The Brandon Folk, Music and Art Society Inc. is dedicated to promoting emerging and innovative multi-arts presentation with an emphasis on cultural and inter-disciplinary diversity in the southwestern Manitoba region.

The Brandon Folk, Music and Art Festival’s goal is to feature inter-activity in order to broaden the scope of cultural and artistic experience to a primarily rural audience.  Our primary activity is the yearly summer Festival and a smaller off-season series of concerts and events.

2010/2011 Programming Priorities

Cultural Diversity – Our goal is to better represent Brandon’s culturally diverse community. Identified groups which are currently under-served by the festival are – First Nations, Latin American (Mexican, El Salvadoran), Ukrainian and Chinese.

Multi-Arts – Our goal is to include more multi-arts projects and performers. To this end we will not only present more multi-arts programming but facilitate workshops to help introduce and nurture local artists in multi-disciplinary work. Our new interactive programming, In the Trees, will play a significant role in encouraging this work.

Emerging Artists – We will continue to present Emerging Artists from our community with opportunities to perform on our Main Stage, in day time workshops and on our Anniversary stage. We will build off our strong tradition of presenting these artists but also create programming that provides them with professional development opportunities. On site workshops with professional artists, backstage passes to provide them with opportunities to speak with established artists and the ability to workshop ideas for programming with other artists are apart of our 2010 festival.

Interactive Programming – Our goal is to incorporate a significant amount of interactive programming into the festival and our year round activities. For the festival itself this has meant the creation of our ‘In the Trees’ Programming. This means – bringing musicians off the Main Stage to do workshops with smaller groups ‘In the Trees’. These would be groups made up of festival goers, emerging artists who we have asked to attend these workshops and other performers from the festival programming. We believe this benefit the festival and the community in a number of ways:

1. to create opportunities for local and emerging artists and community members to interact with professional artists from outside their community thereby stimulating growth, the breadth of creative expression within our community and will foster important relationship between artists within our community.
2. to nurture a creative environment where members of cultural organizations can come together to workshop ideas for projects and programming for the coming year and broaden the cultural activity in Brandon through partnerships in these projects.
3. to expose the community to a variety of art forms : their mediums, methods and presentations which will help facilitate creative expression within our community.