GrassRoots Festival will host Culture Camp

By Eric Banford
 
The annual Finger Lakes GrassRoots Festival of Music and Dance kicks off early this year with a newly added Culture Camp from July 17-20 leading up to the main event from July 21– 24 at the Trumansburg Fairgrounds. Culture Camp will feature music and dance workshops with artists who are playing at GrassRoots, yoga workshops, cooking lessons and nightly dinners and dances, among other events.
 
Culture Camp has been held the past two years at the Virginia Keys GrassRoots Festival in Miami, Fla., and was such a success that organizers decided it was time to introduce it to their fans in the Finger Lakes.
 
“It’s a great extension of the GrassRoots experience and reaching out to the community,” says Tara Nevins, co-organizer of Culture Camp and co-founder of festival host band Donna the Buffalo. “There’s a great music community in the greater Ithaca-Trumansburg area, so we decided that Trumansburg would be a great place to try it this year.”
 
Music workshops will be held each day with instructors from Big Mean Sound Machine, Donna the Buffalo, Driftwood, FABI, Preston Frank, the Horse Flies, Jennie Stearns, Jim Lauderdale, Johnny Dowd, Keith Secola, Laila Belle, Sim Redmond, the Grady Girls and many more.
 
“You have four days of this community where everybody during the day is taking workshops, jamming, hanging out and meeting friends both new and old,” Nevins says. “Folks will get to spend quality time with musicians and artists that they’ve maybe admired or been inspired by. It’s very up-close and personal.”
 
Each day also includes a cooking workshop featuring the chef of the day. Monday is Italian, Tuesday is Mexican, and Wednesday is Louisiana gumbo with Preston Frank. “Every evening you come together and have a group dinner, and the dinner is a cultural meal that you can watch being made during the day,” says Nevins. “Everybody eats it together, and then after that there’s a dance at night.”
 
Evening dances are open to the public ($15), and each will feature a different theme. Sunday’s band features the original members of Donna the Buffalo, Monday is cajun band T’Monde, Tuesday is Cuban band Santa Palabra, and on Wednesday Preston Frank and Soileau Zydeco will wrap things up just in time for GrassRoots to begin on Thursday.
 
Intimate workshops like this are nice for performers who are often isolated from their audiences, connecting remotely from the stage. “There’s a certain connection when you’re on stage performing, there’s an energy exchange between you and the audience,” says Nevins. “You’re giving and they’re giving back. It’s one big ball of energy, which is really great. Then there’s sitting face-to-face with somebody, and giving them advice or helping to inspire them, and that’s an exchange of energy on a much more intimate level, which is also very rewarding in and of itself.”
 
Local singer and fiddle player Rosie Newton will perform at GrassRoots with Richie Stearns, and she’s excited about participating in the inaugural Finger Lakes Culture Camp. “I am looking forward to being a part of the first Culture Camp,” she says. “Students in my class can expect to learn a tune or two, and work on old-time bowing and rhythm. I am excited to have this great opportunity as a resource for music and culture in our home town!”
 
An important aspect of the festival has always been education, originally focused on the AIDS epidemic, then about environmental and social causes, and evolving to include wellness and sustainability. Culture Camp is an effort to extend that further to education about the broader reaches of the music culture.
 
“Culture Camp is really an extension of the GrassRoots mission,” shares Nevins. “If you look on the schedule, within Culture Camp we have old-time fiddle, banjo, guitar and all that, but we also have indigenous workshops with some fabulous Native American artists. Every night there’s a different cultural cuisine, and we try to get the cooks to be authentic, so we have Mexican night and Italian night, and we have Preston Frank cooking Creole food from Louisiana. So we’re including much of the same wide range of cultures as the festival itself, and drawing from a lot of the artists that perform at the festival,” she notes.
 
For tickets, you can pick and choose how much you want to participate in, and cost varies accordingly. For an evening of dancing, you can get in for $15. Single-day passes that include workshops, dinner and evening dances are $40; similar passes for all four days are $125. Or you can go all in for the Culture Camp & Festival On-Site Vehicle Camping Package, which costs $350. Go to http://fingerlakesgrassroots.org for details.
 
At its core, the GrassRoots Festival is about coming together as a community, and Culture Camp looks to deepen that relationship. “I’m hoping there will be a lot of fun, learning and connection—a really positive time,” Nevins says.