About the festival:

The Smithsonian Folklife Festival is a national, even international, family reunion asserting the ability of people to converse with and understand each other.

At the Festival, tradition bearers, local scholars, and Smithsonian curators speak for themselves, with each other, and to the public. The Festival typically includes daily and evening programs of music, song, dance, celebratory performance, crafts and cooking demonstrations, storytelling, illustrations of workers' culture, and narrative sessions for discussing cultural issues. The Festival encourages visitors to participate—to learn, sing, dance, eat traditional foods, and converse with people presented in the Festival program.

Initiated in 1967, the Festival has become a national and international model of a research-based presentation of contemporary living cultural traditions. Over the years, it has brought more than 16,000 musicians, artists, performers, craftspeople, workers, cooks, storytellers and others to the National Mall to demonstrate the skills, knowledge, and aesthetics that embody the creative vitality of community-based traditions.

To date the Festival has featured exemplary tradition bearers from 54 nations, every region of the United States, scores of ethnic communities, more than 100 American Indian groups, and some 50 occupations. Festivals typically include international, regional/state, occupational, and thematic programs.

Like other Smithsonian museums, the Festival includes exhibit quality signs, photo-text panels, a program book/catalog, learning centers, sales shops, and food concessions. In an attempt to create physical settings for the traditions represented, the Festival has included a horse race track (from the Washington Monument to the U.S. Capitol Building), an Indian village with 40-foot high bamboo and paper statues, a Japanese rice paddy, and a New Mexican adobe plaza.

The Festival is a complex production, over the years drawing on the research and presentational skills of more than 700 folklorists, cultural anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, and numerous other academic and lay scholars. Its production involves the expertise of hundreds of technical staff, the efforts of volunteers, and the backing of sponsors and supporters, including a "Friends of the Festival."

The Festival has strong impacts on policies, scholarship, and folks "back home." Many states and several nations have remounted Festival programs locally and used them to generate laws, institutions, educational programs, books, documentary films, recordings, museum and traveling exhibits. In many cases, the Festival has energized local and regional tradition bearers and their communities, and thus helped to conserve and create cultural resources.

The Festival was a centerpiece of the U.S. Bicentennial, lasting for three months in 1976; it has provided models for the Black Family Reunion, the Los Angeles Festival, and other major civic cultural presentations.

As the largest annual cultural event in the U.S. capital, the Festival receives considerable publicity, typically reaching 40 million readers and viewers through print and electronic media. In the past, the Festival was named the Top Event in the U.S. by the American Bus Association as a result of a survey of regional tourist bureaus -- thus joining previous winners that include the Olympics and the World Expo. The Festival has also been the subject of numerous books, documentary films, scholarly articles and debate.

| HOME