Last weekend, I had the pleasure of attending my very first Artswells festival.
I have mentioned in a previous column that the towns of Wells and Barkerville hold a special place in my heart. My husband William and I met and worked in Wells and Barkerville for many years and some of our very best friends still live in Wells.
It is a special town with extraordinary people who live and work there. Being the wife of a musician has it's perks and one of them is to be able to attend music festivals such as Artswells or the Edge of the World music festival in Haida Gwaii. So on the August long weekend, we packed up the minivan and travelled a few short hours to Wells to join in the hippie parade that is the Artswells Festival of All Things Art.
I had heard from our friends that still live in Wells that Artswells is crazy, busy and very strange and wonderful and we were not disappointed. Around 2,000 festival goers flood the tiny town of Wells which normally boasts a year-round population of around 200. Most of the festival attendees are hard-core hippies complete with dreads, thrift store clothing, an impressive array of facial hair and glow sticks.
Most of the hippies camp in various tent cities scattered around the town and then stumble to the bog to bathe in the creek in early afternoon. The parties at the venues go almost all night.
Unless, of course, you happen to travel with two small children and then the extent of your partying is severely curtailed.
Artswells was amazing and I am grateful for two things: 1) I didn't have to camp and 2) that we have friends who live in Wells that we could stay with and share babysitting duties so we didn't have to camp and we could see some of the shows.
Artswells packs over 140 different acts into four long, hot days spread over ten different venues.
The sets were around 45 minutes long and all very different styles. The same venue could host singer-songwriters (like my husband), a gypsy pirate fusion horn band, a tabla drummer, a belly dancer, a throat singer or a performance art dancing band with sewing machines and a huge pile of laundry that the dancers are ripping off their writhing bodies. Yes, the last one is real and it was very, very strange.
When a festival has so many different acts, it is exceptionally difficult to try and see bands or singers (or performance art pieces) that you may enjoy (or not). I found the amount of acts overwhelming and I wished that there could be more of a musical theme to the venues.
More specifically, I wanted to be able to just go and sit down in one place and have a few drinks and be able to see most of the folky acoustic acts and then later, I could go to join the impromptu street dancing party with the gypsy pirate band.
This plan, of course, would depend on whether or not the kids were sleeping and if it was my night to watch the kids. All in all, it was a fun and exhausting weekend and we hope to go again next year.
