2020 marks the 15th year for Sappyfest, but the arts and music festival won’t be celebrating this milestone with giant tents and concerts this year.

After the COVID shutdown made the regular festival impossible, organizers decided to pivot, and see what they could make happen without gathering hundreds of people together on Bridge Street in Sackville.

Erica Butler called up creative director Steve Lambke to find out more about what Sappyfest will look like in this pandemic year.

There’s no tent. There’s no live concerts. We are doing some things online. But our guiding principle once we started to reinvent this was, we knew we would be doing a number of things online and we’ll be using, you know, the internet and stuff, but as much as possible, we’re trying to think of things that could still have some sort of activation in real life.

Creative Director Steve Lambke says one of those projects is a collection of new poems, stories, comics and graphic works designed to elicit the experience of attending Sappyfest in person.

The publication is called Fifteen Dreams, and available by mail-order.

Sappyfest is also coordinating a call centre where folks can dial in to hear a musical performance or have a conversation with a Sappyfest volunteer.

There’s a participatory theatre project happening online via Zoom, and radio projects happening in collaboration with CHMA.

And of course, there’s the project everyone’s already heard about: in collaboration with Struts and Owens Art Gallery, massive projections on the giant Cube in Sackville.

So we definitely approach this as an opportunity to approach different artists and offer them the opportunity to do unique projects or activities that they might otherwise not have had a chance to do. So that was kind of the idea. It does involve some streaming live performances or streaming pre-recorded performances. So there will be some of that, but as much as possible, we’re trying to do things that didn’t just involve a passive watching of something online.

Lambke says the festival considered their options when it became apparent that the usual festival was not in the cards.

To be really candid, the reason we went ahead with anything is we already had our funding in place from Canada Council for the Arts and also from Canadian Heritage, which are our two biggest public funders on a year to year basis.
So we had those funds in place and then had the discussion with them about what the options were when it became clear that we, you know, could not go ahead responsibly with our usual festival.

The festival’s major funders were flexible, giving the festival the option of cancelling outright and paying the already contracted artists, or using their full funding to instead do something different.

We made the decision that the best thing for our community of artists that we engage with, was to try and get that money out to them. And the best thing to do for the community we serve in Sackville was to try and, you know, do something fun this year, despite it being a very strange set of circumstances we also had ourselves in.

Sappyfest was already about one third booked for the year, so Lambke contacted those artists and asked them if they were willing to participate in a different, COVID-friendly way. Some backed out, he says, but others were open to—and even thrilled by—the challenge of coming up with something new.

My role is creative director with Sappyfest and definitely my primary thing is dealing with the artists and booking the artists and having those kind of conversations. And, you know, I’m an artist myself, and I see how difficult this time is for artists. They’ve all had tours canceled. Their industry, that they’re participants in, has really been hit hard by this and no one really knows when it’s going to come back.

The Call Centre project was proposed by PEI musicians Mathias Kom and Ariel Sharratt and will feature musicians and Sappyfest volunteers answering calls from erstwhile festival goers who are missing the experience this year.

Callers may get a musical performance, or simply a conversation with someone involved in the festival.

The call centre will be open from noon to 8pm daily, from Wednesday to Saturday, August first.

It’s really interesting because in some ways we can we can move the music online and we can move some of the artistic projects online, or we can make a book and stuff, but the one thing I’m so worried about is we can’t simulate that chance encounter that you have. Like at the top of Bridge Street when you’re walking into the tent. Or just by all sharing that same space. So the call centre would, like I say, the people answering the phones will be performers and they’ll also be just Sackville and Sappyfest community members. So in some ways it’s offering the possibility of that chance encounter.

There may also be chance encounters—albeit socially distant ones— at another Sappyfest event taking place at the giant CUBE on Crescent Street.

The projection event at Terra Beata will be a large projection, kind of almost like art installation, that we’re doing in collaboration with Struts and Owens Art Gallery. So we’re presenting this event together and programming together. The Sappyfest part of that will be the projection of a concert by Lido Pimienta, who performed at Sappyfest live in the flesh in 2017. And we all really, really love Lido, and she really loved her time in Sackville.

Pimiento will be recording the concert in advance, but exclusively for Sappyfest. But you don’t necessarily have to go to the giant Cube in person to witness it. In fact, Lambke say, the festival is counting on not many fans showing up in person.

It’s quite a large space. So we have, we can accommodate a lot of people, but we’re not necessarily expecting a lot of people. And we’re not, in some ways, even advertising it as a live event. Certainly not how we would normally invite people from all over to try and come to Sappyfest. We’re not doing that with this. We hope the people in Sackville ride their bikes out or stroll out on the night that it’s happening. We have lots of space to socially distance there and we’re going to be asking people wear a mask, and all that. We’re not treating it like a normal Sappyfest live event and we will be documenting it and streaming it for people that aren’t there in person.

The projection they will be documenting will be roughly three times the size of the largest drive-in movie screen in North America. The projection equipment needed to make it happen is coming from Halifax, something which only became possible once the Atlantic bubble started on July 3rd.

The event itself will be brief, says Lambke, as the projections must wait for darkness to fall. He’s not expecting to draw people from out of town, but is hoping that area residents will be curious enough to come out.

We do hope everyone in Sackville feels comfortable to come out and see the event and you know, see the programming and enjoy Lido’s performance. We’re not trying to turn this into like some massive public event with people coming from all over. We just feel like that’s not a responsible attitude for us to take on this one. And we’re going to be following all the provincial guidelines and like I said, there’s lots of space to socially distance there. And like I said we’ll be encouraging masks and we’ll be doing the necessary contact tracing and all that kind of stuff. So I hope that we can just kind of get everybody there and we have a nice time and have a little bit of, you know, the feeling of experiencing music and art and in a cool, different space, which is what we always try to do with Sappyfest.

You can find more information about Sappyfest’s alternative 2020 festival on their social media channels, and by tuning in to Sappyfest Radio on CHMA, Fridays at 11am.