This weekend, the first ever Guest Slippers Festival has made its way to Kingston’s Inner Harbour neighbourhood.
The festival, organized by a team of two in Arden Rogalsky and Jenny Lapp, is truly a grassroots, community driven festival which couldn’t have been possible without buy in from the community it aims to serve itself.
That is due to the entire festival being held throughout the Inner Harbour and Skeleton Park neighbourhoods in the actual homes of people who live there.
Organizer Jenny Lapp says only one of the houses which was tapped as a venue has actually hosted a house show before, but after getting buy in from some friends and family in the area, the logistics of hosting a show haven’t been too difficult.
She says she hopes this little festival inspires people in Kingston to see that DIY shows are possible in Kingston, and hopefully more people will become interested in hosting.
“The idea came from just feeling a lack of DIY style shows happening in Kingston, in large part because of a lack of spaces, but if you want to organize a show, you can just make it happen in,” Lapp said.
“All of the house ones seem pretty straightforward. I wouldn’t say we’ve run into anything [difficult]… I think there’s a lot of artists who want to play these kinds of shows in Kingston, but the spaces aren’t necessarily available.”
The festival’s other organizer, Arden Rogalsky, says if the need for house shows and other DIY spaces hasn’t already been apparent, the recent history in Kingston puts even more emphasis on it.
“I feel like there is like a real need for alternatives to the kind of traditional venues in Kingston, the last couple months, two of the historic ones like the Mansion and the Grad Club closed,” Rogalsky said.
“It feels like it’s a bit of a dire time for those traditional spaces. So it feels like it’s time to just be making new ones for ourselves and not waiting for those things to bounce back or waiting for that to catch up with music here.”
Overall the festival booked four different shows between May 15 and 16, with houses hosting shows in Picardville, Tannery Land, Swamp Ward, and finally culminating Saturday night in the Skeleton Park neighbourhood.
Organizer intentionally kept the sites close together so that attendees could more easily visit all the shows throughout the festival, with each show coming in at a ticket price of $15 and the whole festival pass going for $30.
Lapp says in its debut year, it’s a bit of an experiment to see what works and what doesn’t, but ideally they’d like to see the festival become annual, and grow if given the opportunity.
“It’s an experiment to see if this format works and if it feels like it could sustain itself,” Lapp said.
“Definitely approaching it with like an attitude of see what goes well and see what doesn’t about it, and then hopefully make something else happen in the future that looks similar to this.”
