Northwest Folklife

Northwest Folklife Folklife
Fisher Pavilion at Seattle Center during Northwest Folklife Festival 2007
Genre	Music, dance, arts & crafts
Begins	Friday before Memorial Day
Ends	Memorial Day
Frequency	Annually
Location(s)	Seattle Center, Seattle, Washington
Years active	45
Inaugurated	1971
Most recent	2016
Participants	7,800
Patron(s)	250,000
Website
nwfolklife.org

The Northwest Folklife Festival is an annual festival of ethnic, folk, and traditional art, crafts, and music that takes place over the Memorial Day weekend in Seattle, Washington at Seattle Center. It brings together an estimated 250,000 visitors, 800 volunteers, and about 6,000 musicians, dancers, and other performers. Admission is without charge thanks to community support and donations from attendees. Greeters at the entrances encourage visitors to make donations and special buttons with yearly designs are exchanged for donations.

Northwest Folklife was founded in 1971 by the Seattle Folklore Society, the National Park Service, the National Folk Festival Association (now the National Council for the Traditional Arts), and the City of Seattle, as part of the Park Service's urban outreach program to allow the people of its Northwest Region (including Alaska) to publicly present what they "make for their own use and do for their own entertainment." The first festival was first held in 1972 and has since grown to become the largest festival of its kind in North America.

Each year, the festival spotlights a particular ethnic community or folk tradition. In recent years, these cultural focuses have included maritime culture, Arab-American life, the Urban Indian, Bulgarian Culture and the passing of cultural traditions from generation to generation. The most recent focus was centered on Indian culture. The festival has several stages, large and small, set up throughout the Seattle Center grounds, which feature mostly local acts organized by the festival. Like the volunteers who support the festival, they perform without compensation. Many of the venues, notably the Center House and the nearby Roadhouse, are set up for participatory dancing.

The festival grounds also include extensive space for music jams and drum circles. Many attendees from across Washington state, Oregon and British Columbia, come to Northwest Folklife annually to play music with friends.