As the 59th annual Mariposa Folk Festival was winding down Sunday, Gord Ball and Tim Lauer took a moment to wax nostalgic.
“I never imagined a festival like this,” Ball said. “I imagined a scaled-up Arts for Peace Festival.”
Ball, Lauer and Don Evans were involved with Arts for Peace when they got an idea: Almost 40 years after the Mariposa Folk Festival was chased out of Orillia, it was time to bring the "grande dame" home.
“Arts for Peace, for us, was the inspiration behind it,” Ball said. “Tim looked at Don Evans and me and said, ‘Don’t you think it would be great if Mariposa came home?’”
And home it came. This weekend, during the 20th instalment of Mariposa since its return, Ball and Lauer were among the approximately 30,000 people who attended the festival. Its growth and current popularity were pleasant surprises. After all, it was a tough go in the early years of Mariposa’s return to Orillia.
“Year 2, we went into debt,” Ball recalled. “Some of us had stars in our eyes about having a laid-back folk festival. After a year or two, were we like, ‘We need to be making some money.’ It was so fragile, the littlest thing could have sunk us.”
It took a few years to get the festival on a healthy financial footing.
“We were committed to the idea that we weren’t going to lose money,” Lauer said. “We did lose money at times, but we never shorted anybody.”
It took some negotiating to bring the festival back in the first place. In the mid-’90s, the Toronto-based Mariposa Folk Foundation suggested Orillia become a sort of satellite site for the event. Ball, Evans and Lauer weren’t interested.
In 1999, after Mariposa had migrated from place to place, the festival was hanging by a thread.
“At that point, they were pretty desperate,” Ball said.
The local group saw its opportunity and jumped at it.
“They were in big trouble, so our objective was to change the mindset of the festival, which had been slowly getting into big trouble financially,” Lauer said.
In 2004, the Mariposa Folk Foundation returned to the Sunshine City after amalgamating with Festival Orillia.
When the festival returned, “it was exactly this format; there just weren’t as many people,” Lauer said.
There were about eight stages upon its return. Now there are 12.
Mariposa has grown in many ways, including attendance as well as the number of artists and volunteers. About 640 people showed up to donate their time this year.
“It goes nowhere without key volunteers,” Lauer said. “All the way along, there have been more people getting involved.”
Thinking about the festival’s future, Lauer doesn’t necessarily see further expansion — Tudhope Park is already packed every year for Mariposa — but he knows he doesn’t want to see it leave town again.
“I’d like to keep this going. I love the way the festival has been expanding into the community,” he said, referring to the annual Mariposa in Concert series as well as the establishment of a downtown stage seven years ago. “We both wanted it to be knitted into the community and we want that to continue.”
“The other key is the location. This is a gem,” Ball added, referring to Tudhope Park. “You can lie on the grass and listen to first-class music with Lake Couchiching lapping at the shore.”
