D Festival '11

With the second annual D Festival looming, I return from my summer holidays pondering what a community festival means to a community. Historically the south Wales Valleys have been the home of village carnivals and meccas to jazz bands and fancy-dressers alike. However, the post-industrial years of the 80s and 90s saw a decline in these types of carnivals, and the Dulais Valley was no different. The patronage and interest dwindled, insurance costs and bureaucracy created no end of barriers, and as a result volunteers and the yearly events became sporadic, small-scale and poorly attended.

Despite all this, a strong, often changing, cohort of Dulais Valley citizens have managed, one way or another, to keep things going over the years and we should be proud of this. However, the Dulais Valley Festival, an effort to run a valley-wide carnival if you will, came and went (for many reasons), and the modern day Seven Sisters Carnival and Banwenbury are in the main highly localised occasions that have failed to achieve that elusive valley cohesion.

So, as we fast approach this year's D Festival, a three day occasion with a mix of events spread across the valley, I am compelled to ask myself what the point is? The details, for what they are, is that the D Festival consists of Dove Workshop's Roots and Froots Food Fair on the Friday, accompanied by a heritage trail and a photographic exhibition; a vintage fair at Cefn Coed Colliery Museum on Saturday, and a day of music at Seven Sisters Bandstand on Sunday afternoon. This is very different to the carnivals of old, as described above, but in many ways the D Festival feels better for it; contemporary, different, interesting.

However, one unfortunate similarity exists, and yet again the success of a valley wide event depends on the efforts of a hardcore (but very small) band of committed organisers, and I'm left to hope that it's not an indicator of the level of interest we're going to have next weekend. Last year's D Festival was held on quite possibly the wettest weekend since records began, and so if it wasn't as populated as we'd have liked it to be, well, we could always blame the rain...

So, if the sun decides to put its hat on next weekend, will we see the people come in their thousands? Well, I doubt it. But, whilst we are yet to find out, we'd settle for a few hundred, and that, I'm pleased to say, is a figure we're optimistically aiming for.

The future of the D Festival, or any other valley-wide community event, is unknown. But I like to keep faith in the fact that whilst there are people prepared to turn up, there'll be people prepared to put the hard work into organising them, no matter how small that small but committed group might be.

DC

For more info go to dfestival.org