Photo by Victoria Pickering
Like last year, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival will be located on a smaller part of the National Mall’s grounds, and it will be focused on one community. But despite fears about the beloved festival’s future, organizers say this year’s event will be as vibrant as ever.
One of the District’s most highly-anticipated cultural festivals, Folklife will be back this summer with an exploration of Basque Country, a region whose roots are planted in northern Spain and southwestern France.
“We chose Basque because of its focus on innovation through culture,” says James Mayer, a spokesperson for the Smithsonian. “We’ve been doing a lot of work on cultural sustainability here—supporting communities in determining what pieces of their culture they want to focus on sustaining.”
Early on, the Basques weren’t shy about exploring—they were one of the first groups of Europeans to venture into the Western Hemisphere (the Smithsonian notes, “today, Basque cuisine sets the standard for farm-to-table and sea-to-table quality”). In addition to cooks from the region and diaspora communities, the festival will feature musicians, dancers, boat makers, and other experts.
The festival kicks off on June 29 through July 4, then picks back up July 7 through July 10.
In 2014, the National Park Service signed a five-year agreement with the Smithsonian to hold the festival between 7th and 14th streets and Madison and Jefferson Drives for the next five years whenever possible.
The “whenever possible” didn’t include last year, when the second-phase of a turf renovation project on the National Mall winnowed the festival’s location to just four blocks. To keep things manageable, the festival focused on just one country—Peru.
Amid concerns over the structure, fans launched a Save The Folklife Festival campaign as well as a petition urging Congress and the National Park Service to ensure that the festival and other large scale public events have a permanent home on the Mall.
“We are planning to be on the Mall for the rest of the foreseeable future,” says Mayer, though it will also take place between 4th and 7th Streets this year. Mayer adds that once the five-year memorandum ends, they plan to renew it with the National Park Service.
And although the Basque region is this year’s only featured community, there’s more in store, Mayer assures us. A “Sounds of California” concert series will explore the music of immigrant communities in the Central Valley of California. “In terms of tent space on the Mall, it’s not going to be the same type of program [as Basque], but in terms of the mission and research, it will have the same amount of information behind it,” he says.
The Folklife Festival will also help produce a celebration coinciding with the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Plus, in preparation for the festival’s 50th anniversary in 2017, Mayer says that “we’ll be doing a couple of events to allow people a sense of what’s coming next year.”
