Levee on the Lake is returning to Sackville this August, with an East Coast Music Award win tucked under its belt.
The event won the title “Event of the Year” for 2021, which took co-founders Stacey Read-Whittleton and Shelley Chase by surprise.
“If we’d been filmed when that was announced…We were having a barbecue on Stacey’s deck overlooking Silver Lake, there was two toddlers trying to eat some steak and some corn and it was all over us and the kids and we were watching it on the phone and we were like, ‘What just happened? What, who and what now?'” Chase remembers.
Read-Whittleton says she was surprised even to just be nominated, never mind win and award. “It was obviously a great honor to have been nominated to begin with, but then to win the award… There was definitely some shrieking because we really weren’t expecting to win. So we’re very pleased that the other folks in the industry really recognized how much we put into the levy last year.”
The pair are excited for the second iteration of the festival, which will include a flexible schedule of live shows and workshops.
All workshops are free, but registration is required for COVID-19 contact tracing. Some workshops will teach porcupine quill-making, fiddling, and square dancing.
“They [the workshops] are not only aimed at musicians, so we have a pretty wide array of workshops happening from beginner fiddle, step dance, those who have never danced before perfectly fine. We have a sustainable farming workshop that’s happening with a family from Bathurst. We have some Indigenous workshops happening one with quill-beading and the other with a basket-making workshop. A very broad range of things,” says Read-Whittleton.
The festival was for-profit last time, but Chase says it didn’t rake in any money.
“There was a lot of concern that the Levee was a for-profit type situation. It was for the first one, because it happened in two and a half months, and we had to really get things going. But there was certainly not profit. So at that point, we became a nonprofit. We have a board of directors, Stacey and I work on contract when possible for the organization and the Intangible Culture and Heritage Council. The role or the mandate is to promote and protect and present the intangible culture of the Tantramar region and southern New Brunswick. That means anything, that’s an oral tradition, storytelling, a way of doing things, it could be farming, it could be cooking, it could be singing a song, sharing a story. It’s not just limited to music, but it’s something that’s so fragile right now. We wanted to start highlighting that.”
Some events on the calendar, which is subject to change pending COVID-19 restrictions, are performances by country singer Melanie Morgan, folk artist Dave Gunning, and Mikmaq storyteller Chris Sanipass.
