The Mummers Festival is a participant-driven, not–for–profit, community–based folklife festival that encourages the celebration and free expression of tradition.The Mummers Parade is the Festival’s crowning event and it’s the mummers who make it so memorable. In our first year, more than 300 energetic mummers and 200 spectators came out to the Parade. Our workshops generated close to 30 hobby horses, adding a new twist to a less common mummering tradition and a lot of horseplay to the Parade. Our focus is on you, the province’s diverse public, whose creative and expressive presence make the Festival such a success.

The Mummers Festival began as a joint initiative with the Intangible Cultural Heritage division of the Heritage Foundation of Newfoundland and Labrador and Memorial University’s Department of Folklore.
The research-based initiative began in 2009 and included 16 free community events. This year, the Festival was organized by a group of enthusiastic volunteers and supporters bringing you workshops, a lecture and film screening, the province’s largest dress-up party, a Christmas Concert & Mummers Jam, and of course, the Mummers Parade.

Described as an exposition of intangible cultural heritage, a folklife festival is just one way to help encourage the celebration of traditions and recognize tradition-bearers. A folklife festival strives to provide the opportunity for people of varying backgrounds to come together and explore the many aspects of particular traditions. A folklife festival attempts to achieve the goals of cultural understanding and cultural transmission, as encouraged by UNESCO’s policies on intangible cultural heritage (ICH)

Since 1967 the Smithsonian Institution’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage in Washington has been producing an annual folklife festival and has served as a model of a research-based exposition of intangible cultural heritage. They describe their folklife festival as “an exercise in cultural democracy, in which cultural practitioners speak for themselves, with each other, and to the public.” The Mummers Festival is an attempt to model the Smithsonian’s methodology and approach but with due attention to the differences in context.

At the heart of a folklife festival is the aspiration to represent collective cultural knowledge in a grassroots way. This approach encourages the free and informed participation of community members and tradition-bearers who, it is hoped, will play a central role in the shape of the festival’s development and overall outcome. It is based on principles of organization in which matters and decisions are best managed by the smallest, lowest or least centralized authority.

When we talk about grassroots in the folklife festival context, we mean that agendas are driven and informed by a range of individuals who are closely connected to their respective traditions and/or the communities involved. The decisions made while planning the festival should ideally reflect the views of many individuals within a community who are intimately connected with the traditions on display. This process has been described as natural, spontaneous, and “from the ground up.”

The folklife festival approach to issues of representation are based largely in theories of cultural conservation, a perspective described by Mary Hufford as “grounded in subjective assumptions about how nature and society fit together.”1 This perspective views habitat and culture as an indivisible whole, acknowledging that traditions are intimately tied to the people who use them and the conditions for their use. This ecological approach places value on culture as pluralistic, dynamic, adaptable, and mobile. This perspective thus challenges who controls culture, questions for whom culture is mediated, and reflects an interest in how culture can be used to combat forms of essentialized identity.

A folklife festival aims to ensure traditions are renewed and kept alive. Preserving and safeguarding culture does not suggest the protection of traditions from outside forces, but rather, supports the conditions necessary for cultural reproduction. In line with cultural conservation, ICH policies encourage the sustainability of traditions by taking a natural heritage as living systems approach that seeks to sustain the whole system as a living, dynamic entity.