Humbler, cheaper music fests like Guelph’s Hillside survive shakeout

The Hillside Festival turns 36 this year, an age where many less committed music fans start to put their days of traipsing around a field from stage to stage in withering heat and/or ankle-deep mud behind them. Hillside, which returns to the Guelph Lake conservation area for three days starting this Friday, July 12, shows no signs of packing it in, however — an encouraging sign that things aren’t quite as dire as the general wreckage of the festival landscape in southern Ontario this summer, from the absence of such past major players as Field Trip and WayHome from the concert calendar to the spectacular collapse of both the upstart Roxodus festival and its slightly less ambitious cousin Hair in the Fair last week, might suggest. The continued success of the homespun, endearingly hippie-ish Hillside and other events operating on similarly modest scales, in fact, demonstrates that there is a sustainable festival model to be found in setting realistic goals and existing within one’s means, growing at a logical pace and being attentive to one’s core community.

Granted, no one’s ever gotten rich from the Hillside Festival. It, like Toronto’s committedly DIY Wavelength Summer Music & Arts Festival and the newer Venus Fest, is a not-for-profit enterprise with a specific mission and altruistic set of values to complement its elevated taste in music. People get paid where they should be paid, of course, but no one ever went into any of these events looking to get rich. Consequently, no one’s ever sunk $18 million into a Roxodus-sized hole — to invoke one of the more extreme figures being bandied about as the amount of money lost on the stillborn classic-rock campout that was supposed be happening, at the same time as Hillside, on the Dufferin Highlands this weekend — as a precarious gamble on turning such an outsized investment into returns on the same scale at some vague point four or five years or whenever down the road. And so they survive. Not that the 5,000-capacity Hillside didn’t feel the bite from the sudden incursion of Field Trip, Riot Fest, Bestival, the Toronto Urban Roots Festival and, in particular, WayHome — an ambitious three-day campout that was scheduled on the same July weekend from 2015 to 2017 before going on hiatus last summer — into the local market a few years ago, not to mention the 35 days of largely free “Panamania” programming that brought the likes of the Flaming Lips, the Roots, Pitbull and Kanye West to Toronto during the Pan Am Games on top of WayHome in the summer of 2015. “The last five years have been challenging,” concedes Marie Zimmerman, Hillside’s executive director. “But the good thing is we could kind of see it coming because the Ontario Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Sport had invested an awful lot of money in live music. New festivals popped up because they loved the model and then the corporate festivals moved in on the scene. And we’re a not-for-profit charity so we went from ‘cruise’ mode into ‘overdrive,’ having to market differently and having to fundraise differently than we ever had before. But luckily, we’re a pretty flexible and mindful organization, very community-embedded … It’s not a top-down structure. It’s more like a series of whirlpools.”

Thus, Hillside didn’t suddenly book deadmau5 or Skrillex as a headliner and rebrand itself overnight to compete with all the new blood. Quite the opposite. It listened, says Zimmerman, to “the whirlpools and eddies of thoughts that circulate amongst all the people who contribute to Hillside” — the 1,350 volunteers who build up and tear down the lakeside site and make the whole thing possible each year among them — and what they said was largely to stick with the model that has set the Hillside Festival apart from other, more commercially minded properties for three decades: exploring the intersections “between art and peacemaking” and nurturing “an ethical imagination” through promoting inclusiveness and “cultural understanding” as much as it does different musical genres from folk to rock to hip-hop.

The 2016 festival adopted a theme of “activism and resistance” in 2017 by bringing in activist artists such as Billy Bragg, Sarah Harmer and Leonard Sumner, for instance, and one of “countering hate with beauty” last year. This year, the emphasis is on bringing marginalized narratives to the fore through storytellers as varied as Steve Earle and the Dukes, Bruce Cockburn, Rhiannon Giddens and F--ked Up. “We are definitely in a period of challenge. But we’re also rising to the occasion and just trying to stay true to our vision and our mission and all of our values,” says Zimmerman. “It tries to be as non-commercial as possible. We don’t have booths for insurance companies giving out key fobs and things like that because we want to create a kind of utopian island for people to enjoy … and I think when people come they feel like they’re experiencing something that’s bigger than themselves. It’s bigger than just music.

“People do come away feeling refreshed and renewed. And it has something to do with faith — faith in humanity that is restored at Hillside. These are not my words, these are the words that come back to us from our patrons. So that’s a really wonderful thing, but it’s a really hard thing to describe, especially in this marketplace right now. How do you describe yourself when you’re up against behemoth festivals that are these loose, baggy monsters of security and massive stages and massive headliners and everything? So that has been our challenge: to market what we do without appearing sentimental or self-congratulatory.” The Wavelength festival, like its previous iterations as the ALL CAPS! festival on Toronto Island from 2009 to 2013 and the roving Camp Wavelength for the past three years, is likewise sticking with the core mandate of creating a nurturing environment for up-and-coming underground artists that was the weekly Wavelength new-music series’ original purpose when it began upstairs at the old Ted’s Wrecking Yard 20 years ago. This year’s festival — which goes down at the new Stackt market on Bathurst Street on Aug. 17 and 18 and features a thoroughly diverse lineup that includes electro-pop duo Milk & Bone, rapper Cadence Weapon, genre-blurring dance producer Afrotonix, glam-rocker Art D’Ecco and Québecois experimentalists Fet.Nat — actually marks “a bit of a containment” after Camp Wavelength’s move to Fort York last summer, says artistic director Jonathan Bunce. “If you blow it up too much, you lose that sense of intimacy and, thus, that sense of community (and) there’s less chance for people to discover new acts,” he says. “We’ve just sort of grown it, year by year, at a pretty natural, incremental degree of professionalizing. We’re not a big-budget festival. Even our stage is still DIY — we’ve never rented a big, typical Stageline SL-100 stage that you see at most festivals … Atwe’re not trying to become the next big festival in the region. We’re really just trying to do something that speaks to our local community and the wider underground music community.” Venus Fest founder Aerin Fogel studied permaculture and worked on an organic farm long before she created her showcase for emerging Canadian female artists three years ago, so she has tried to apply some of her knowledge of sustainability to the festival, as well.

This, in short, means “it doesn’t grow beyond a certain point because that can actually threaten the capacity of the business itself.” So while Venus Fest quietly ups its game this year with a move to the 950-capacity Opera House over three nights from Sept. 20-22 and some impressive bookings — Charlotte Cardin, the Vaselines, the Weather Station, Tei Shi, Fiver and Riit among them — Fogel doesn’t have designs on “growing the festival to a place where we can’t really remain connected to the actual community that’s in the space,” merely in giving the acts she brings in a leg up towards larger and larger stages of their own. “For me, there’s a really important middle ground between us having enough visibility and enough space in the media and in the festival industry to have support behind what we’re doing, but at the same time not getting so big that we actually lose track of the community-based aspect of what we’re doing,” she says. “I think it’s a very capitalist mentality to say that bigger is better and it’s an interesting question from the perspective of an artist’s career what signifies success for an artist because, to me, it’s successful to be playing a show at the Opera House. That’s the sign of something meaningful in an artist’s career. So does it have to be headlining a 50,000-person stage? … to me, the bigger-is-better mentality is often pretty far from the truth.” Ben Rayner is the Star's music critic and based in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter:

Source: Thestar.com

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