The annual Lotus World Music & Arts Festival will return for its 32nd year Thursday. The festival spans four days and will include 20 different performers and bands, with many performing multiple times throughout the festival.
This year's festival will include opening and closing performances from Krista Detor Band, Terrance Simien and The Zydeco Experience, Cathy Fink, Marcy Marxer and Chao Tian, and Natu Camara at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater on Thursday and Sunday. On Friday and Saturday, there will be several performances at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater, on Sixth Street between College Avenue and Walnut Street, the Waldron Arts Center and First Christian Church.
Each venue will have different kinds of music. First Christian Church will house some of the quieter acoustic acts, such as the musical trio Cécilia, the more fast-paced musicians, such as Nidia Góngora, will play at the Sixth Street venue. The third floor of the Waldron Arts Center will be a dance venue for the festival.
This year’s festival will feature bands performing cumbia, salsa, swing and cajun music. Attendees can learn how to perform these styles of dance at workshops from noon to 4 p.m. Saturday at the Waldron Arts Center.
“I hope they (attendees) dance their socks off because there’s a lot of dance music,” Tamara Loewenthal, artistic director of the Lotus Education and Arts Foundation, said. “We hope that maybe they’ll buy some of the artists’ CDs because the artists support themselves. We sometimes joke that Lotus is the biggest music festival of artists you’ve never heard of.”
Artists must have a unique cultural aspect to their music to get hired, Loewenthal said.
“They might be doing something that is really relatable to American audiences, but they will be using some kind of instrumentation or some kind of theatrical setup that is not common with U.S. presenters,” Loewenthal said. “So, there’s something really intriguing about it.”
Beginning in 1994 with just three small venues in downtown Bloomington and around 800 attendees, the Lotus Festival has continued to grow each year.
The Lotus Festival is part of a bigger nonprofit called the Lotus Education & Arts Foundation. Its goal is to bring music from other cultures to Bloomington, and its biggest event of the year is the Lotus Festival. Another project is Lotus Blossoms, a four-week series, usually during March or April, of artist workshops and performances held in Monroe County and surrounding areas.
Loewenthal aims to bring artists from as many places outside of the U.S. as possible and expose people in Bloomington to their music. As a music lover herself, her duties as artistic director, which includes finding and booking artists to perform for the festival, draws her across the country and the world to find musicians. She attends conferences and listens to many submissions from artists around the world to find the right musicians for the festival. Through this she has learned about many new instruments she had never heard of.
The larger mission is to show people, brought to Bloomington through Indiana University from other countries, that they have a home here. The Lotus Festival allows these students and professors to see people from their country or culture performing.
However, this year it has been a challenge to bring as many artists from other countries, as obtaining visas for them has gotten harder, Loewenthal said. They have just eight groups from out of the country this year. Two groups backed out of touring because of the current atmosphere in the U.S.
“I think it’s really that when we’re exposed to other cultures, we see how similar people are to us,” Loewenthal said. “Like, politics makes a big deal of division, and I think when you see people from other places and especially if you love what they’re doing you just go like ‘oh my God, this is the best thing ever.’”
The full performance schedule is available at The Lotus Festival website. Tickets are available on its website as well. The all-inclusive pass, which costs $133.61, includes access to all concerts Thursday through Sunday.
The weekend pass includes access to all concerts Friday and Saturday, and costs the same as the all-inclusive pass. Additionally, tickets are available for any single day, with the opening concert costing $31.05, the Friday and Saturday showcase tickets costing $72.07 and the closing concert costing $25.92. Discounts for seniors, veterans, students and teens are available with all tickets except opening and closing concert tickets.
