Let's Go To A Festival

Folkstreams offers a number of films focused on annual community gatherings for celebration. The events normally include some combination of processions and parades, decorations and costumes, special foods, music, dance, and speech, and distinct roles for performers and for spectators. Many of the oldest ones in t...

Let's Go To A Festival

Folkstreams offers a number of films focused on annual community gatherings for celebration. The events normally include some combination of processions and parades, decorations and costumes, special foods, music, dance, and speech, and distinct roles for performers and for spectators. Many of the oldest ones in the United States—shown in films like “The Men That Dance the Giglio” and “My Town, Mio Paese” in Boston and “Texas Tavola”—have roots in the religious history and practices of Americans’ countries of origins. Other festivals—“La Charreada” on Mexican and Mexican-American rodeos and “Everybody Promenade” on a tractor dance in Iowa—developed here to commemorate ethnic or occupational identities. Families too may have their own festivals, yearly reunions like that in “A Singing Stream,” enacted in an African-American family’s picnic, gospel concert, and church service.

Festivals hold many meanings. Some are acts of religious devotion. But “Welcome to Spivey’s Corner” shows one that whimsically exploits a fading rural practice, “hollering,” to raise money for a volunteer fire department. “It Ain’t City Music” shows a contest or convention that brings together previously unacquainted people who share an enthusiasm. Most, however, assert the identity and values of a more cohesive group. The Cajun Mardi Gras run in “Dance for a Chicken” draws on a long history of giving space to bounds-breaking behavior but at the same time draws boundary lines around a specific community, inviting the insiders to a meal. “Dry Wood” gives glimpses of the differing Creole version of the same festival. But a festival that celebrates one group may also offend an outsider. This is the unintended subject of “Gathering Up Again,” about festivals of Hispanics, Native Americans, and Anglos in Santa Fe. And can we even find the line between a festival like the annual blessing of a Louisiana Isleño fishing fleet in “Mosquitoes and High Water” and celebrations that are frequent but not set on a fixed date in the calendar, like traditional weddings and ceremonies for the dead among the Laotian refugees in “Moving Mountains: The Story of the Yiu Mien” or those in many other films also streaming here?