It’s been eight years since the Great Lakes Folk Festival brought nearly 80,000 people to the downtown streets of East Lansing for a weekend of live music and culture.
But the popular community event – or at least a smaller version of it – is back. From Thursday, Aug. 7 through Sunday, Aug 10, the city will hold “A Taste of Folk Festival.” The event comes after the city assembled a committee last year to explore the possibility of reviving the popular community gathering.
While the scope of this year’s event is much smaller than previous iterations, the “taste” festival will help set the stage to possibly bring the bigger festival back, said Colleen Armitage, community events specialist with the City of East Lansing.
“The suggestion was made that we bring this folk festival back,” Armitage said. “The City started an exploratory commission to see if the community would be interested in having this again, bringing the festival back to life. The Commission worked for several months and gave my department their suggestions. There wasn’t a whole lot of time to make their whole dream happen, but we did cultivate quite a few performers that we think would make a really great addition to having kind of a preview of the festival.”…