Tent pegs going in for annual Folklife Festival

If you’re a Washingtonian, you’ll have guessed by now that it’s time for another Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the Mall, brought to you by the folks at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage.

Thousands of visitors, perhaps as many as a million, are expected to attend the 10 days of the festival — which is springing up tent by tent, banner by banner, stage by stage on the National Mall in anticipation of its opening next week. The festival will run from June 23 to June 27, and from June 30 to July 4.

Its themes this year center on the Middle Eastern nation of Oman, on music in Latino culture, on the work of the U.S. Forest Service and on “food culture USA.”

That breadth means you can move among a kaleidoscope of people and still not stray too far from home.

You can rub shoulders with celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse and with experts on tofu and spices. You can consort with camels, with calligraphers from Oman and musicians from El Salvador playing their homegrown Chanchona music, and with expert bird callers and smoke jumpers. And you can listen to the sound of a group called the Fiddlin’ Foresters, the official old-time string band of the U.S. Forest Service.

You can luxuriate in the aroma of barbecue and the new-style American cooking, and meander through a new-style garden called “The Edible Schoolyard.” You can roam through an “Interactive Forest,” watch how boat-builders from Oman recreate the vessels that once ruled the Indian Ocean, and listen to the many strains of Latino music.

“Year in and year out, it’s never, never boring,” says festival director Diana Parker. “Every program, every theme, is full of opportunity.”

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The Smithsonian’s Folklife and Cultural Heritage Center has always seen the festival as a place where cultures — America and its states and regions and the people of every country in the world — come together and exchange views.

It’s a kind of large, popular but educational show-and-tell, one where the bearers of tradition come together with local scholars and Smithsonian curators to share their enthusiasms with the public. And always, there’s food and music.

Founded in 1967, the inspiration and passionate life work of the late Ralph Rinzler, the center’s first director, the festival debuted with two tents and a music stage plus a performance area at the Museum of History and Technology. The first festival had 84 participants.

It grew by leaps and bounds — it ran for three months during the bicentennial year of 1976 — and continued to focus on nations, cultures, states, regions and occupations. The Silk Road, the ancient trade route across Central Asia, was the sole theme of the entire 2001 festival. The center plans well in advance, and even today is working on the 2007 and 2008 festivals.

The hope is that of the thousands who attend — fighting lines and heat and often with children and babies in tow — some will take with them memories that alter or broaden their take on other cultures and their own lives.

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This year’s festival has four major themes. “Forest Service, Culture and Community” celebrates the 100th anniversary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service and will include presentations by more than 100 people who work in America’s national forests.

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