Kurin

Why We Do the Festival

• Want to teach young people about what you know and who you are

• Want to “secure” their future

• For the people to be heard:  not likely to be heard in a national setting.  Emphasizes folk, tribal, ethnic, occupational, and regional traditional culture, generally non-elte and noncommercial.

This point was interesting.  I’d been involved with the Festival of Philippine Arts and Culture and didn’t think about it this way at all.  But now that I think about it, there is plenty of indigenous and community-based representation.

• Proper way to speak for themselves

• So that people will be encouraged to pass on skills and knowledge.  Recognition is a source of strength

• So that we learn — it provokes dialogue

• Festival contributes to the development of methods for the representation of culture.

• So that we celebrate cultural democracy — a forum for the inclusion of cultural diversity within civil society.  It can become a place of juxtaposition and creativity.

• Festival is a vehicle and indicator of an open national cultural conversational and makes us quietly proud of who we are.

Producing the Festival

For a program to be realized at festival, three general conditions must be met:

1. Substantive grassroots cultural traditions that can be brought for public presentation must exist
2. Fund to finance the program must be raised
3. The necessary permissions to participate must be secured from those being represented and their legitimate representatives

2 Principle phases:

1. Research:  preresearch selection fo culture areas and themes, raising of funds and securing of necessary approvals, field research, and research evaluation
2. Production:  selectiona dn preparation of participants, planning the Festival program, site, and exhibit materials, the Festival presentation, and management of the event itself.

Festival is oriented toward community-based forms of knowledge, skill, and expression learned through informal relationships and exhibiting intergenerational continuity.

• Curation:  Research, knowledge base, sensitivity to public exhibition or representation of culture, and concern for people participating.  It’s about conceptualizing, negotiating, and managing a program.  Curators serve as research coordinators, reviewing the literature on relevant folk traditions, idetnifying areas where original research needs to be done, and also identifying documentary sources which may be useful for research and presentation purposes.

• Curators identify academic and lay scholars who are familiar with and have carried out work on the folk traditions of a cultural region or group.  They develop a roster of researchers, proposed geographic areas, and topics of research.  They often arrange group meetings with those identified as potential researchers.  At these meetings, they discuss the goals of the Festival, the potential traditions to be represented, the criteria for selecting participants, and ideas for presentation and overall conceptualization of the program.

• Fieldworkers research particular traditions by locating social activities to observe and specific people within their targeted community who are knowledgeable in the selected tradition.  They fill out interview report forms for each person interviewed, take notes, and record information with tape recorders and photographs and video cameras.  Good fieldwork documentation enhances future research and contributes to the development of ancillary educational products like films, television programs…

Festival performers present traditional repertories in styles appropriate to that community or in-group, rather than for touristic or other out-group performances.

Criteria for individual practitioners:

• Person’s role as a tradition bearer
• Artistic excellence in a traditional repertoire
• Strength of presentation

Limitations imposed by budgets and logistics

• Number of persons to be included
• Elaborateness with which the traditiona can be represented at Festival

Directing the Festival:

• Meeting appropriate officials
• Presentations to sponsors
• Strategizing with colleagues in field research
• Hearing from participants
• Consulting with advisors
• Deciding which programs to produce
• Find curator
• Develop detailed budget
• Find research money
• Develop other materials needed for fieldwork and fundraising

Motivation to keep doing it?  1)  Festival breaks barriers  2)  Respect the people you work with  3)  For the participants

• Coordination = Translating plans into action.  The main link between program curators, researchers, partners, supporters, and the rest of the Festival staff.  Coordinators count money alloted, number of participants, letters of invitation, confirm contact information, and talk to person selected for program, reservations for airplane tickets, the transport of heavy equipment, how many microphones needed.  Make sure everything gets done on a timely basis.

• Recordings, interviews, and scholarly commentaries help generate sign text;  fieldwork photographs provide the images for photo murals and illustrative photo-text panels.  The Festival’s approach to editing and design of publications and signage is to foreground the voices of people represented.  Text should be understandable to the average teenage reader and meet the accessibility requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

• The Festival is designed to be interactive and has to be tied together as an overall event.  Art director researches culturally dervied images and icons that relate directly to specific programs, discusses that with curators, and uses them in appropriate way.   Has to set up a scene.

• Festival Technical Director:  3 Phases:  Conceptual, design and procurement, and implementation.

• Festival presentations are invented by combining elements from home context and repertoire of Festival practices.

• Culture is made understandable in part by constructing the context for it

***How are we compensating our cultural bearers?  How are we “creating a big family for them?”***

***Public relations?***

• No sales at the shop prompts questions such as “how’d you learn to make that?”