POSTcards from the Folk Festival #1 - Audience Migration

AUDIENCE MIGRATION (Stage 2 to Main Stage)

The lady at the booth next to ours says, ‘That’s noth­ing. You shoulda seen it this morn­ing, before the gates opened. They were all wait­ing in huge groups to get in and the vol­un­teers were hold­ing them back. They all want their space you know, to set up their blankets.” 

I’ve seen that behav­iour before in older peo­ple, at an estate sale which was like a fancy garage sale only at an expen­sive house with gated prop­erty, and out­side the gate peo­ple jock­eyed for posi­tion, elbowed one another and stood on tippy-toes to see past the gate. 

This migra­tion though, was calm, almost tired. They had all just come from Stage 2 where for the past hour, the band had played their last song at least four times, or so it seemed, as long drawn-out gui­tar solos and horn sec­tion crescen­dos sug­gested an epic denoue­ment, and then lead singer would thank the audi­ence with an ol’ honky-tonk accent, and thank his band­mates by name while the audi­ence roared like it was the finale, but then the band would start again, with ban­jos and heavy drums. 

The audi­ence from Stage 2 that now migrated towards Main Stage were exhausted from being strung along emo­tion­ally, time and time again, and I couldn’t blame them for want­ing their own blan­ket spot to return to and sprawl out on before the next show. The lady at the booth next to us says this is the worst time to try and get food.

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