It’s finally festival season again. The return of social gatherings is having an immense effect locally by revitalizing Victoria and bringing its citzens together. Victoria’s sense of community is being brought back through festivals, now that restrictions around social gatherings have lifted. But the return of festivals isn’t without its struggles.
In March of this year the City of Victoria announced that it’s providing $321,200 in Festival Investment Grant money to 41 festivals. Additionally, the government has offered in-kind contributions up to $129,500. However, even with financial support, it’s still proven to be extremely difficult to get back into the regular groove of things after two years of events being cancelled or postponed. Organizers are facing difficulties booking performers and vendors, organizing dates, and managing financial shortages due to a lack of revenue and high inflation rates. Nevertheless, since early May, Victoria festivals have been on, including events such as the Victoria Highland Games & Celtic Festival and the Victoria Pride Festival. And, despite the obstacles they’re facing, the fest season is still in full swing with, to name just a few, The Great Canadian Beer Festival, Capital City Comic Con, The Function Festival, and Rifflandia still to come.
Sudsy socialization
The Great Canadian Beer Festival (GCBF) is a great example of the diversity of local festivals at a micro—craft-beer specific—level. Given the nature of the event—lots of people eating and drinking together—the pandemic created a lot of limitations for GCBF, now in its 28th year.
“It was started by this wonderful group of craft-beer lovers and they really just kind of brought forth brewery festivals for the first time, especially tasting festivals,” says Victoria Beer Society event producer Rebecca Craig. “Great Canadian [Beer Festival] focuses on sampling a lot of product as opposed to an Oktoberfest, where you’re getting those giant pints, you know, that are like the size of your head. The festival is really about trying a really diverse lineup and sampling the beer, and learning about the beer, too. That’s kind of a core value for the Great Canadian Beer Fest, is having the breweries on site so that the craft-beer lovers can talk to them about it and they can talk about the product and sample them and learn about the product, and not just to get super wasted on a field on a Saturday night.”
Although some may be disappointed that there isn’t a raging beer party to attend in Victoria, because of the GCBF’s focus on acquiring an educated taste for craft beer, the festival is a great opportunity for students to learn more about their own taste.
“I know that Victoria has a huge craft-beer culture, and it can kind of be intimidating to get into,” says Craig. “There’s so many options and so many really great breweries and people really changing the game quite quickly that I feel like festivals are the best way to try a lot of beers and figure out what you like… Going to a beer festival you have access to 260 beers, you’re not really going to get that elsewhere. So I think for students just kind of getting into the beer world, if they know that they like beer and want to try a bit more, these festivals are a really fun opportunity. And fun to go with your friends, get some food, get some tastings, and hang out on a really nice summer day.”
The festival offers a larger opportunity to have fun and get out of the isolated COVID bubble we’ve been in for the past several years. It’s also an important moment in time for local festivals: people need to take advantage of them or they might die out.
“I think it’s just really fun as a festival organizer to bring new experiences for people to get out and socialize,” says Craig. “So I think it’s a really important notion and I also feel like in the last couple years we’ve seen the arts and culture sector of Victoria kind of slowly die away a little bit just because we haven’t had the ability to run events, so to get these going again is really important for so many sectors, so I’m excited to get this back running again this year.”
Beyond creating an experience for attendees, GCBF—which takes place this year on Friday, September 9 and Saturday, September 10 at Royal Athletic Park—also provides a great spark in tourism to Victoria.
“We expect to have close to 8,000 attend for the weekend, so obviously a big chunk of that is people from the island, or specifically from the south island, but a large amount of that is tourists from either up island or the mainland or from the States, as well,” says Craig. “So we really bring in this big crowd that’s going to be there for the whole weekend and use all of the city’s amenities, including restaurants and hotels and transportation, so I think festivals are huge for bringing tourism back into Victoria.”
Capital City community
Like the GCBF, Capital City Comic Con has a seemingly niche audience that has been eagerly awaiting the event’s return. Comic Con director Candice Woodward has been dealing with the ups and downs of restrictions for two years.
“There is so much work involved, and so much planning, and you have to do a lot of things in the background, and then of course you have to postpone again,” she says. “So it’s been a real challenge to just hope for the best and try to be positive about it, as well as everybody else. A lot of our groups are either non-profits… and they’re run by volunteers, and, of course, volunteering is harder to find with the pandemic going on. It’s definitely a weird world for the events industry right now.”
The environment at Comic Con—happening this year from Friday, September 23 to Sunday, September 25 at the Victoria Conference Centre and Crystal Garden—creates a community, and a special place for passionate individuals to share in their love of the nerdy variety.
“There’s so many wonderful attendees that come to it and everybody is so welcoming and inclusive. It’s just almost like a big family when it comes to all the people that attend it… Everyone is just really happy the week of the convention. And they embrace everybody, like everyone is just really friendly and welcoming, and that’s what I love about it,” says Woodward. “So it doesn’t matter if you love Star Trek or Star Wars, everybody has a bit of a common ground with enjoying a fandom and being passionate about their fandom to any extent. Some people absolutely go above and beyond with their fandom and other people are just like, ‘Yeah, I just like it.’ You can really feel the love and it’s just a great feeling.”
Something else Woodward stresses is that anyone who needs support services in regards to access issues can contact them to make sure they get what they need.
“We offer support services, so if anybody needs they can contact us and we can basically offer their support person a ticket as well to help them out,” she says. “They go through the VIP entrance and we have special lineups to move them to the front of the line. We just want everybody to feel really welcome and included and of course not have any issue the weekend of the event… It’s very important to us.”
Serving a function
Creating a sense of community and a place for everyone is a common theme in festivals, and that’s what organizer Charity Williams aims to provide with The Function, taking place on Saturday, August 20 at Ship Point. The event is new to Victoria’s lineup of festivals and is run by the BC Black History Awareness Society (BBHAS) for the celebration of BIPOC artists and the BIPOC community in Victoria.
“It’s essentially just to elevate and highlight BIPOC artists, as well as create a community in Victoria… I felt it was important to give a space for people to come together and show authentically as themselves and also just meet people in different spaces,” says Williams. “I feel like people out here can sometimes be very separated and kind of be sucked in these little boxes that we tend to create around ourselves. I just want to give a opportunity for people to come together, hear new music, make some new connections, support BIPOC businesses, and support BIPOC artists. So that’s essentially the bottom line of the festival, is I just want to create a community. I feel it’s lacking. I want to feel like I’m a part of something that’s bigger, and that’s really where that came from, is kind of wanting to make a space where I could feel comfortable and where everyone else as well can feel that way.”
Williams is the youth engagement coordinator at BBHAS and plans youth events in the city to support BIPOC youth. She also runs a program called the Fifth Element that explores the five elements of hip-hop with BIPOC youth. The Function is an perfect extension of her work in the city.
“Myself and one of my teammates and friends organized the peace rally for Black lives a couple years ago and I spoke that day in front of about 10,000 people at Centennial Square. And it was the first time that… I’ve lived this kind of peace of happiness of seeing so many people of colour that I can relate to and finally kind of finding a place to come together,” says Williams. “So I wanted to create environments where folks can come together, if not out of tragedy, just out of pure joy and celebration and art, and so that’s kind of where it came from. It didn’t happen at that exact moment, it was a couple years of doing other projects, and this is kind of just the next thing to come out of that, of creating a bigger space and an opportunity for people to come together.”
The event’s support of the BIPOC community extends to its vendor selection, which will include BIPOC vendors from Victoria and Vancouver, such as Decolonial Clothing.
“I hope that everybody feels welcome there. I hope that everybody feels like they can see themselves in the artists and just feel like this is a space that they can come and keep coming back to year after year,” says Williams. “I tried to model after things that I went to back in Toronto growing up, which for me feels like a very multicultural and really just exciting place to live, so I kind of wanted to model a little bit of the things that I experienced in Toronto to this festival.”
The Function Festival is one of the recipients of the City of Victoria’s Festival Investment Grant.
“The music and art industry is one of the strongest in Victoria and I think it’s really exciting that they’ve put such a huge amount of funds behind these projects,” says Williams. “And we’re just lucky to be one of the many who were selected to get a grant this year. We’re super thankful to the City of Victoria for offering us this grant and I can’t wait to see what we’re going to do with it. It’s really exciting”
A champion returns
Nick Blasko, founder of Rifflandia, also aimed to fill a gap when he created the music fest in 2008. Through the years, the event has expanded immensely, and although there hasn’t been a Rifflandia in four years, the time off was spent restructuring to remain prominent in the landscape of music festivals in Victoria.
“People who have come to the event through the years will see lots of changes. We like to think elevations. The core of the festival is still there, and Royal Athletic Park is the same as it was, but we’re running two stages. You’ll notice they’re much bigger, there’s a lot more video and production in general,” says Blasko. “We’re just trying to consider our audience. A lot of our audience has kids now… The audience has sort of grown with us and aged with us too. So we had to consider the audience, consider what they’re going to want, and try to show all the things in Victoria that we love, and just obviously work with the a lot of the same people that we’ve worked with over the years, some of our food vendors and some of our alcohol suppliers and so on… There’s a lot of different people in Victoria who contribute to the event.”
And due to the festival’s popularity, the vendors benefit from being at Rifflandia, which goes down this year from Thursday, September 15 to Sunday, September 18 at Royal Athletic Park and Electric Avenue. All these local events play an important role to the local economy.
“We have a very specific audience that wants to come and see music, and wants to do some of the things that they enjoyed doing before COVID, so I can’t speak to the greater economy of things, but… if we can be part of an effort to revitalize and rebuild and re-engage people, that’s certainly something we want to do and that we want to be seen as doing,” says Blasko. “I think a lot of people, especially in service, are having a very busy summer right now. So we come just at the end of summer, beginning of fall, so we’re not quite a shoulder-season event but almost. I think definitely from a revenue perspective a lot of our vendors, whether they’re food vendors or any other of our service providers, we’re definitely a big part of their year.”
Rifflandia offers a special experience in live music, as it’s the only fest of its magnitude in Victoria.
“This experience to go to a major music festival is something you always would have had to travel off island to go do. Not too long ago you’d have to go to the United States or Europe to even go to something,” says Nick. “It’s a manageable weekend experience for the family, is what it is, where you see the same headliners that you’d go and see at these giant juggernaut festivals around the world but at a little park in Victoria.”
For students, especially those new to Victoria, the event can also offer a chance to learn more about their community.
“I think for those new to Victoria it’s a great snapshot of a community and a lot of the things that we love about it,” says Blasko. “It’s a great gathering, so you’ll meet people and you’ll be inspired, you’ll see all sorts of art, you’ll see all sorts of music, you’ll meet some new people. It’s just a very nice and friendly and exciting environment to be in. I think that for those who are from Victoria it’s just a great annual celebration.”