Northwest Folklife

Many of you have attended the annual Northwest Folklife Festival before, and you have one big question:  Who are all these people?

The 2010 Cultural Focus, Folklife is Community, will help answer that question.  Each year we invite communities from the Pacific Northwest to help us fulfill our mission of creating opportunities to celebrate, share and sustain the vitality of folk, ethnic and traditional arts.  The annual Northwest Folklife Festival is an interactive story of all the communities that participate in our mission. Some communities are ethnic groups, some are occupational groups, some are groups that have formed because they're interested in a particular subject—choral music or dance or storytelling, for example. 

The 2010 Cultural Focus will introduce a few special communities to you.  This spring we'll have a section on our website called Folklife is Community.  This section will profile some of the communities that step forward to share their traditions. Each of the communities will have a separate page that includes information about their history, photos of their members, links to videos, recorded interviews, recipes, major holidays, and more.

Then, at the 2010 Northwest Folklife Festival, May 28-31 at Seattle Center, you'll see these communities come to life as they perform on stages and teach in workshops, participate in panels and discussions, demonstrate crafts, and invite you to participate in activities on the Folklife Commons. 

Meet your neighbors from throughout the Northwest and learn more about the communities who share your love of the annual Northwest Folklife Festival.  You knew this all along:   Folklife is Community!