I get a lot of questions about how we choose acts for the festival, so I thought I’d share part of that process with you. Planning a folk festival is like planning a meal. If the programming committee selects only the artists that they would like to see, there’s a good chance the program will not have the musical balance needed to appeal to the broad range of people that make up a typical audience. We all love fish and chips, but would we eat it every day? To eat well and get all our vitamins, our diet has to contain a wide selection of foods. A good folk festival also has to have a broad variety of acts, musical genres, instruments, and personalities.

Programming is a tricky job, entailing many hours of work over the course of the year and is undertaken on a strictly volunteer basis. It requires much thought, reflection and discussion to create a festival that is both strongly artistic, and representative of the cultural community that it must embody. Over the past couple of years, our programming committee has developed criteria for festival-performer selection to facilitate informed and intelligent decisions. The subjective opinions of those on the committee do come into play, but they are tempered by the checks and balances that we are trying to develop, and that continue to evolve from year to year.

The mandate of the SJFAC is “to promote and preserve the traditional arts of Newfoundland and Labrador, both within the province and throughout Canada; to foster creative expression of those arts, and foster good intergroup relations.” In programming terms, that means that the majority of our performers are traditional artists who live and work in the province. In our definition of traditional, we try to be inclusive. While priority is given to artists who represent the cultural heritage of the founding cultures: English, Irish, French and Aboriginal, we also include in our definition people who live and work in the province who represent other traditions, including the folk genres of blues, bluegrass country, and music of other nationalities.

Our province’s tremendous wealth of talent makes it difficult to narrow down the list of performers. We cannot present every folk musician at each and every festival! We now zero in on specific parts of the province in our “Regional Focus” program. This allows us to go into an in-depth exploration of the songs, tunes, stories and dances of distinct geographic regions of the province.

Our “Common Ground” program invites artists from the mainland to attend our festival and explore shared cultural connections with performers from Newfoundland and Labrador. These artists really help us promote the festival in the rest of the country. After being on tour, musicians go home and tell their friends, family and audiences about the gigs they’ve played, and the places they’ve visited. Some of the people that I spoke with at the 2003 festival told me they decided to come to our event, after reading a glowing description on David Francey’s website (Juno award winning singer/songwriter David Francey played at the festival in 2002).

Once we get the main acts in place, we then select artists from the long list of applicants to complete the program. We read each and every application, and listen to all of the accompanying CDs and demo tapes. Before completing the roster, we examine other aspects of the program that must be balanced. Are there enough female acts? Do we have a variety of acts that appeal to the various demographics represented by our audience members? Are there acts that will interest seniors? Have we chosen bands that our younger audience members will relate to? Do we have too many accordion players? (Naw, not possible!) Are there enough singers? Are all the traditional arts (music, storytelling and dance) represented?

The budget is also a major consideration. Most of the acts that apply to the festival are bands, and as they have generally 4-6 members, they are more expensive to hire than duos or solos. People often feel that in order to get themselves taken seriously as musicians, they have to have a band backing them up. The reality of the situation is that an excellent duo or solo act has a better chance of getting hired, as they help balance the program both finacially and sonically.

Travel costs must also be taken into account; if it wasn’t for government granting organizations like Canadian Heritage, ACOA, and CEDA, we would not be able to bring in half of the visiting artists that now attend the festival.

Once we’ve decided on a tentative line up, (which takes hours of thinking, listening, sending emails, holding meetings, and creating budgets) we then have the daunting task of compiling the schedule. With 49 hours of programming on 5 different stages, this is not unlike the task that Hercules undertook when he diverted a river to clean out the Aegean Stables! Here are some of the factors we consider when assembling the schedule.

1) On which days are artists available?
2) Are there any scheduling clashes involving artists who are performing both on the main stage, and in various workshops?
3) Which artists will work well together, and have interesting chemistry in the workshops?
4) Is there any sound interference between the mainstage and Neil Murray Stage?
5) Does the session have a good “flow” and variety of acts?
6) Are there long set up times between acts?

There are also finicky little details that only someone who has worked long years with the SJFAC would know; for example, if Dave Panting is playing at the festival, we have to make sure that he is not on main stage while his daughters are on the Neil Murray Stage!

When my two programming colleagues (Ford Elms and Rob Brown) and I complete the lineup, the process of tweaking goes on for what seems like an eternity. I had a phone call recently from an anxious performer saying he could not play in his designated time slot, as it clashed with his son’s birthday! The so called “final program” can change right up to the last minute.

There are some other difficult aspects to programming. One of them is the fact that we have to turn away so many fine acts every year. This year we had 120 applications for only 32 main stage slots. A disappointed artist recently dropped by our office to complain that we didn’t notify him when his application to the festival was not successful. I do try to get in touch with people who have phoned inquiring about the status of their applications, but I admit that sometimes the lines of communication between the SJFAC and performers are not always what they should be. We know that this process has flaws, and we are working to correct them.

Another unhappy part of the job is the flak. We’ve been dressed down by audience members for not having certain acts on main stage. We’ve been yelled at, and called idiots by artist managers and performers who don’t understand that our festival is not really about the music biz, but about our culture. We’ve been praised by audience members for programming certain acts, and then raked over the coals by others, for having those exact same acts!!!

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not whining...it’s been educational! If you do have a complaint about any aspect of SJFAC/performer relations, please put it into writing. We would really appreciate it if your feedback contained concrete suggestions for improvement.

So, what’s on the “menu” this year? Well, it’s “feast” of French talent in honour of the 400th Anniversary of the arrival of the Acadians. Enjoy your meal, and don’t forget to eat your vegetables.....
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