![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/Beer-Fest-for-web.jpg\")
<\/a>Although some may be disappointed that there isn\u2019t a raging beer party to attend in Victoria, because of the GCBF\u2019s focus on acquiring an educated taste for craft beer, the festival is a great opportunity for students to learn more about their own taste.<\/p>\n
\u201cI know that Victoria has a huge craft-beer culture, and it can kind of be intimidating to get into,\u201d says Craig. \u201cThere\u2019s so many options and so many really great breweries and people really changing the game quite quickly that I feel like festivals are the best way to try a lot of beers and figure out what you like… Going to a beer festival you have access to 260 beers, you\u2019re not really going to get that elsewhere. So I think for students just kind of getting into the beer world, if they know that they like beer and want to try a bit more, these festivals are a really fun opportunity. And fun to go with your friends, get some food, get some tastings, and hang out on a really nice summer day.\u201d<\/p>\n
The festival offers a larger opportunity to have fun and get out of the isolated COVID bubble we\u2019ve been in for the past several years. It\u2019s also an important moment in time for local festivals: people need to take advantage of them or they might die out.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think it\u2019s just really fun as a festival organizer to bring new experiences for people to get out and socialize,\u201d says Craig. \u201cSo I think it\u2019s a really important notion and I also feel like in the last couple years we\u2019ve seen the arts and culture sector of Victoria kind of slowly die away a little bit just because we haven\u2019t had the ability to run events, so to get these going again is really important for so many sectors, so I\u2019m excited to get this back running again this year.\u201d<\/p>\n
Beyond creating an experience for attendees, GCBF\u2014which takes place this year on Friday, September 9 and Saturday, September 10 at Royal Athletic Park\u2014also provides a great spark in tourism to Victoria.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe expect to have close to 8,000 attend for the weekend, so obviously a big chunk of that is people from the island, or specifically from the south island, but a large amount of that is tourists from either up island or the mainland or from the States, as well,\u201d says Craig. \u201cSo we really bring in this big crowd that\u2019s going to be there for the whole weekend and use all of the city\u2019s amenities, including restaurants and hotels and transportation, so I think festivals are huge for bringing tourism back into Victoria.\u201d<\/p>\n
Capital City community<\/b><\/p>\n
Like the GCBF, Capital City Comic Con has a seemingly niche audience that has been eagerly awaiting the event\u2019s return. Comic Con director Candice Woodward has been dealing with the ups and downs of restrictions for two years.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is so much work involved, and so much planning, and you have to do a lot of things in the background, and then of course you have to postpone again,\u201d she says. \u201cSo it\u2019s been a real challenge to just hope for the best and try to be positive about it, as well as everybody else. A lot of our groups are either non-profits… and they\u2019re run by volunteers, and, of course, volunteering is harder to find with the pandemic going on. It\u2019s definitely a weird world for the events industry right now.\u201d<\/p>\n
The environment at Comic Con\u2014happening this year from Friday, September 23 to Sunday, September 25 at the Victoria Conference Centre and Crystal Garden\u2014creates a community, and a special place for passionate individuals to share in their love of the nerdy variety.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s so many wonderful attendees that come to it and everybody is so welcoming and inclusive. It\u2019s just almost like a big family when it comes to all the people that attend it… Everyone is just really happy the week of the convention. And they embrace everybody, like everyone is just really friendly and welcoming, and that\u2019s what I love about it,\u201d says Woodward. \u201cSo it doesn\u2019t matter if you love Star Trek<\/i> or Star Wars<\/i>, everybody has a bit of a common ground with enjoying a fandom and being passionate about their fandom to any extent. Some people absolutely go above and beyond with their fandom and other people are just like, \u2018Yeah, I just like it.\u2019 You can really feel the love and it\u2019s just a great feeling.\u201d<\/p>\n Something else Woodward stresses is that anyone who needs support services in regards to access issues can contact them to make sure they get what they need.<\/p>\n \u201cWe offer support services, so if anybody needs they can contact us and we can basically offer their support person a ticket as well to help them out,\u201d she says. \u201cThey go through the VIP entrance and we have special lineups to move them to the front of the line. We just want everybody to feel really welcome and included and of course not have any issue the weekend of the event… It\u2019s very important to us.\u201d<\/p>\n Serving a function<\/b><\/p>\n Creating a sense of community and a place for everyone is a common theme in festivals, and that\u2019s what organizer Charity Williams aims to provide with The Function, taking place on Saturday, August 20 at Ship Point. The event is new to Victoria\u2019s lineup of festivals and is run by the BC Black History Awareness Society (BBHAS) for the celebration of BIPOC artists and the BIPOC community in Victoria.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s essentially just to elevate and highlight BIPOC artists, as well as create a community in Victoria… I felt it was important to give a space for people to come together and show authentically as themselves and also just meet people in different spaces,\u201d says Williams. \u201cI feel like people out here can sometimes be very separated and kind of be sucked in these little boxes that we tend to create around ourselves. I just want to give a opportunity for people to come together, hear new music, make some new connections, support BIPOC businesses, and support BIPOC artists. So that\u2019s essentially the bottom line of the festival, is I just want to create a community. I feel it\u2019s lacking. I want to feel like I\u2019m a part of something that\u2019s bigger, and that\u2019s really where that came from, is kind of wanting to make a space where I could feel comfortable and where everyone else as well can feel that way.\u201d<\/p>\n Williams is the youth engagement coordinator at BBHAS and plans youth events in the city to support BIPOC youth. She also runs a program called the Fifth Element that explores the five elements of hip-hop with BIPOC youth. The Function is an perfect extension of her work in the city.<\/p>\n \u201cMyself and one of my teammates and friends organized the peace rally for Black lives a couple years ago and I spoke that day in front of about 10,000 people at Centennial Square. And it was the first time that… I\u2019ve lived this kind of peace of happiness of seeing so many people of colour that I can relate to and finally kind of finding a place to come together,\u201d says Williams. \u201cSo I wanted to create environments where folks can come together, if not out of tragedy, just out of pure joy and celebration and art, and so that\u2019s kind of where it came from. It didn\u2019t happen at that exact moment, it was a couple years of doing other projects, and this is kind of just the next thing to come out of that, of creating a bigger space and an opportunity for people to come together.\u201d<\/p>\n The event\u2019s support of the BIPOC community extends to its vendor selection, which will include BIPOC vendors from Victoria and Vancouver, such as Decolonial Clothing.<\/p>\n \u201cI hope that everybody feels welcome there. I hope that everybody feels like they can see themselves in the artists and just feel like this is a space that they can come and keep coming back to year after year,\u201d says Williams. \u201cI tried to model after things that I went to back in Toronto growing up, which for me feels like a very multicultural and really just exciting place to live, so I kind of wanted to model a little bit of the things that I experienced in Toronto to this festival.\u201d<\/p>\n The Function Festival is one of the recipients of the City of Victoria\u2019s Festival Investment Grant.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThe music and art industry is one of the strongest in Victoria and I think it\u2019s really exciting that they\u2019ve put such a huge amount of funds behind these projects,\u201d says Williams. \u201cAnd we\u2019re just lucky to be one of the many who were selected to get a grant this year. We\u2019re super thankful to the City of Victoria for offering us this grant and I can\u2019t wait to see what we\u2019re going to do with it. It\u2019s really exciting\u201d<\/p>\n A champion returns<\/b><\/p>\n Nick Blasko, founder of Rifflandia, also aimed to fill a gap when he created the music fest in 2008. Through the years, the event has expanded immensely, and although there hasn\u2019t been a Rifflandia in four years, the time off was spent restructuring to remain prominent in the landscape of music festivals in Victoria.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople who have come to the event through the years will see lots of changes. We like to think elevations. The core of the festival is still there, and Royal Athletic Park is the same as it was, but we\u2019re running two stages. You\u2019ll notice they\u2019re much bigger, there\u2019s a lot more video and production in general,\u201d says Blasko. \u201cWe\u2019re just trying to consider our audience. A lot of our audience has kids now\u2026 The audience has sort of grown with us and aged with us too. So we had to consider the audience, consider what they\u2019re going to want, and try to show all the things in Victoria that we love, and just obviously work with the a lot of the same people that we\u2019ve worked with over the years, some of our food vendors and some of our alcohol suppliers and so on\u2026 There\u2019s a lot of different people in Victoria who contribute to the event.\u201d<\/p>\n And due to the festival\u2019s popularity, the vendors benefit from being at Rifflandia, which goes down this year from Thursday, September 15 to Sunday, September 18 at Royal Athletic Park and Electric Avenue. All these local events play an important role to the local economy. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cWe have a very specific audience that wants to come and see music, and wants to do some of the things that they enjoyed doing before COVID, so I can\u2019t speak to the greater economy of things, but\u2026 if we can be part of an effort to revitalize and rebuild and re-engage people, that\u2019s certainly something we want to do and that we want to be seen as doing,\u201d says Blasko. \u201cI think a lot of people, especially in service, are having a very busy summer right now. So we come just at the end of summer, beginning of fall, so we\u2019re not quite a shoulder-season event but almost. I think definitely from a revenue perspective a lot of our vendors, whether they\u2019re food vendors or any other of our service providers, we\u2019re definitely a big part of their year.\u201d<\/p>\n Rifflandia offers a special experience in live music, as it\u2019s the only fest of its magnitude in Victoria.<\/p>\n \u201cThis experience to go to a major music festival is something you always would have had to travel off island to go do. Not too long ago you\u2019d have to go to the United States or Europe to even go to something,\u201d says Nick. \u201cIt\u2019s a manageable weekend experience for the family, is what it is, where you see the same headliners that you\u2019d go and see at these giant juggernaut festivals around the world but at a little park in Victoria.\u201d<\/p>\n For students, especially those new to Victoria, the event can also offer a chance to learn more about their community.<\/p>\n \u201cI think for those new to Victoria it\u2019s a great snapshot of a community and a lot of the things that we love about it,\u201d says Blasko. \u201cIt\u2019s a great gathering, so you\u2019ll meet people and you\u2019ll be inspired, you\u2019ll see all sorts of art, you\u2019ll see all sorts of music, you\u2019ll meet some new people. It\u2019s just a very nice and friendly and exciting environment to be in. I think that for those who are from Victoria it\u2019s just a great annual celebration.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It\u2019s finally festival season again. The return of social gatherings is having an immense effect locally by revitalizing Victoria and bringing its citzens together. Victoria\u2019s sense of community is being brought back through festivals, now that restrictions around social gatherings have lifted. But the return of festivals isn\u2019t without its struggles. In March of this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22945,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,271],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22943","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-august-10-22"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22943","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22943"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22943\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22946,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22943\/revisions\/22946"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22945"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a><\/a>