THUNDER BAY -- The city has all the ingredients necessary to host successful festivals, says the man who turned the Edinburgh Festival Fringe into one of the largest events in the world.
Paul Gudgin, the former director of the Scottish festival, said the best festivals start with good ideas and grow from there.
“One of the things I was pointing out here, which is what I see around the world, is that a lot of the best festivals are the ones that have a very special place in their local environment. It says something about the place as much as the event,” Gudgin said.
“So even if it’s something like a jazz or a blues festival, it has something to say about the place that it’s in.”
Size and location don’t necessarily matter either, he said, presented with Thunder Bay’s out-of-the-way spot on the global map.
There are several festivals that have succeeded and continue to thrive, despite being in the middle of nowhere, he said, pointing to the Glastonbury Music Festival as a perfect example.
Set in an English town of less than 10,000, it almost always sells out, bringing tens of thousands of music fans to a relatively unpopulated corner of the British Isles.
While Gudgin isn’t suggesting re-inventing the Lollapallooza or Bonnaroo music festivals in surrounding farmers’ fields, it doesn’t mean Thunder Bay couldn’t replicate something on a lesser scale.
“A lot of these festivals started small, a small idea, and started with someone’s passion and have grown from there,” he said.
And it certainly doesn’t have to be music.
There are plenty of cultural and artistic ideas already in place just waiting to bloom.
“It’s an interesting place, and obviously you’ve got a unique culture here as well. And that’s such a good starting point. And what I’ve witnessed over the past couple of days is you’ve got some really creative people, and that’s probably the most important thing,” he said.
“And the other things, you already do have one or two festivals that have made that breakthrough, that have shown they can go from the small to something really quite scalable and sizeable. From everything I’ve seen, the festival future could be really quite promising.”
Marilyn McIntosh is with the Ontario Arts Council, a group that is actively looking to fund festivals across the province.
What she learned is the major economic drivers necessary for success are already in place in Thunder Bay, especially in the summer and fall period, to create arts and family opportunities to get together and spend money in communities.
They brought Gudgin in to help the largely volunteer co-ordinators of the region’s festivals to better understand what they need to do to grow their events and draw more attention to them.
“Paul was able to provide an incredible amount of knowledge around doing things in ways that are simple, straightforward and utilizing resources. I think the biggest message he gave to everybody is festivals are not independent of the communities in which they are.
"They are part of the community, so it’s finding ways to connect with the people, the players, the sense of pride in the community and bringing that into the festival,” McIntosh said.
“I think people left with less of a sense of isolation, that they do things by themselves, and more of a sense that they’re part of the fabric of Thunder Bay and the region.”
