READYING FOR FOLK FESTIVAL
Despite being almost entirely submerged in June, Prince’s Island Park has been cleaned up and is ready for next week’s Calgary Folk Music Festival
The 11th hour back-and-forth with Kerry Clarke gets a little annoying and, to be honest, approaching unprofessional.
An agreed upon interview time of 1 p.m. suddenly becomes 1:15 then, just as suddenly, a mere 40 minutes before that time, turns into a request to postpone it for two hours or even a day. The reason? A “surprise” that includes lunch, massages, manicures and other stress relief remedies for all of the people in the office where she works.
Right. Like what exactly do those people have to be stressed about to necessitate inconveniencing an esteemed and re- spected member of the fourth estate.
“Well, our home was flooded,” Clarke says. Oh, right. That. The Calgary Folk Music Festival and its downtown outdoor home on Prince’s Island Park, which, for those who may have missed it, was one of the area’s of the city that was almost completely submerged during the late June flooding. And when the water receded, the damage was extensive.
So much so, that for a few weeks it seemed rather a far-fetched notion that it would be able to house the annual musical jamboroo, which, this year is slated to begin July 25, barely a month after the event.
Clarke, the folk fest’s longtime artistic director, describes the past few weeks as a “rollercoaster,” with her initial “Pollyanna-like optimism” giving way to uncertainty when she first toured the site with local park officials, which was only finally alleviated when they were given the goahead last week.
That alleviated her stress levels more than any rubdown or cuticle-soaking could.
“I think once we knew that we were for sure back on Prince’s Island you could deal with not speculation but actualities,” she says, while sipping a white wine — an enticement to ditch her office party and fulfil the infinitely more important media commitment — in The Barley Mill.
The Eau Claire location of the restaurant is fitting, because it’s adjacent to the island — still, at the time of the conversation, closed to the public, although the fest apparently will have full ac- cess beginning Saturday — and it has also become part of those contingency plans to make sure the folk fest goes on in as close to its original form as possible.
(Ironically, Clarke admits she had completed the programming for the event, including all of the scheduling of the side stages and workshops, a day before the flooding, so that she could enjoy fellow fest Sled Island, the first musical casualty of the waters.)
And while there are some changes, they’re nowhere near as drastic or catastrophic as some might fear. “The beer garden is fine, yes,” she says.
Actually, she describes the two most important parts of the festival map — the beer garden and the mainstage area (in that order) — as being almost “pristine,” with only the grass in the former needing to be replaced by mulch.
The biggest issue, though, is the loss of the first two side stages and the artisan market, which lie in what is considered the “no-go zone,” one that was left with what she estimates to be a foot-and-a-half of silt, and which, as a result, isn’t expected to be usable until as late as next Canada Day while some of it has been lost entirely to a new berm.
Still, even with the subtraction of those areas, most of the programming was saved, as a result of some rejigging on the other stages and adding artists to the Twilight Stage lineup on the previously dark days of Thursday and Friday.
Even an understandable request by the beleaguered community of Sunnyside for the fest to wrap up early on Friday and Saturday night — at 11 p.m. as opposed to the usual 11:30-11:45 time — was relatively easy to accommodate by moving an artist from each of those night’s mainstage over to one of the other venues.
The only actual subtraction from the schedule is the five concerts by local artists, which Clarke considers regrettable, but perhaps a little less tragic considering they’ll still get their spots in the workshops, which she thinks “are more important to them, I think. Collaborating with international artists is more important than them doing a sometimes 10, sometimes 10:30 a.m. concert, when some of them, frankly, play a lot in town.”
To keep all of the 39 workshops, organizers had to expand the festival off of the island and outside of the gates into Eau Claire, where there will now be a stage located just north of the market, with the artisan area to be held inside.
“I think it’s cool, people aren’t losing any programming,” says Clarke, noting pass and ticket holders can leave the site and get back on, while offering those who aren’t official attendees a taste of the festival.
“It will provide something free to the public as a bit of a thanks for all of the flood stuff and also just maybe get some new fans and friends.”
Not that they really need any more. That became apparent post-flood when the fest put out a social media call seeking a couple of hundred volunteers to help with Prince’s Island cleanup.
So inundated with responses were they that organizers had to plead with would-be Samaritans to cease singing up on the website they’d set up.
“We were heartened but not surprised,” Clarke says of the outpouring of support that extended beyond their volunteer base of 1,700.
“Calgarians have an incredible volunteer spirit, we’ve seen how people go and help out strangers ... So it wasn’t a surprise that our own volunteers are dedicated and we’d had a lot of audience members and sponsors saying, ‘If we can help out.’
“It’s always heartening, but I wasn’t surprised. I would have been more surprised if people didn’t want to help out. People care about the festival.”
(So much so that even during the time of the festival’s uncertainty ticket sales slowed slightly, but didn’t stop, with Thursday and Saturday being completely sold out, and only 600 or so tickets remaining for Friday and Sunday.)
And it’s not just the music lovers of the region or the citizens at large who were invested in seeing and making the event happen and succeed in their regular home, Clarke was happy to discover.
She warmly sings the praises of the City and its Parks and Recreation Department who were onsite, assessing and cleaning before the folk fest even felt it was appropriate to approach them five days after the flooding.
Granted, she acknowledges that it’s in Calgary’s best interests to reclaim the much used “jewel in the middle of the city,” but officials expedited their measures to ensure that it was usable for next week’s fest.
That, she says, stands in stark contrast to 2005, the last time the site was damaged by flooding, and organizers had to, on that level, battle even harder to make sure the event wasn’t lost in its entirety.
“Things have really changed in eight years,” she says, sipping her wine and looking and sounding what can only be described as relaxed.
“I feel like we’ve really reached some kind of recognition ... that maybe we’re not a huge festival, like the Stampede, but there’s something iconic and important about us that matters to people.
“I think that was the most heartening thing of all.”