Folk Marathon is amazing.
It happens just once every year.
It's a five days nonprofit grassroots event for folk / trad / world musicians, dancers and enthusiasts.
Folk Marathon takes place around new year's eve in a different European city every year. Neither small nor too huge, it usually welcomes about 300 participants: to party, jam, dance, share knowledge, skills, tunes and songs on a voluntary basis with each other.
It's a gathering rather than a “festival”, in the sense that it’s more about active participation, experiencing, experimenting rather than presenting something finished and polished.
- Of course, at every Folk Marathon there are no other lots of opportunities for bands and projects to present themselves and their great music on stage, for listening or for dancing, in different carefully selected venues,
- but an essential part of Folk Marathon is to provide lots of space for meeting and exchange, for a huge diversity of jams and workshops.
- It's an open, communicative, creative event, a friendly (maybe a little bit utopian?) framework, celebrating togetherness as well as individualism.
Every kind human being, independent of age and skill, is invited to join into Folk Marathon, just the way they want it to happen: One may visit dozens of workshops or none at all, party and jam and dance all day and night or take it much slower, choose to go to this dancing concert or rather to that session, explore everything on his/her own or party together…
There’s a modest participation fee just to cover the expenses.