Festivals have always been oases of the weird and the extraordinary among a desert of the mundane. But after a year-and-a-half of nothing but weirdness, the pioneering World of Music, Arts and Dance makes its triumphant return to Wiltshire in July, aiming to bring back a little bit of that normality – while remaining as extraordinary as ever.
It’s an understatement to say that festivals have been hit hard over the last 18 months, and WOMAD have had it even worse than most: they’ve seen eight of their festivals across the world cancelled. “The world needs festivals and people need festivals,” says WOMAD’s director Chris Smith. “To have the possibility of actually putting one on is just incredibly exciting because I think we’ve never been more necessary.” Many festivals have resigned to taking 2021 as another fallow year but WOMAD have said from the very start that they will be going ahead. With a whole pandemic’s worth of best laid plans having gone awry, why so certain? “We always believed it would be possible, we’ve been relentlessly positive about that,” Smith says. “I think positivity is more and more an asset that we’re all going to need going forward. And it’s exhausting, I have to say! But I think it’s working, because we’re nearly there.”
While WOMAD is striving to keep things as close to business-as-usual as possible, there have been some unavoidable changes this year. The biggest and most visible is in its line-up. With travel restrictions uncertain and overseas artists possibly facing lengthy quarantines when visiting, the usual globetrotting will be a bit different: “the special thing is that most – or all – of the artists will be UK-based,” explains Smith. “It’s a real celebration of the diversity of the arts and culture in this country that we’ve produced a top line-up of UK-based artists that meets the creative criteria of WOMAD.” It’s certainly impressive – it’s a typically world-spanning feast with huge names such as Anoushka Shankar and Nitin Sawhney alongside plenty of festival favourites and many exciting new discoveries to be made. And while he stays tight-lipped about specifics, Smith hints that there are artists ready to fly in should their respective countries get the green light to travel in time.
Regarding the on-the-ground experience, WOMAD are hoping that everything will look pretty familiar. There will be more room to manoeuvre, more hand-washing points and the like, but a two-metre social distance won’t be mandatory (or particularly feasible in a field of tents). It’s understandable that some will be more nervous than others about rejoining the crowds, so there will also be a new addition to the arena called The Space, a more open area that will host silent discos and other such distanced activities, leaving room to breathe “for those that haven’t quite adjusted yet to full mosh-pit activity.”
So now it’s summer 2021. You’ve made the banana bread, you’ve done the Zoom pub quizzes and you’ve watched Tiger King way too many times. Now it’s time for something different. Enjoy the normality of a typically world-class, globally-musical, relentlessly positive and real, actual, in-the-flesh WOMAD festival – see you there!
Update: WOMAD 2021 ended up getting cancelled about a week after the publication of this article. Let’s try again in 2022!
Photo: Chris Smith at WOMAD, by Elliot Caunce.