Youth at the Illawarra Folk Festival

It is with great pleasure that the Festival will once again present a focus on youth and folk music at the 25th Illawarra Folk Festival.

The Festival since its inception has encouraged involvement from youth. Folk music by its very nature is music of the people, whether young or old.

For the last couple of years a Young Folk Concert has been held with wild gyspy ensembles, traditional trios, sensational soloists and youth folk bands like you've never seen before.

This year we have again committed a whole venue for a number of hours on the Friday and Saturday to make the concerts even more attractive to younger folk.

There two main aims:

• The first to encourage younger performers with alternative music with a broad folk brush to perform in public and to a folk festival audience.
• And secondly to provide the performers a chance to see other like-minded performers and to see other folk performers in action.

The Folk Festival Organising Committee is fully behind this project in the hope that more young folk become involved.

DEADLINE FOR APPLICATIONS - 15 September 2009

Wanted

• Youth performers who want their music and songs heard.

Essential Performance Criteria

• Folk style, folk influence (Singer / songwriter / bands)
• Age: 9 to 25 Years
• Unplugged performance. Acoustic instruments only
• Cut down drum kit, acoustic guitar, electric bass are acceptable.
  Bring out the instruments outside the rock tradition e.g. violins, mandolins, didgeridoo, accordion, whistles, banjos, autoharps, harmonicas, harps

Desirable

The performance set is to contain either/or

• an original song (reflecting historic content - time/place/person)
• a version of a traditional folk tune (i.e. Irish/Australian ballad, Greek/ Macedonian dance tune etc)

The Performance

The concerts are planned for Friday evening 15th January and Saturday 16th January. The performance will be for around 15 to 20 minutes dependent on the number of performers.

The venue is to be advised within the Bulli Showground Festival site.

For the performers

There is no remuneration however all performers will receive 1 Festival Season Pass for themselves and 1 for a parent or partner. These are worth $110 each.

This will allow them access to all venues on the 4 days of the festival.

To apply

Click here to apply online.

Go to the Festival Performers Application on-line page at and fill in as many details as possible.

DEADLINE FOR APPLICATIONS - 15 September 2009.

Please send photographs for the programme booklet as well to media@illawarrafolkclub.org.au

Further Information

Contact Ann Lehmann annlehmann@idx.com.au tel. 02 4268 0723