Festival Report

We had a great Festival! The weather was beautiful, workshop attendance was in general very good and people appeared to enjoy the concerts and the skit. We were able to provide sessions at the Climbing Wall, boating on the lake and a shuttle to take people to and from cars parked in the farther lots.

There were 173 people in attendance during the weekend including 31 total performers and staff, which gives us a total of 142 paid attendees. I am only able to give a *very rough* estimate of the financial results, because not all of the revenues have been accounted for yet. There are good reasons for this, since the Festival just ended on Sunday, but this is also because Barbara Moo, who usually keeps track of finances for us, has been out of town for the last week due to a death in her family. My back of the envelope calculations say that we probably lost about $400-$500 on this Festival without factoring in the Agranoff Endowment. I consider this to be a relatively good result because we had a lot of last minute expenses that we did not consider when we did the budget for this Festival.

We sold 17 dance tickets, up from 15 for the Spring Festival. Although at first glance this looks very positive, at $45 a ticket the dance passes are really not paying for themselves. Furthermore, it seems that a lot of the people who buy dance passes are not spending all of their time dancing. Instead, they visit the other workshops or hang out with their friends. This means that we are still not getting an optimum number of people at most of the dance workshops. There are several other downsides to having dance passes. They put another strain on the already difficult parking situation, with a dozen or so extra cars scheduled to arrive on Saturday afternoon. They also create a lot of additional work for the Festival committee. For instance, they are marketed separately, creating additional work for Festival publicity, including the web site. And holding the dances means a lot of additional work for the sound crew. My recommendation going forward, is to discontinue the dance program at the Festival. This would not preclude all dancing; we might still have dances with pick-up bands, rock and roll dances or dancing to recorded music, but I think we can no longer sustain the formal dance program that we now have in place.

Just recently, the Salvation Army has indicated that they may be willing to have us back for future Festivals. They have said this will definitely mean an increase in our prices. We may also be obliged to use the camp's catering service as part of our contract. I haven't looked at the survey results yet, but the sense I have gotten is that most people feel that the camp suits our needs very well and if the new prices are ones that we can work with, we would like to stay. As I see it, the parking situation is the main drawback of the camp, but I think we can refine this in the future to work better for our group. The camp is able to provide shuttle service in a large 12-seater van for $20 an hour. We probably will want to pay for more shuttle time at future festivals. We also need to take a hard look at the parking logistics and work to refine them so that parking goes more smoothly in the future. It may take a few festivals to get it right, but I am confident that it can be done.

The alternative is to find a different Festival site. So far, several alternatives have been considered but I haven't seen one that can match Star Lake for convenient location and comfortable, private sleeping quarters. Going to an all commuter festival might open up some additional possibilities.

I will be resigning as Festival Chair at the end of this year and Carl Croce will assume the role. I intend to remain involved with the Festival Committee.

Lori Falco

Festival Chair