(Facebook/Ness Creek Cultural and Recreational Society)

By Ronald Quaroni

COVID Cancellations

Organizers cancel Ness Creek music festivals

Apr 16, 2020 | 12:46 PM

The effects of COVID-19 are beginning to have an impact on event’s planned through the summer 2020.

Two of the North’s major music events — the Ness Creek Music Festival and the Country at the Creek Music Festival are both cancelled.

“It was an incredibly difficult decision for the team to make,” Ness Creek Festival Co-Manager Carlie Letts told paNOW. “In addition to the overall sadness that comes to having to cancel something that you spend the better part of a year planning for, it’s even tougher for us because it was set to be our 30^th anniversary celebration.”

“We weathered most storms that we thought could be thrown our way. It seems we’ve met our match with the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Letts explained they are now in the process of refunding or transferring tickets to next year as well as asking people to think about donating their ticket price to the organization to help offset the cost of the festival cancellation.

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Country at the Creek Festival Manager, Jeanette Wicinski-Dunn said it will be a tough year.

“It’s definitely a financial hardship on our organization. However, we realize being a small festival we’re probably in a better financial position than some of the other bigger festivals that put a lot more money into deposits,” Wicinski-Dunn told paNOW.

She added the consideration for postponing the festival to a later date this year was discussed but the conflict of dates with other postponed festivals and uncertainty around COVID-19 led them to ultimately look ahead to next year.

“I’m still a little bit cautious about putting too much planning into next year until we know where this COVID-19 [situation] is going to take us all,” Wicinski-Dunn said. “We’d like to extend our greatest thanks to all the people who continually support us and understand our position in making the announcement of the cancellation.”

“We looked forward to this being a great year for us.”

Looking ahead, there may be more economic ripple affects. The mayor of nearby Big River, Robert Buckingham, said local restaurants, gas stations, grocery store and convenience stores always saw an uptick in business during the festival dates.

He noted local service clubs will also lose out on valuable fundraising opportunities as they often volunteered at the festivals.

“Some of these organizations won’t have that opportunity to raise their funds that they need to keep [up] their programs,” Buckingham said.

He noted the general sense is people are accepting of the situation.

“Most people understand the predicament that we are in. They understand this can’t happen because you don’t want to overwhelm the health-care system or put your family at risk,” Buckingham said.

Looking ahead to next year, Carlie Letts hopes festivalgoers will be ready to go after taking what on the outset, looks like the better part of the summer off.

Until then, Letts noted they have set up various Facebook groups for the Ness Creek community to connect online.

“People can post videos of themselves performing songs much like they would do at a regular an open-mic night or people can just join the group in order to get their Saskatchewan music fix,” Letts said.

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Ron.quaroni@jpbg.ca

Twitter: @RonaldQuaroni