For the second consecutive year, the National Storytelling Festival will be held virtually.
International Storytelling Center officials were preparing for an in-person festival this year, but as new coronavirus infections and hospitalizations began rising in early July, they re-evaluated.
Center Development Director Ben Weakley said that, after last year’s virtual festival, the center’s staff were prepared to go virtual again this year if needed. Weakley said he paid attention to local and regional data trends, and looked to other festivals to see how they handled things.
Weakley pointed to a music festival held in the Netherlands last month that required proof of vaccination or a negative COVID-19 test result, but still saw a significant number of infections among those who attended the festival. He said since they couldn’t guarantee that the festival would be safe for attendees, organizers felt they needed to go virtual again this year.
“As the numbers of hospitalizations and positive tests really started spiking — if you remember a couple weeks ago, it seemed like over the weekend it just exponentially blew up,” Weakley said. “Really, once that happened, looking at the CDC guidelines and talking to the Northeast Regional Health Office here, we concluded that there’s just no feasible way to hold the festival in the town of Jonesborough and call it safe.
“Our North Star through the whole thing has been the safety of the tellers, our staff, our volunteers and our patrons,” Weakley said.
The annual festival, which has been held since 1973, draws about 10,000 attendees from a multitude of states and countries. Weakley said the festival was already going to offer a virtual ticket that involved separate content and livestreams, so the transition to virtual again won’t be as difficult as it was last year.
“The tagline that we’ve all kind of said around to each other is we’d rather have everybody here, healthy, safe, alive for next year for the 50th festival to kick off the 50th year of the center, than really try and rush it and force a festival in this environment,” Weakley said.
The response to last year’s virtual event, Weakley said, was overwhelmingly positive, though some people were “understandably disappointed that they weren’t going to get the live experience.” Ahead of last year’s festival, ISC President Kiran Singh Sirah said staff hoped to use the virtual format to grow the festival’s audience, which happened — about 20% of last year’s virtual ticket-holders were people who hadn’t been to the Storytelling Festival before.
Weakley said he’s hoping to continue to grow awareness around the festival, and said the virtual format is likely here to stay as a companion to the live festival whenever it returns.
“No matter what twists and turns the pandemic takes, I think virtual is here to stay as at least one of our options to connect with and expand our audience,” Weakley said. “It’s just too easy to reach people with social media, the internet, Google and all those other platforms who otherwise wouldn’t have heard of us.”
And just because the main festival is not going to held in-person, that doesn’t mean all in-person events are off the table. Weakley said they not ready to announce anything yet, but hinted some smaller in-person events could still happen.
“It is important to us that we’re modeling the behavior and the choices that we know help us sleep at night,” said Weakley. “That said, we do have a responsibility to the town and to the merchants. There’s some ways that we’re thinking through and discussing, and we’re not really ready to say yet, (but) there are some ways we feel like we can still hold some events that are more local in a way that maybe are a little more controlled.
“We can do them in a safer environment with a smaller crowd, greater distance,” he continued. “We’ve been in talks with our partners kind of discussing what that looks like, so it’s not necessarily that anything we do in-person is dead in the water, it’s just a matter of we can’t have something at the scale of 10,000 people from all over the United States descending on Jonesborough and call it safe.”
The 2021 National Storytelling Festival will be held Oct. 1 to 2, with tickets available at storytellingcenter.net.
