This year’s edition of Dauphin’s Countryfest may not have sold out, but given the heat of the three-day festival, organizers feel it was a tremendous success.
Prior to Sunday’s evening main stage entertainment, Countryfest president Duane McMasters was pleased with how everything went this year.
“We had some pretty fantastic weather. We had a couple sprinkles of rain here and there. The heat has been pretty intense. So far no problems with that,” he said, adding the crowds were great all weekend. “I’m hearing nothing but good things about our entertainment. Haven’t really had any security incidents. In all honesty, it’s one of those things where you spend so much time trying to get here and then you get here and you’re amazed when it goes well.”
That just proves when you having a good team and doing a lot of hard work ahead of time makes things happen when the event finally does roll around, he added.
This year, organizers focused on bringing in more Indigenous artists, the result of a partnership with Indigenous Music Manitoba to develop an Indigenous artist showcase.
“We’ve got a lot of great musical artists like Mitchell Makoons, Nelson Little, Desiree Dorion obviously is a local name. (Sunday) we had the Ivan Flett Memorial Dancers, the Throat Singers, which I’ve never seen before and I thought it was really awesome. It was pretty cool,” McMaster said, adding he hopes to continue in the future.
“We definitely did deliberately do that. We just wanted to showcase our Manitoba talent. We wanted to showcase the Indigenous talent. Just to show what we’ve got here in Manitoba.”
McMaster hopes to continue that showcase next year.
“I think it would be fantastic. I loved having them on the main stage here and everybody was really thrilled to actually be appearing on the main stage at Dauphin’s Countryfest. It’s a little bit of a prestigious thing. We’ve been around long enough that that’s sort of a pretty exciting place to be,” he said.
Although the final numbers won’t be known for a while, McMaster was pleased with the weekend’s attendance.
“The stands have looked good. Our numbers are good this year. We’ve had great attendance at the shows, up top has looked good. We’ve had a lot of people coming through the gates. Overall, I think things are looking really good,” he said.
Because this is his first year as president, McMaster is just happy everything went well.
“Whether it was real or imagined, I felt like there was a bit of pressure on me, because I’ve never done this before in this position. So I’m just happy that things are actually flowing smoothly,” he said, adding he only got to watch one act, catching half of Snake Oil’s show, Saturday night.
Relieving some of the pressure is the work of the board to make things run as smoothly as it did this weekend.
“We have such a fantastic team here. I’m one of 13 directors on our volunteer board and all of them just do a ton of work. Then we’ve got our office staff, we’ve got out summer students, we’ve got our site crew. No one person can take credit for anything out here. It’s a team effort for everything,” he said. “And it always blows my mind that, at the end of the day, we’ve got maybe a dozen paid employees at our peak and our 13 board members and we make this happen with a whole bunch of volunteer support from our community. I’m so proud to be part of the group that makes this happen.”
Even though this year’s festival was still going on, discussions for next year’s lineups had already begun.
You have to start looking at entertainers a year out, McMaster said, so organizers have already had some preliminary discussions with some entertainers.
McMaster appreciates the support the festival has received year after year.
“Our volunteers who come out and support us. All of the people that come back year after year and buy tickets and come see us,” he said, adding he saw some people from Texas in Vermillion Park, last week, who came to Dauphin for Countryfest. “It’s unbelievable that people would come that far to our little event out here in Dauphin. So thanks to everybody,” he said.
