-pressed to name a better audience than the one that has been in Bangor these last two years. So absolutely, if Bangor continues to put as much energy into a continuing festival as it has the National, it’s sure to be a big success. The type of festival the National is and that the new American will be resonate in the state and the region.”