International Festival Postmortem
The International Festival concluded this weekend.
From the sounds of various reports, attendance was down. The organizers will be able to blame the weather, and surely that had an impact, but I can say that I had made up my mind not to go well beforehand and it had nothing to do with the weather.
Rather, it had more to do with the reasons outlined by John Nova Lomax prior to the festivities:
All in all, that's not a bad lineup, so if iFest fails at the new site, it won't be because of the music. It could happen because of the ticket price -- $12 for adults, which is anybody over ten. Or because of the $7 parking fee. The soullessness of South Main is a threat, as is the possibility that it will somehow be ten degrees hotter here than it was downtown. Or maybe none of that will happen and iFest will thrive in the new digs.
For me, the price was too high, the venue was too silly, and while Lomax is technically right about the lineup not being bad, it was scaled down by an entire stage. Michael Clark noted this in his tepid review of things:
It doesn't help that the festival has trimmed from four to three major music stages at a time when it needs to fill a much bigger space.No, it didn't.
Really, it's still just a puzzle to me why our city leaders and the promoter of one of Houston's best festivals couldn't come together and keep this thing downtown, where it belongs. I don't get it. We spend hundreds of millions on choo-choos and sports venues and downtown beautification, and we let a great international festival head out to the concrete and mud of the Reliant "complex" instead of showing off our great downtown.
Definitely not world class.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 04/26/04 20:56 | Houston | Technorati
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Comments
Could it have had something to do with traffic downtown not yet being sorted out? Smith Street is currently under construction, and I remember last year trying to get around was a nightmare.
Posted by Stu Greene @ 11:55 on 04/27/04
That was one reason that was given. Another was that the city really did feel it needed to receive more of the fees for its part in putting things on downtown. And one parks official even commented that the festival was too hard on the grass downtown (!?). It just seems that nobody really wanted to find a way to make it work downtown anymore. So no way was found. :(
Posted by Kevin @ 12:06 on 04/27/04
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