Big Branch Festival

Jeff Green and Martina Field | Sep 11, 2024

The barn at Leopard Frog Farm dates back to the 1830s.

And for the past three years, it has been filled, for a weekend in September, with musicians and dancers who are devoted to reinvigorating traditional music and dance cultures that stem from the early 19th Century and earlier, in parts of Europe.

The Big Branch Festival is part of a Balfolk revival, a celebration of music and dance that began in the 1970s and has continued to percolate ever since. There are Balfolk groups in Toronto and Montreal who meet weekly to play and dance in a variety of Western European and Scandinavian traditions, with spiritual headquarters in Central France, where an annual Grand Bal takes place on a farm in Gennetines, near Moulin-sur-Allier, which draws over 3000 participants for a two-week festival each year.

The Big Branch Festival is a two-day gathering. The Founder and Artistic Director of the Festival Emilyn Stam, started playing traditional music when she was a young fiddler. She has performed with a number of groups and musicians in Ontario and Europe, that have explored different ways of bringing the music, and culture that is captured under the umbrella of Balfolk, to a contemporary, all-ages audience.

Everything about the Big Branch Festival, and Balfolk, is about building community and connection between musicians and dancers. At the Festival, there was a schedule of performers during the evening “Grand Bal”, just like other music festivals, but there were only about a dozen seats available in the Leopard Frog barn, relegated to the far corners, for dancers who needed a break from time to time. The bands played in another corner and the entire middle section of the barn was a dance space. The rhythmic thumping of feet on the barn floor provided percussion for the music, played on stringed instruments, accordion, clarinet, harmonica and jaw harp. to name a few. There were also a few hurdy gurdies, a Hardanger fiddle and a nyckelharpa.

The Ontario based bands at Big Branch this year included Vinta, Elise Boeur and Adam Iredale Gray, Medusa and Boing Boing Zoom Zoom (Canada) and Cubrana and Dirty Caps from France.

In addition to a Grand Bal on both the Friday and Saturday Night of the festival, there were music and dance workshops throughout the weekend in the barn and at other locations on the site, covering a mix of bourrées, polskas, rondeaus, mazurkas, waltzes, schottisches, and others that make up the Balfolk repertoire. There are some partner dances, some mixer dances, some group dances, and some chain dances.

While Frontenac County is not exactly a center of Balfok music in Canada, it is equidistant from Balfok Montreal and Balfolk Toronto. Both of those groups are thriving, holding weekly sessions all year long, and when their members come to Big Branch they are ready to play, dance, eat and mingle.

“When we were approached by Emilyn to host the festival, I was not sure what it was all about,” said Ellen Hamilton, who has lived and worked at Leopard Frog with her husband Chris since 2001. “But it has been wonderful, and we feel that holding it in a barn that is almost 200 years old is fitting.”

This year, Weirdough Pizza from Sydenham provided some of the food for Big Branch, along with Leopard Frog and festival volunteers.

Emilyn Stam and her husband and fellow musician John Williams are central to the planning for the festival, but over the years, a larger and larger core group has taken ownership and expanded the scope of the festival, not so much in terms of size, but in the richness of the experience for all who are involved. Based in music and dance, Big Branch is also about community, a human antidote to a world dominated by digital, AI generated content that masquerades as modern culture.