Every September, Summerland turns into a festival town. For five days, the Ryga Arts Festival fills theatres, storefronts, and side streets with music, theatre, and words. But as I've discussed before, the beauty of the Ryga Festival is its commitment to the representation of its artists and audience members. The spiritual success of a festival like this hinges on the question: who is it for? Not just who's invited, but who is it built around?
It's one thing for a festival to be a place where I feel like I belong, but it's another for it to be built that way, on purpose, before I ever walk in.
When people hear "accessible arts festival," they might picture a ramp. Ramps are crucial, and they matter. But the longer I've considered the idea, the more accessibility looks less like a feature you bolt onto an existing event. Rather, it looks more like a series of questions you ask from the beginning. Namely, who is sharing their story at this festival? Who will be given the opportunity to hear it? A festival named for George Ryga, a man whose work was about the people no one was listening to, ought to take those questions seriously.
Sometimes, we get to feel the difference without naming it. You walk into a place and something tells you, quietly, whether you were considered. Sometimes it's obvious, but more often it's not. It's the room whose acoustics keep the noise from crashing down on you. It's the clear instructions that actually make sense. It's the moments where you don't need to ask for help, because someone already thought of the question. It's not just about the presence of accessibility features; it's about the absence of struggles. When a space doesn't work for you, you're reminded again and again that it was meant for someone else.
That's what I mean by "built on purpose." Not a grand gesture, and often not even a visible one. It's the result of a hundred small decisions made by people who stopped to ask who might come through the door. And who took the answer to that question seriously. "Everyone's welcome" is easy to say, but the difficult question that follows is "welcome to what, and on whose terms?"
Because "welcome" doesn't come from the sign at the entrance. It comes from everything that was decided before the sign was put up.
There's another thing that happens when a place is built with you in mind, and it changes everything: you stop bracing. And once you stop bracing, you have room to actually be there. You can really listen, interact with art, and add something of your own. When you spend the whole time just managing your own discomfort, you're never fully there. A person who's been considered gets to fully participate.
That's the part that gets lost when we treat access as a box to check. The point isn't just to get someone through the door. What it's really about is what you're able to do once you're inside. Being a full participant and just a guest who was allowed to watch are two different things. A place that only tolerates you doesn't allow your full participation. A place built for you lets you arrive without needing to earn your way in. And it's glad you came. When enough people are treated that way at once, more of them get to be fully part of what's happening, instead of hovering at the edges of it.
The part that's easy to overlook is that the place gets something back. When people can be all the way in, they bring their attention. They react authentically. They pick up the little details that only they notice. A room of people considered is a room that is more alive. Access isn't a charity an event performs at a cost to itself. It's what allows the event to be what it was meant to be in the first place.
This is the kind of event that the Ryga Festival was created to be. One built on purpose, with consideration shown before anyone walks in. And over the next few weeks, I'd like to show you how. I'll start two weeks from now with a conversation I had with Chris Dodd, a Deaf theatre artist and advocate whose work has helped widen who our stages make room for. There's a lot that goes into a festival like this that you never see from the audience. I'd like to spend the next few weeks exploring the people, the thinking, and the small decisions that add up to a place made for everyone. I hope you'll come along.