From next week, writer Kevin Chong will be blogging from the Dawson City Music Festival in the Yukon, which begins July 17.
This will be my fourth trip to the Yukon in the past two years, and though I’ve managed to squeeze some work assignments into my travels, I keep finding excuses to return to renew my big heart crush on the place and its people. If you don’t like the Yukon, I probably won’t like you.
In my opinion, the Yukon is Canada in its most undiluted, and perhaps best, form. Like the rest of the country, it certainly gets cold enough there. And the abundant natural splendour is barely smudged by its human footprint. Its 30,000 or so permanent residents are an eccentric mixture of First Nations people, Canadians originally from other parts of the country, Europeans (many of the campground signs here are written in English and German) who fell hard for the writing of Jack London and Robert Service at an impressionable age. (Check out Johnny Cash’s spoken-word performance rendition of Service’s spooky tale-in-verse, “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” here.) The pioneer spirit is still alive, its Gold Rush-era steamboats and brothels proudly burnished for happy tourists, and yet because so many Yukoners come from elsewhere and often travel during the cold, dark winter, the smallness of the communities never feels small-minded.
Indeed, because of the long winters that encourage indoor artistic endeavours and a chronic workforce shortage, you’ll find people with the most unlikely dual careers: on my visits, I’ve met a radio producer-slash-trapper, a commercial fisherman-slash-arts college administrator, a science-fiction writer from Texas who performs in a Vaudeville-style show for tour groups, an actor-slash-tourism official, and a sculptor-slash-tour boat driver. Idiosyncracy isn’t merely tolerated here, it’s practically a requirement.
While about two-thirds of Yukoners now live in its capital, Whitehorse, it’s Dawson City that has all the Gold Rush-era quaintness. Between 1896 to 1898, the territory’s original capital and the ancestral home of the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in First Nation was occupied by 50,000 panners, saloon keepers, merchants, and sex workers.
By the middle of the 20th century, the numbers plummeted to only several hundred. Now, with about 2000 or so full-time residents, the town bases its economy on tourism and ongoing gold mining. Many of the town buildings from the Gold Rush period exist today. Some have been restored to pristine condition. Bombay Peggy’s, once a notorious brothel, is now a hotel with a very good movie library for its guests; the door of the bar is worked by Caveman Bill, a friendly guy and local celebrity who (you guessed it) lives in a cave. The Snake Pit at the Westminster Hotel, called the “best Canadian bar in the world” in the National Post, blends the charms of a Legion Hall with a really cool basement, with a birch-bark canoe and multiple sets of antlered animal heads unironically fixed to the walls and a pretty rockin’ band.
Other old buildings, which have been rendered warped and structurally unsound by the semi-permafrost on which the town sits (and which prevents the roads from being paved), are left empty and untouched like haunted houses, and offer an eerie counterpoint to the tourist gloss.
An appropriately blurry shot of the preserved toe that’s dunked into your glass for the infamous sour-toe cocktail at the Jack London Bar & Grill.
Although it’s not unusual to see Parks Canada “historical interpreters” dressed up as gold miners or prostitutes coming and going on the streets, the real appeal of Dawson City lies in the vibrant arts-driven community that co-exists with the gift shops and the casino. Dawson hosts its own international short-film festival. The Berton House, Pierre Berton’s childhood home, now welcomes writers for three-month stints.
The town is also home to the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture (KIAC) School of Visual Arts, which started in 2007 and offers transferrable first- and second-year post-secondary credits to 20 students. To bolster its core faculty, the school uses teleconferencing to employ artists and instructors from other parts of the country. One offshoot of this distance learning is “Over the Wire,” an ongoing series of collaborations between an off-site artist and KIAC-SOVA students. In a collaboration with Toronto artist Shary Boyle, students were instructed to “create a sculptural (3D) portrait of your/a mother as an object, plant or animal” after first “consider[ing] how objects/animals can symbolize aspects of character, emotion, and conceal or reveal attitudes towards the subject” and “[reflecting] on whether you are trying to create an observational portrait of your mother’s character, or how she makes you feel.” After the sculptures are photographed and compiled in a book, students are instructed to burn them as a group.
KIAC also hosts artist residencies and in recent years welcomed the multi-disiplinary likes of Ivan E. Coyote, Dan Bejar, and James Whitman. Artists in residence this summer include Toronto visual artist Brandon Vickerd and Halifax sound sculptor Stephen Kelly.
This year, I’ll be covering the Dawson City Music Festival. The festival mashes together roots, country, folk, blues, klezmer, folk, hip-hop, and indie-rock acts for a truly all-ages (i.e. people over thirty won’t feel like narcs) crowd in a tented amphitheatre for the evening concerts and smaller venues including turn-of-the-20th century venues like St. Paul Anglican Church and the Palace Grand Theatre for smaller songwriter’s circles and collaborations.
I was at the festival last year, and although it was wet and muddy, it hardly diminished the good cheer. In fact the bad weather underscored the fact that the music is almost secondary to the community spirit you feel that weekend: the music festival feels less like a musical food court and more like a giant block party for all Yukoners, who see the summer as a kind of release valve, full of revelry and hi-jinks, for their deep hibernation in the winter.
Anyway, I’ll be posting reports from each day at the festival with photos by Michelle Mayne, who isn’t responsible for the shoddy camera work seen in this particular entry.
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