In May, I called my first post “A Work in Progress.” I’d been in the Okanagan for six years by then, a long way from the rural Alberta I grew up in, but I was still finding my way into its creative communities and working out where I belonged. I didn’t expect George Ryga to help me answer that.
When I started writing here, I knew George Ryga mostly on the page: a farm kid from Deep Creek, a few hours from where I grew up, who refused to let that place decide who he’d be, and who wrote about the people who’d been left out of the story. Then in July, I spoke with James Hoffman, Ryga’s biographer, and through him, met the man off the page. In the early-to-mid ’80s, James visited him in Summerland with a tape recorder and a list of questions, and Ryga opened his door to him, fed him, and played guitar for him. The man who put the dispossessed at the centre of his plays made room at his own table, too. After that conversation, I understood what a festival in his name owes him: the habit of asking who it’s making room for now.
That question ran through most of what I wrote on this blog. In August, in “Built on Purpose,” I wrote about what it means for a festival to be designed with everyone in mind: the small choices made before anyone walks through the door, so the people who come through it can simply arrive. Not a ramp added afterward, but a welcome planned from the start. I wrote that one from experience. I’m autistic, and I know what it’s like to walk into a room already braced for it. That piece led me to Chris Dodd, a Deaf theatre artist and advocate, and my conversation with him was my first formal interview.
Then the Bald Range Creek wildfire hit. Plans across the region were put on hold, and for a while it wasn’t clear whether the festival could go ahead, or should. Venues across Summerland and Penticton stepped up to host events on short notice. My interview with Chris, which I’d meant to share before the festival, had to wait. It finally ran in my previous post, “Where the Music Lives.”
In the end, the festival went ahead, and I made it down from Kelowna for two nights.
The first night was the one I’d been looking forward to since our interview: Chris’s reading of his upcoming solo show, Nineteen Eighty-Eight, at the ABD Centre (formerly the IOOF Hall). When the captions behind him read “rock music plays,” no music played, and Chris started to dance. For a moment, the music lived somewhere other than sound. We’d only ever met over video, but afterward Chris recognized me and offered his hand. I’d been writing about welcome all season, and that night I felt it.
The next night, the festival threw a birthday party. The Summerland Community Centre turned 50 this year, and Yanti and the Cramer Bros. played it in. I found myself watching the Cramers’ hands as closely as I listened, following the music by sight as much as by sound. Chris had changed how I paid attention. I watched Yanti the same way and found I could see a song coming before I heard it, in the breath she took before each phrase. Between songs, she talked with the crowd like she’d sent each of us the invitation herself. After weeks of wondering where the festival could gather, we got to celebrate a building that’s been this town’s gathering place for 50 years.
A festival isn’t a schedule of events. It’s a set of decisions about who gets a stage, who gets a seat, and who gets to settle in once they’re inside. This year, many of them had to be made all over again, in a hurry, by people with plenty else on their minds. If you want to know who this festival is making room for, start with Chris, dancing in a silent room. I think George would have pulled up a chair.
Thank you to Trista and everyone at the Summerland Ryga Festival for trusting a newcomer with the festival’s stories, and for letting me find my voice while I told them. Thank you to Chris and James for their time and generosity, and to everyone who has been reading along.
I came into this summer braced, the way I usually walk into a room. Somewhere along the way, I stopped. A room where you can stop bracing doesn’t happen by accident. Someone has to build it on purpose.
As for me, I’m still a work in progress.