ROB MURRAY: I’m speaking with Sue Panning, Artistic Director for the Canmore Folk Music Festival. There are a lot of question marks around summer events for everyone. Have you made any decisions about the Canmore Folk Music Festival?

SUE PANNING: I’m totally heartbroken because we are announcing the cancellation of our live event over the long weekend in August. We’ve been working with different government officials and looking at what other festivals are doing across the country and across the world. I’m so Zoomed out, I’ve been on webinars and Zoom conference calls really trying to analyze what’s going on and working with our amazing coordinator team that are all volunteers to try and see what we could do. We were optimistic that we could do something safe and have protocols in place, but really with the latest trends with the COVID variants and uncertainties around when enough people will be vaccinated it makes it really difficult to move forward. There’s a timeline that we have to follow to put on a quality event, and for public safety and for the long-term financial health of the festival we just figured we have to shift gears. We’re going to plan some meaningful audience and volunteer engagement and get artists and techs working. We will do something, but we don’t know what or when.

RM: I remember when we did this exact same interview probably around this time last year when you announced the cancellation of the 2020 festival. There was a lot of “We’ll see you in 2021!” This must be very difficult to have to do this again this year.

SP: It really is so difficult and it’s been an emotional roller coaster. Sometimes it looks really optimistic, vaccinations are coming, and we seem to be getting things under control. People are used to wearing masks, we could have people masked and physically distanced, and we thought we could have circles on the ground where people could sit. It’s really devastating for us because we were so optimistic, but just with the latest info it’s really hard for officials to see what later this summer might look like. We were really truly heartbroken, but I think it’s the wisest choice for us.

RM: You mentioned the financial health of the festival. Obviously this is going to affect your bottom line. Is this festival going to continue to be financially viable when you can actually do an in-person festival again?

SP: We’ve had years of really solid financial management and we have a really great team in place. We can weather this if we’re smart, and this is one of the things we’re being smart about. Next year is our 45th so we want to be able to do a really great job of that, and that’s partially why we just couldn’t keep waiting and having a bigger and bigger financial risk. Just a few days ago the Byron Bay Blues Festival in Australia, they were all set to go super optimistic.  All the artists had flown in, and then there was a hard stop. They had their permit pulled the day before, which is like a nightmare scenario. That’s when you’re at the biggest financial risk and we truly want to avoid that. Also, we don’t want to be a super spreader event. Honestly, we’ve been up and down and we just couldn’t wait any longer. We have to shift gears.

RM: Do you have any preliminary ideas of what that might look like?

SP: I hesitate to say, because we’ve worked on so many different possibilities and think, yup, this is it, we’re going to make this happen, then something new happens and it changes our plan. I don’t even want to speculate. It’s safe to say, though, we are going to do something. There will be some sort of online component, and we’re hoping that as soon as we can we might be able to do something live. We’re going to brainstorm. We have a great team, we have a really great supportive board and our volunteer coordinators. We’re going to go back to the drawing board and we are going to come up with something. We just don’t know what yet.

RM: This must be really difficult for the artists on the Folk Fest circuit as well.

SP: Very hard. and what a lot of people don’t think about is how it hits the whole live music ecosystem. It’s not just the artists; some of them have been able to switch to online concerts to be able to survive. A lot are certainly doing soul searching and wondering whether they go back to touring, because it seems like it might be a glamorous life but it is a lot of late nights and sitting in airports and eating crappy food. But it’s the behind the scenes, all the sound techs and the lighting techs and the venues, the ushers, the agents, the managers, and they haven’t been able to pivot to anything else. I feel for some of the agents and managers who did all the work last year to book all the artists, then did all the work to cancel. Some people were rebooked for the fall of 2020 thinking, well, of course it’ll be back to normal by then. Then they had to do the work to cancel that. Then some people were getting ready to do things in the spring and the summer, so they did all the work to book those and then those were canceled. That’s why we’re really committed to trying to get some artists and techs to work, but it’s going to take everybody to be supporting live music to help get everybody through.

RM: For whatever you do end up doing, what’s the best way for people to follow you and find out that information?

SP: On our website or our social media, and we do have a newsletter.

Filed under: Canmore, Canmore Folk Music Festival