---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 25 Oct 1998 10:20:16 -0400
From: Parker Barss Donham <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [PARKER:1460] Column 10-25-98 Celtic Colors
25 October 1998
To appreciate the quirky, counterintuitive economics that drive Cape
Breton's Celtic Colours International Festival, picture a fog-shrouded
evening in Ingonish 11 days ago.
Any of the four acts playing Ski Cape Smoky lodge that Wednesday
night -- Archie Fisher, a renowned Scottish folk singer reminiscent of
Pete Seeger; Anita Best, a founding vocalist with Figgy Duff whose
work preserving Newfoundland culture has made her a national treasure;
Eleanor Shandley, a high-octane Irish singer whose incandescent voice
electrified the festival; and Bernard Felix and Norman Fromanger, a
delightful button accordian-electric base duo from the
French-descended community around The Rock's Port-au-Port Peninsula --
could have captivated the audience single-handedly.
Instead, concert-goers got all four. Though the lodge was packed, it
held only 220 chairs, and no one was more than 50 feet from the
stage. At $10 each, that meant a gate of just $2,200 to pay seven
first rate folk musicians -- three of whom, counting Shandley's
guitarist, had crossed the Atlantic to be there.
That was but one of four musical events gracing small communities
across Cape Breton that night. Gaelic singers, pipers, and fiddlers --
including five from Scotland -- presented a traditional Gaelic evening
at the Christmas Island Fire Hall. Step dancers and Cape Breton square
sets filled Port Hood Consolidated School. A dozen first rate
fiddlers, singers, and instrumentalists, including Mary Jane Lamond
and Dave MacIsaac, explored the mystical connection between the Cape
Breton fiddle and the linguistic rhythms of Gaelic at Glendale Parish
Hall.
That was Wednesday. The festival ran nine days. Twelve thousand
people attended 32 concerts at 26 different venues -- mostly community
centres and school auditoriums, with just a few large events in
concert halls and convention arenas.
That doesn't count the Festival Club jam sessions that began each
night around midnight, as musicians drifted back to Baddeck's Inverary
Inn from their concert performances. For nine nights running, the
public could pay $5 to hear the best Celtic musicians in the world
improvising 'til dawn.
These mix and match sessions were the festival's soul. You might hear
three members of the hot Irish group the Bumblebees play a lively
45-minute set with, say, Cape Breton's Dave MacIsaac or Fred Lavery.
Then PEI's intensely energetic Acadian band Barrachois might take the
stage, or more accurately, take to the air two feet above the stage.
Then a haunting a capella Gaelic singer. Then two dueling Irish
harpists playing Ashley-like riffs off one another.
A thundering duet in the wee hours of last Sunday morning --
featuring guitarist Gordie Samson, the year's hottest Cape Breton
artist, and the Irish-bred, US-based button accordianist John Whelan
-- was, by aficionado consensus, the festival highlight.
Last year, Celtic Colours made its headquarters in Sydney, but in
what will rank as the dumbest marketing decision of the year, the
Delta Sydney this year declined to offer any discount on the roughly
$100,000 worth of hotel rooms the festival purchases. So organizers
switched the base camp to the more centrally located Baddeck.
"They may have been the only game in town," said organizer Max
MacDonald, whose comfortable voice you might recall from Buddy and the
Boys and the Cape Breton Summertime Revue, "but they weren't the only
town in town."
Here are some more quirky economics. The move from a city of 27,000
to a village of 1,500 had the unexpected result of boosting Festival
Club attendance from 100-150 a night in Sydney to 200-300 in Baddeck.
Go figure.
So far I haven't mentioned the dozens of workshops (in square
dancing, step dancing, song writing, Celtic musicology, Gaelic
language instruction, and Cape Breton history), art exhibits, milling
frolics, square dances, and banquets that took place throughout the
week.
Or Celtic Colours in the Schools, a program that saw Gaelic singer
Jeff MacDonald and young Cape Breton fiddlers Mac Morin, Mairi Rankin,
and Lisa MacIsaac give more than 30 free performances in public
schools around the island.
Among the audience at each event, you'd hear southern drawls, Aussie
twangs, and clipped Scottish brogues -- visitors who had come to Cape
Breton after learning about the festival in Celtic publications, by
word of mouth, or on the Internet. To judge from ballots filled out
for door prizes, around a third of the audience came from off island.
Celtic Colours is as wildly popular with musicians as with fans --
and for the same reason. Its unique, dispersed character, with so many
events staged in tiny halls scattered around the island at the height
of Cape Breton's autumn beauty, creates an intimacy among the
musicians, and between the musicians and the audience. European acts
wheedle and cajole organizers for bookings.
Run by a nonprofit society, the festival, now in its second year,
gets about one-third of its $700,000 budget from ticket sales and
concessions, a third from corporate sponsors (including critically
important musicians' plane flights from Air Nova), and a third from
the federal-provincial Years of Music program. (That's a fraction of
what the Nova Scotia Tattoo gets, more than a decade after organizers
promised to wean it off government subsidies.)
How it pains the Halifax arts establishment to see government
cultural money spent outside Metro. Each year, the festival's quest
for funding turns into a protracted bureaucratic struggle. Perhaps
that's because organizers insist on making the case on its own merits,
and refuse to take the easy route of lobbying powerful local
politicians like Russell MacLellan and Manning MacDonald.
The Years of Music program ends this year. Officials of the
departments of Education and Culture, and Economic Development and
Tourism, are considering a festival proposal for five years of
declining assistance, at the end of which, Celtic Colours would be
self-supporting.
"At this time, we don't know if there will be a festival next year,"
says organizer Joella Foulds.
But Pat Lynch, Economic Development's point person on the festival,
is upbeat.
"We are just delighted with Celtic Colours," she said in a telephone
interview. "It's one of those little gems that just has to happen, and
we can't possibly expect a festival like this to magically become
self-supporting overnight."
<I> Copyright (c) 1998 by Parker Barss Donham. All rights reserved.
([EMAIL PROTECTED])
--
------------------------------------------------
Parker Barss Donham | 902-674-2953 (vox)
8190 Kempt Head Road | 902-674-2994 (fax)
Bras d'Or, NS B0C-1B0 | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
------------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
All the list info you'll ever want: http://antler.moose.to/~server/parker
