Smithsonian Folklife Festival (review)

The 2001 Smithsonian Folklife Festival (SFF) presented three separately developed program areas: Bermuda Connections, Masters of the Building Arts, and New York City. Over the years, the festival has earned considerable respect by tackling cultural presentations replete with challenges having to do with logistics, presenting, interpreting, translating, re-contextualizing, heat, and homesickness. How such challenges are met within an event that maintains and values person-to-person communication is perhaps the true measure of the SFF, whose laudable programmatic ambitions only occasionally exceed its technical grasp.

The SFF's most popular presentations of material culture played to some of the event's historically strong suits: the start-to-finish construction of large buildings, cooking demonstrations enhanced with sound reinforcement and overhead mirrors, and the display of big machines, preferably in operation. The physical dimensions of these program activities complemented the size of the crowd, which could gather on all sides without sacrificing the opportunity to engage SFF participants in conversation. More intimate activities-tabletop demonstrations of net making or woodcarving, for example-seemed disadvantaged by their modest scale and were sometimes overlooked by visitors.

Music was generally presented in large tent stages within each program area, set apart slightly from other program activities. It would be too perfect if done on purpose, but New York City's stages always seemed overbooked. Performers next on the schedule made hurried preparations in the open wings as they watched the action onstage. Percussion and dance ensemble Hanguk: Sounds of Korea drew standing-room-only crowds of musicians from throughout the SFF with poised, athletic, and blissfully loud performances in both of the program venues-on some days playing two sets within three hours.

Bermuda's stage presented a rotation of fewer performing artists but included two family-based troupes of gombeys, meekly depicted and identified in the SFF program book as "masked dancers of Bermuda." The troupes' (one per week) Afro-Caribbean drumming and dancing created an electric connection with Washington, D.C., audiences whose hometown go-go rhythms seemed austere by comparison. Building Arts thankfully chose not to squeeze its ample participant list for singing coppersmiths or fiddling timber framers.

Within shared space identified by consistent signage, the three festival areas displayed significant differences. In Bermuda Connections, the colors of participants' clothing and those of plastered buildings constructed within the site drew from the same palette, as did cleverly designed architectural signage, setting up program activities that enacted in three dimensions the words and photographs evident in every line of sight. At this concentrated level, it was difficult to tell whether the setting complemented the program activities or the participants complemented the site design. New York City was theatrical in both form and content, with considerable space and emphasis given to occupational cultures associated with Broadway. From across the Mall, a three-story plywood "set" of a residential neighborhood streetscape looked like a carney display. But stagey as it seemed, up close the scenery provided a useful visual backdrop for presenting stickball and other stoop and street activities.

In the Masters of the Building Arts area, signage revealed the Smithsonian's sophisticated approach to an endemic festival problem. Folklorists involved with festivals small and large-including this one-are challenged by the need to secure private, often corporate funds to meet ever-rising production costs and the obligations that are often attached to such funds. Some sponsors are satisfied with a "thank you" in a program book; others demand a larger presence in exchange for their dollars. A large sign above a string of color-coordinated stalls set apart demonstrations by members of the International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers and the International Masonry Institute from those of other unallied masters of the building arts. But with this prominent exception, and occasional stage announcements that acknowledged commercial sponsors, the Masters of the Building Arts area kept its focus on a cast of distinguished artisans. The area's large discussion stage reinforced the point...