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Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Eric Mullis / News Festival season will soon be here

Posted By on Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 11:54 AM

Thankfully, spring is here and music festival season is rolling around…

There are regional festivals like Groverfest (in Davidson NC), Groove in the Holler (Prospect Hill), The Getdown Festival (Prospect Hill), and Smilefest (Pinnacle) are revving up as are the larger festivals that attract national acts — Bear Creek (Live Oak FL), Bonnaroo (Manchester TN), and the like.

It goes without saying that music festivals are fabulous since they give people the chance to catch many bands in one setting, to get outdoors, and to experience music with one another. They also give bands the chance to play in front of scores of music lovers.

Festivals have a long history of giving people the chance to celebrate seasonal changes and the chance to break away from the restrictive routines of everyday life. In ancient Greece, festivals were ecstatic events in which participants drank and danced and, if things went well, the god of wine and festival — Dionysus — would appear and would put everyone in a state of religious ecstasy.

Depending on where you’re coming from, that might sound wonderful or a bit terrifying and, ultimately, I think it’s a bit of both.

It is a wonderful thing to break away from ourselves and to get absorbed into a festival (after all, Halloween gives us an excuse to disguise ourselves and to perform a character that’s different from our usual one). As the ancient Greeks saw, we are likely to experience ecstasy at public festivals especially when wine and music are present. These things call us out of ourselves.

But, at the same time, it can be disconcerting to reflect on the ecstatic forces that are in each of us waiting to be unleashed. It may also call our “selves”—the personas that we’ve created, identify with, and hold onto—into question since those selves seem to disappear when ecstasy bubbles to the surface.

Being a musician myself, I can’t wait for festival season to arrive. It’s my chance to contribute to an ecstatic celebration and to help call Dionysus to the party.

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