November 28th, 2006

What Folk Festival Artistic Directors Really Do and How Committees Simply Can't Do the Same Job

A week or so back, I traipsed up to Orillia for a public meeting about the future of the Mariposa Folk Festival.   As some people may know by now, the festival sent their long-running (and unpaid!) artistic director an email, telling her, in effect, that from now on the festival would be booked by a committee. And others may know that a thousand years ago (well, between 1988 and 1992) I used to be the artistic director of that venerable festival. (For the record, it peed with rain on the event for the first three years, was cool but sunny for the fourth, but at a new venue, and it actually FROZE the fifth year!)....

Personally, I think the current folk at Mariposa have made a wrong-headed, unfortunate decision. Committees, however well-intentioned, produce elephants with lions' manes and giraffes' necks, and will likely be fairly inexperienced in dealing with agents, balancing the conflicting demands of the members, and trying to balance the need to present a festival with a vision and artistic integrity, and one that works at the box office.

The meeting in Orillia was an interesting exercise in participatory democracy, but likely confused the committee members as much as it helped them.  Let's have more dance, let's book Neil Young, let's get more artists from the Maritimes, let's have less dance, let's have artists who are less noisy and don't take 45 minutes to set up on main-stage, how about J.P. Cormier and Emmylou Harris, let's get artists on the edge, let's have more Celtic artists, let's have fewer Celtic artists, let's have tweeners on mainstage, let's have less babble from MCs - and on and on and on.

In my experience, artistic direction is best handled by one person, with his or her mind ON it, all the time.  Boards should stick to raising money and setting policy and creating a workable budget.

Alas, ADs are the figureheads and their job looks simple, on the face of it. Any board member can be an artistic director ... Hey, all they have to do is book 40 acts - or 60 or 70 or 10 - what's so hard about that? You get on the phone and call the artists and it's done, right? Easy!

The point is that ADs have to CHOOSE artists, and THEN hire them, and covering all the folk genre bases, fitting artists together, building a viable program, is a difficult, time-consuming task that takes a ton of musical knowledge, a rolodex full of contacts, strong relationships with agents, managers, and artists

For the last five years, Mariposa pulled itself up by its bootstraps, found its mojo again, and became one of the best festivals in Ontario once more. Once you've achieved that, what do you do? Well, you fire the AD and appoint a committee....

What a shame!

And all you can do is cross your fingers and hope for the best. Those committee members have NO idea what they've taken on....