Ever since I first heard about it, I've had a certain bounce in my step the week before Shambhala. The mere fact such an event exists, and so close to where I live, restores vast sums of my faith in the human race to such a point where everything else seems rather secondary, like a lot of noise.

My first trip to Shambhala was last year, when I went with then-Entertainment Editor Chip Dingo and Lifestyle Editor Janus Jones. All of us staggered around in awed confusion for most of the trip and struggled desperately to use traditional modes of reporting to figure out what the hell was going on. Compared to an easy, "You get the first 3 songs to do photo"-style festival inside the city such as Sled Island (Which itself is somewhat of an endurance test), everything at Shambhala is different.

First of all, the kind folks who run the event do not give out press passes. This is fairly understandable, because the last thing an event like Shambhala needs is for some idiot at a national paper to refer to it as a "rave." Which, in many ways (and let's not shit ourselves), it does resemble. One of those ways is that press coverage is largely unneeded; how many huge outdoor electronic music parties actually need preview coverage for people to know about them? They largely don't even have to advertise; they're able to pack the place merely through word-of-mouth.

This, of course, is rather frustrating when your whole modus operandi is to look at larger North American cultural constructs through the lense these festivals provide. However, even at similar festivals where we have gotten more support (Such as Motion Notion, where we were given full press access only two weeks ago), traditional approaches to reporting quickly break down.

Go read Janus Jones' review of Excision's set at Motion Notion. It resembles in no way, shape or form a typical show review which, let's face it, are incredibly boring and meaningless. "Was the music good? Were there people there? Did they like the music? Did the performer do anything cool? Okay, four for four, review's done." I don't need to tell you that a lot is lost in this approach, especially when so much of the spectacle that is these festivals involves participartory art from the audience. This is a really fantastic and unique approach to performance that is lost when relegated to merely a central performer narrative. A good set review should make you feel what the people gathered felt, make you form pictures in your mind of how the scene must have looked, if only because the power of one's imagination is absolutely necessary to supplement the photos and text in truly understanding the event.

Yet, there's a lot more to events like Shambhala and Motion Notion than just the music. You get into a weird mindset that a whole new society is constructed, something completely foreign to the world you live in while simultaneously being an island in the centre of it. People act differently, and not altogether in the weird, strung-out sense. People are really really polite and talkative; while often people group in regional clusters, everyone is enormously friendly to everyone. I initially found it hella eerie the first time I went, but after an hour or so, I just realized that's how people act: we're all at this absolutely amazing and fantastic party, nothing is pretentious and having a good time is more important than most else.

You see people talk about really big ideas while smoking sheesha and planning for the night ahead. Until about the last day, when everybody's craving, nobody charges a dollar any time someone asks to bum a smoke (Which is at least the convention here in Calgary). Girls walk around topless. Old dudes tripping on Acid offer to help you bring your supplies to camp. Nobody litters cigarettes butts and few need to be told twice. I could go on, but really, the number of inherently-unique memories offered by these festivals are endless. In a way, despite the utter hopelessness of such visions, you begin to wish that the entire world was like Shambhala.

Or if not exactly like Shambhala, a bit more like it. Wouldn't it be nice if people weren't afraid to say "Hi!" to total strangers on the street, or even if that wasn't some grievous infraction of social conduct? Perhaps that if we could all just live together a little better, we'd be a nicer and more humane society? I could once again go on, but the fact remains that to ignore the intense intellectual fodder provided by such a unique shared community is to relegate these enormously meaningful and transferable ideas to what are seen as events dedicated to entertainment.

But culture doesn't exist in a vacuum, and society is dependent upon culture to give it meaning. Even though these events are highly entertaining, they have the potential to evoke a much wider range of emotion than say a film or even the same music if, say, played by an iPod in the context of a bus station. This is kind of the largest wall one runs up against in discussion about festivals like these: "Well, goddammit, why, exactly, are they meaningful?"

And you know, the person to whom the question is directed is often at a loss for words. How do you explain how you danced like a total idiot in a crowd of several hundred people and felt, for the first time in perhaps years, sheer exuberance? How you were walking along a beach and suddenly realized that you were looking at people quite differently? Of course, the person will seize the silence to accuse that "Ah-HA! It's the drugs talking, innit...?", at which point the subject of the questioning, having nothing further, may just shrug: sure, I was high.

It's about a week to the event, and we're gearing up for one of the best festivals yet. We don't want to be journalists at this event. We just want to be people. And we all hope those of you traveling there just want to be people too. We may not take back with us the kind of coverage we did at Motion Notion, but I guarantee you it will at least be interesting.

If you're interested in joining our discussion, drop by Camp Hotbox, or better yet, set up near us and be a part of our evolving community inside yet another evolving community. If nothing else, you'll always be able to find somebody to smoke a doobie or go dance with.

-æ.

       

Written by :

Ændrew Rininsland