Folklife Festival celebrates 100th anniversary of folklore society

A fifth-generation potter, a B-Boy dance crew and a ballad singer are just some of the people participating in Saturday’s 2013 North Carolina Folklife Festival.

The festival, the product of a partnership between the North Carolina Folklore Society, the North Carolina Folklife Institute and UNC’s Department of American Studies, takes place from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at various venues and locations throughout Carrboro.

The festival celebrates the 100th anniversary of the folklore society, said Janet Hoshour, the society’s board president.

The different events will be going on all around town, with several events taking place in the Century Center and The Carrboro ArtsCenter.

“Part of why (this festival) makes so much sense is that North Carolina has such a long history of embracing tradition — traditional arts, traditional cultures,” Hoshour said.

The event encompasses all art forms — musical performances by folk musicians, art exhibits and documentary screenings. Various craft demonstrations by communities from around the state are just some of the types of events going on throughout the day.

One of the events is a tattoo-documenting tent run by student volunteers from the American studies department. Danielle Riley, a graduate student in UNC’s folklore program who is participating in the festival, said the group will be photographing people’s tattoos and other body modifications and recording the stories behind them.

“We see that tattoos and body modifications are a kind of living tradition,” Riley said.

She said she hopes the tent will help legitimize in people’s minds the idea of tattoos as a form of storytelling and an emerging part of folklore — much like the traditional components of music, art and dance.

“We’re trying to expand the ways in which the folk of North Carolina express who they are,” Riley said.

The tent is going to be located near The Station bar in Carrboro. After the festival, participants can have a copy of the photo sent to them, and all of the material collected will be archived at the North Carolina Folklife Institute in Raleigh.

Joy Salyers, the executive director of the North Carolina Folklife Institute, said one of the main goals of the festival is to break people’s misconceptions about what constitutes folklore.

“(Folklore) is the foundation of what we really build healthy communities on,” Salyers said.

She said traditional events, like basket weaving and pottery demonstrations, are transposed with more contemporary events, like the tattoo documentation tent, in order to convey that folklore is changing and being made every day.

Riley said new lifestyles and societal changes will continue to be reflected in North Carolina’s folklore.

“As people live their lives in different ways, we’ll try to be there to document it with them,” Riley said.

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