This is Jeannie Staub’s eighth year working for the Regina Folk Festival. As Manager of Marketing, she’s responsible for determining a new theme for each year’s festival and coordinating marketing efforts around that theme. While she’s the creative mind and the technical wizard behind most of the promotional materials, her work is incredibly collaborative, with fellow RFF staff, an ad-hoc museum in rural Manitoba, and a Brit on EBay all contributing critical components toward the development of this year’s theme and marketing materials. Her stories contain enough whimsy to make one wonder if she’s taken this year’s theme “Play, Make, Believe” a little too closely to heart. But they do check out, which makes them all the more fantastic.
Where do your ideas for each year’s theme come from?
It’s always such a combination of influences. I look at what the trends are, what people are gravitating toward, what people are interested in visually. The line-up always inspires it, too. I sit down and start listening to the music, and ideas start to flow. I sort of collect ideas and aesthetics and try to create a narrative around them. It’s pretty intuitive.
What inspired this year’s theme, “Play, Make, Believe”?
I’ve seen a lot of throwbacks to the original graphic style, like letterpress printing. People seem to be interested in those aesthetics again (maybe it’s a reaction to an over-digitized media assault).
Then [RFF artistic director] Sandra told me about this wonderful place about two hours east of here – this man George Chopping’s house that he’s turned into a museum. The part that was most interesting to me was the attic. It was filled with dusty old toys, just like right out of a storybook. The way he let the toys just sort of be there and grow old and get dusty and worn – it was very artful, playful and intriguing.
The posters and TV ads feature a lot of dusty, old toys. Is there a story there?
Yes, they’re my Dad’s. I went to my parents’ farm and pulled out all of my Dad’s old toys from the ’40s and ’50s – wind-up cars and little helicopters and playful things. I didn’t even bother cleaning the dust off. Our TV producer Jayden Soroka and I set up a shoot right there in the basement of my house.
Amazing. And that old letterpress type featured in all the posters is equally intriguing.
Yeah, I’d been looking around town for letterpress type, but couldn’t find any. I ended up messaging a guy in the U.K. who was selling the letters on Ebay. He responded right away. Apparently, it’s not the first time he’s had this request. Since all I needed was digital photos of the type, he suggested that he just shoot all the letters that I wanted, and send the photos to me over the internet. So he cleaned off all the ink and took them outside and took pictures of all of them, and now I have this huge library of these gorgeous old pieces of letterpress. That’s what made up our logo this year, and the names of the artists on the posters.
Everyone who attends the festival will interpret the theme, consciously or not, through their own experience, but what does this year’s theme mean to you?
Toys represent our imagination, as do the playful aesthetics of rooms, windows, costumes and curtains. I feel like this theme is meant to remind us of how accessible our creativity really is. The theme often doesn’t make total sense to me until other people get involved. So I’ll actually have a better understanding of it after the festival, because of people’s participation.
How do the visual aesthetics of the festival interact with the music, in your experience?
Music starts out as the focus, but then by the end of the festival weekend, people are really more engaged in the experience. Folk festivals are a place where creative expression is really embraced, so you see all sorts of colourful ideas floating around you at the festival, and we inspire one another. That’s what’s so special about folk festivals. And in Regina, we do it right in the middle of our downtown, which is extra cool.
How do you think the theme influences the experience of festival-goers?
It’s interesting – the generation of a theme is part of marketing and communications, but it goes beyond that – having a theme to draw on really brings people together. It serves as a starting point for things to jump from. For example, the Fada dancers will interpret what’s going on with the theme and create numbers that are related to it; sometimes we create on-site artwork to allow people to engage in the theme or create programming with it in mind. It is meant to inspire people, energize everyone involved and engage in a conversation about why we are here together.
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