The new Downtown Victoria Buskers Festival — the apparent winner of the Battle of the Busker Fests — has booked 75 acts and is poised to open July 11, organizers say.
“Everything is going really well. Everyone is booked to come. The stages are booked. All the activities are ready to go,” said Kerri Milton, executive director of the Downtown Victoria Business Association, which is producing the festival with partners.
Meanwhile, the defunct Victoria International Buskers Festival (VIBF) will be reincarnated as the Kamloops International Buskers Festival in 2018.
In December, the VIBF announced it would shut down operations. This happened after the DVBA announced it would launch its own festival — the Downtown Victoria Buskers Festival — in July of 2017. This is same month the VIBF was scheduled to take place.
VIBF producer John Vickers said his festival’s closure was caused not only by the new competition. He cited a 25-per-cent reduction in funding from downtown organizations who’d traditionally supported his event.
Tourism Victoria was among those that declared its intention to end financial support of the VIBF in favour of the Downtown Victoria Buskers Festival. At the time, Tourism Victoria CEO Paul Nursey cited a “deep and irreparable schism” between Vickers and sponsors of the new buskers festival.
Vickers, who founded the VIBF in 2011, says the festival has now sold its assets to the City of Kamloops, which will mount its inaugural buskers festival next year. Kamloops acquired a warehouse of equipment — including lighting and sound gear — as well as the VIBF web site.
Vickers has been hired as a consultant for the Kamloops festival.
He said the death of his Victoria buskers festival and the birth of a new one is confusing to many. “I’m inundated with phone calls here for the last week or two. People are hearing the buskers festival is cancelled, but they’re also hearing the festival is on.”
Vickers said he’s heard from more than 100 international performers who insist “they will never touch the DVBA event.” He said Victoria-based buskers are also upset by the busker festival change-over.
“They feel it’s outrageous that this local community event, built by the community, has been basically upstaged by a downtown partnership that had nothing to do with the founding of the event.”
Milton said the DVBA has had no difficulty booking performers, including local buskers. She declined to comment directly on Vickers’ contention the VIBF was ousted unfairly. She says the change-over in festivals “makes no difference” from the public’s perspective.
“We’re not going to comment on John Vickers’ world. All I’ll say is this — we have amazing international acts that are coming. We have them coming from Sydney, Australia, and Israel and Spain as well as throughout the United States. And we have some local as well,” she said.
Running July 11 to 16, the Downtown Victoria Buskers Festival will have a main stage at Ship Point, an evening stage at Market Square and a smaller day-time stage at the Bay Centre. There will also be busker “pitch spots” throughout the downtown area.
The new festival has some differences from the old one. Evening performances have returned and there will be a beer garden.
“We’ve listened to what works for merchants,” Milton said. “We’ve changed and adjusted a lot of things they didn’t feel worked for them [with the previous festival].”
Although a tireless advocate for his buskers’ festival, Vickers was also a polarizing figure who sometimes clashed with those who got in the way of his plans.
For example, in 2015 he moved some of the festival from downtown Government Street to Uptown shopping centre in Saanich. Vickers said the move was made partly because the City of Victoria and merchants were unsupportive of busker performances on Government Street.
Although the VIBF has disappeared, the future for two other Victoria festivals founded by Vickers is rosier.
Earlier this year, Vickers said the Victoria International Chalk Festival and the Victoria International Kite Festival would be cancelled for 2017. Now he says another municipality in the capital region has taken over the Chalk Festival and will stage it this year. This “new regional host” will make an announcement about its plans in the near future.
And Vickers says he will bring back the Kite Festival in May of 2018.
“Kite Festival is unscathed from all these actions downtown,” he said.
