One of Nelson’s musical fixtures has announced that this year was likely its last.
Festival Nelson, which has been running for 26 years, decided in an emotional meeting that after many years of dedication there simply isn’t the funds or interest to keep the festival running.
“We haven’t pulled the plug completely; we’re still in the discussion stage,” said Karen Walgren, Festival Nelson co-chair. “We’re going to see how this year goes and how we feel. We’ve told the board that we need to have a year cooling period.”
Walgren said at one time the festival, which showcased the musical talent of high school students, was one of the top five in Western Canada.
“We had everything from beginner bands, kids who’d been playing less than a year, all the way up to Grade 12 students who were in kind of like an advanced class. We had all ranges. And we didn’t just have public school system band but also community choirs, like the Doukhobor choir from Grand Forks.”
Over the past few years, Walgren said there have been dramatic drops in festival enrolment.
“This year was a huge drop. We usually have a really large contingent of jazz bands. This year we ran with a whole half-day not even touched,” she said.
There were also fewer choirs and local bands weren’t participating either.
“That’s what the whole thing was about years ago: to provide an opportunity for our local kids to get the expertise provided at a festival,” she said.
Walgren blames provincial funding cuts to fine arts programs across the province for the changes in enrolment.
“In general all over the province — and it isn’t the fault of the school districts, it comes from the head down, from the province — there isn’t a lot of support for the fine arts. We keep seeing the ‘do more with less’ approach,” she said.
For the next year, the board of Festival Nelson will assess whether to pull the plug completely.
“We’re going to look at it again next year and look at a whole bunch of questions like: do we need this? Do we miss it? And from an educational standpoint, did our kids miss it? Did they get the same type of education somewhere else? There are a whole bunch of questions that we still need to answer. We’re still open to doing it again,” said Walgren.
The festival has also been hit by a decrease in volunteers.
“We kept losing our volunteers, and not because they were disheartened, but because the people who have always helped are getting older. The younger population, everyone is working. We don’t have a lot of stay-at-home moms willing to give up four hours out of their day to come work at a music festival. I know the last couple years when we were putting together the volunteers list we had to strike names off because they had passed away.”
Despite decreases in funding and volunteers, the community was always excited when Festival Nelson was on, she said.
“The people of Nelson made it a success. It became affectionately known as the ‘weekend of the buses’ because there were so many charter buses and so many kids.”
It wasn’t uncommon for ‘random acts of concert-ness’ to break out all over town as groups of children started singing.
The festival took place over a weekend in late April.