A folk art festival that’s become popular amongst creators and fans of folk art will go on in a new location later this month.
The annual Dancing Goats Folkfest will be held at River Park, on South Main Street, Saturday, Oct. 22, and Sunday, Oct. 23. Event times are 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Saturday and 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Sunday.
“We’ll be at the section (of the park) that’s right across the road from the emergency room. We’ll be up on the grass,” said folkfest organizer Mona Lowe.
The event, which was previously held at the Artful Acres property on River Street, will welcome local and visiting folk artists to show and sell their work. Past festivals have featured painters, potters, woodcarvers, a cigar-box guitar maker and others who specialize in the quirky, unfancy type of art.
“We want to have more folk artists (for this year’s festival). I believe there are some hidden folk artists in this county, and I’d love to find out about them,” said Lowe. “It is (a festival for) folk art. We’re not really doing craft. There are as many definitions (of folk art) as there are people, but the easiest way we’ve been able to distinguish is that folk art is not made from a pattern. Craft is going to involve a pattern.”
The Dancing Goats team is also in need of volunteers to assist with various areas of the folkfest, which resembles an old-time mountain get-together.
“We need volunteers to work the days (of the event) and, right now, we need help with our signage. We’re doing what we call a goat brigade, which is building wooden cutout goats,” Lowe said.
“We had a few of them last year, but we want to put them in as many places as possible. We need people to help us paint goats and help put them up when they’re done. We also need (people for) more children’s activities if we can find a group or people who want to do one. We’d like to do an old-fashioned cake walk or cake auction, things that people did historically around here.”
Lowe said several features of past Dancing Goats festivals will return this year including a goat beauty pageant, in which actual goats are judged on their good looks, as well as live storytelling and music.
“We’ll have storytelling for 30 minutes both days. This year, they’re mostly going to tell Jack Tales, which are a big part of the history (of folk tales). Folk tales were ways of teaching moral lessons to kids and also ways of telling the news,” Lowe said.
The Old Goats Giving Advice Tent, another fixture of past events, is also a volunteer-manned activity that welcomes more participants. However, unlike the beauty pageant contestants, these goats are human.
“We set up a tent, put chairs in it and people just sit around giving advice,” Lowe said. “You can go up to them and ask them anything.”
Lowe can be contacted by email at dancinggoatsfolkfest@gmail.com or by text at 478-718-6596.
More details can be found at DancingGoatsFolkfest.com.