APRIL ARTS COUNCIL COLUMN

By Margaret Cavers May

As spring inches its way into the North Peace, for young performing artists in the region, that means one thing; it’s festival time! After learning and polishing their performances for many months, it is time for hundreds of musicians, singers, dancers and speech artists to hit the stage at the North Peace Cultural Centre to show off the fruits of their hard work to audiences and adjudicators.

The festival, in one form or another, has been a part of this community as far back as the 1940’s. My own connection to the festival seems to have started with my mother taking a turn in the drama class at a festival in the 1950’s, much to my surprise when I saw the pictures. By the time my turn came to put my limited piano skills on display, the festival was called the Peace Country Arts Festival and was a shared event between Fort St. John and Dawson Creek. Every second year we would perform in the North Peace Secondary School gym and every other year at Unchagah Hall, which seemed to me to be as grand as Carnegie Hall.

Regardless of the location, every festival inspired in me, excitement, extreme stage fright, a promise to definitely practice more next year and some feeling of satisfaction when I managed to get through my pieces without disaster. To this day, I have the deepest sympathy and admiration for the performers at our current festival for the nerves I know they are feeling and their ability to rise above the fear and perform with such poise and proficiency.

I don’t think I fully appreciated the value of festival until I returned as a parent of a dancer and a band student. By that time, the festival had evolved into the Peace River North Festival and my children got to perform in a real theatre in their home town. Inevitably, I became part of the organizing committee and have watched our young talent perform over the last 25 years and seen them blossom from year to year, grow up and move on with their lives, to be replaced by a new crop of eager young students. I have seen how performing on stage gives skills that last a lifetime, regardless of whether the child wants to be a professional dancer or musician or whether they just want to learn skill and have some fun with it.

I have marvelled at the poise young children develop to deal with performance disasters. I have seen dancers fall, lose a shoe, forget their dance and watched them carry on with a smile on their face as if nothing has happened. I have seen young performers accept awards with grace and congratulate their competitor when the trophy goes to someone else. Over my many years backstage, I have been constantly impressed with the camaraderie I have seen between the competitors and the support they give each other, even at the provincial level where their fellow performers are strangers.

Our young performing artists learn confidence, poise, how to present themselves, how to set goals and work to achieve them and they take away some cool skills that they can enjoy for a lifetime. In spite of my own mediocrity in my festival performances, I have enjoyed playing the piano my whole adult life and still play for my own enjoyment. And any time I speak in public, I am grateful for the experience I had overcoming my nerves at the local festival.

So, I invite everyone to come out to the festival over the next 10 days. Our young performers deserve our support and, also, they are really good and what they do and are fun to watch. In recent years our delegates to the Provincial Festival have had increasing success against the best of the province including several winners in recent years. The Best of the Fest Honours Concert on April 19 is a great showcase for the outstanding talent that we have in this community, and, who knows; you might be watching the next Peace River North Festival provincial champion!