New Directions

Change is in the air for the Richmond Folk Festival's Virginia Folklife Area. The stage has a new sponsor, the Center for Cultural Vibrancy, and it, along with the crafts area, has moved to a different location on festival grounds.

"We are now on the upper canal, bordering Fifth Street" says Jon Lohman, the Executive Director of the Center For Cultural Vibrancy and previous Virginia state folkorist. "When you come down Fifth Street, we're the first thing you are going to see. Before, we were kind of tucked away, so I bet there will be a lot of people who experience the Virginia Folklife area for the first time this year."

It's also the first year that the regional offerings will be produced as a partnership between the newly-formed Center and the Virginia Folklife Program of Virginia Humanities. "It’s double the folklife power!" says Katy Clune, the newly-installed state folklorist and director of the Virginia Folklife Program (as of March 2022). "Jon is leading his own non-profit, the Center for Cultural Vibrancy, which expands the kinds of resources available for what we hope to do. He'll continue to program the stage and the Virginia Folklife Program will the craft demonstration area."

This year the craft demonstration area honors twenty years of the Virginia Folklife Apprenticeship Program. Since 2002, with support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Virginia Folklife Program has supported 162 artists in continuing living traditions through apprenticeships. Many of these individuals have been luthiers, and accordingly, there will be an Instrument Makers Workshop at this year’s festival. Visitors will be able to see demonstrations by 11 artists from across Virginia who make and repair stringed instruments. Rounding out the craft demonstration area will be an interactive exhibit celebrating the Apprenticeship Program, featuring artist Mark Cline and a couple of his larger-than-life fiberglass sculptures.

Connecting Latin American & Virginian Traditions

The Center for Cultural Vibrancy Virginia Folklife Stage will spotlight different musical and dance traditions of Latin America and connect them to Virginia folk traditions. Larry & Joe will take the stage on Sunday afternoon. Larry Bellorín hails from Monagas, Venezuela and is a legend of Llanera, the traditional "plains music" of Western Venezuelan. His partner, Joe Troop, is a Grammy-nominated bluegrass and old-time musician from North Carolina, whom Lohman calls "a quintessential folk musician."

"I'm excited for people to see what we've been doing," says Troop, who lived in Argentina for a decade, forming a bluegrass – "latingrass" – band there (Che Apalache). "Larry and I are respectfully studying each other's traditions. I'm studying Lianera and he's studying bluegrass, and we're coming up with some concocations that naturally, organically come out of that exploration."

Bellorin, a master of the four-string cuatro guitar and the harp, is an encyclopedia of Latin American folk music, Troop says. "I've never worked with a Latin American musician of his caliber. Back home, he's been instrumental in bringing the Lianara music to his province, which is Eastern Venezuela, nowhere near the western region of that music's origin. His region has now fully embraced the music, kind of like what happened to California and bluegrass, and he was the guy who did it."

“In his home country he’s a giant,” says Lohman. “Here he’s working construction, a common experience for many immigrant artists.””

— Jon Lohman

After becoming a celebrity and respected bandleader at home, and opening up a music school in his native Monagas, Bellorin was forced to flee Venezuela in 2012. He's currently an asylum seeker living in North Carolina. "In his home country he's a giant," says Lohman. "Here he's working construction, a common experience for many immigrant artists.”."

On stage, Larry & Joe perform a technically-impressive fusion of Venezuelan and Appalachian folk music on harp, banjo, cuatro, fiddle, maracas, guitar and upright bass. Both musicians switch instruments and sing, sweetly, mostly in Spanish. What is the thread that ties Virginia folk with Musica Lianara? "It's all string band music," Troop says. "Culturally, the commitment that the musicians in Venezuela have to their folk traditions is very reminiscent of what we have here. The only difference is that they are using different instruments."

So far, audiences are responding to the sound fusion. Larry & Joe were recently invited by banjo master Bela Fleck to the Blue Ridge Banjo Camp where they gave an emotional concert for 3,000 people. After hearing their unique sound, renowned jazz guitarist Charlie Haden offered to produce Larry & Joe's debut album, set for release in January on the Side Hustle label. "Larry and I are both unique in our musical interests and our wants on planet Earth," says Troop. "I'm really fortunate that destiny has brought us together."

"One of our goals is to try and engender more empathy and understanding and appreciation in this world between different types of people," Lohman says. "Sharing traditional arts and cultures is an amazingly effective way to do tha. It's hard to have a two-dimensional view of someone when you are moved by them or their culture."

Ouros with Danny knicely

On Saturday, Folklife stage mainstay Danny Knicely will pair on mandolin with Bolivian master guitarists Mario and Jose Oretea and their band Ouros. Veteran folk bassist Ralph Gordon will hold down the bottom. "Danny brings something new to the Folklife stage each time," says Lohman. "One year it might be his family band, the next year it might be African music with Cheick Hamala Diabate, or appearing with Will Lee and performing bluegrass. He can walk into any musical situation, open his ears, and take it in."

Working with Ouros, which specializes in driving "nouveau flamenco" songs performed on nylon string guitars, has been hard work, says multi-instrumentalist Knicely, from Loudon County. "It's difficult. It's probably the most musically challenging project I've ever done. Flamenco in general, you have to be technically proficient. I have to do my best to keep up."

Even within the flamenco genre, he says, the original music of Ouros is different. "My friends are from Bolivia and grew up outside of Cochabamba, so they were steeped in traditional Andes music before moving to Mexico. Their music reflects the music of the Andes so the progressions are a little different. It's not a straight up flamenco nouveau." (The Oretea brothers now reside in Port Washington, Maryland.)

This past summer, the quartet performed at the Red Wing Music Festival in Mount Solon, and is still evolving, Knicely says. "They are teaching me to sing in Spanish and I've also taught them some bluegrass songs and we're sharing in that way. It's kind of hard to describe the music but when you hear it, it all comes clear."

The explorations won't stop with these performances. To help find a sonic link between bluegrass, traditional lianera and nouveau flamenco, Larry Bellorin and Joe Troop will share a Folklife Stage workshop on Saturday with Danny Knicely and Ouros, moderated by Jon Lohman, called “Bridging Borders."

BOMBA SHOWCASE: TATA CEPEDA AND SEMILLA CULTURAL

On Saturday afternoon, the Bomba Showcase stage performance will bring to life these connections between Virginia and Latin America, and between the past and future of the Virginia Folklife Program. This one-time-only performance will feature Tata Cepeda, one of Puerto Rico’s most celebrated bomba dancers, with dancers and musicians from the non-profit Semilla Cultural, led by Isha M Renta Lopez of Fredericksburg.

Cepeda and Lopez are current Virginia Folklife Program apprenticeship participants, says Clune. "It's the first cross-ocean apprenticeship in the program. Tata Cepeda is sort of bomba dance royalty in Puerto Rico. Her grandfather, Don Rafael Cepeda Atíles, helped shape modern bomba and plena dance traditions. Cepeda will be performing with two drummers also visiting Richmond from San Juan. In a performance, the dancer engages the drummers in a call-and-response conversation -- "they are speaking to each other during the performance."

"All my work is focused on my ancestors and thinking about all those taken from their land against their will," says Cepeda, who will travel to the festival from Puerto Rico with two drummers. "I do this with respect and responsibility, I do it with love, but bomba is also filled with tragedy.”

"The connecting thread of all of these stories is that culture doesn't know natural borders or boundaries," says Clune. "All of these artists are paired with Virginians who are deeply invested in learning and sharing with cultures that originated outside of Virginia." She laughs. "Of course, it's all Virginia culture to us."