Success Stories

Success in Incorporating a Heritage & History Component: The Discovery Festival in Renfro Valley

A volunteer for The Discovery Festival in Renfro Valley started taking clogging lessons for fun and recognized the link to the heritage and history of her area. She suggested that clogging be added to the programming of The Discovery Festival, which is the first weekend in June, to address the absence of what used to be a thriving tradition in the community: dance. The idea was welcomed by the festival organizers and a county-wide group called the Bittersweet Cloggers was happy to take on the project. The clogging group met with the festival committee to toss around ideas and make programming decisions. Festival coordinator Carol Bryant and the volunteer, Janine Norman, completed the course to become Community Scholars. They were trained by Community Scholars instructors on ways to delve into clogging and dance to discover how much of that tradition has been passed down and exists in the community today.

While the Bittersweet Cloggers did most of the planning for their participation in the festival, The Discovery Festival did ask that they keep the focus on tradition by performing an older type of clogging to traditional mountain music. The component was presented as both entertaining and educational. Supplemental to the dancing were materials about the history of clogging in the area, signage, pictures, costumes, and other information. The cloggers performed in a variety of costumes that appropriately represented different eras of history. They welcomed questions from the audience at a narrative stage and encouraged audience participation in the dancing. Festival attendees could also sign up for lessons with the group.

Plenty of energy and time were expended to plan for and include the clogging piece, but most of that was taken on by the Bittersweet Cloggers and their leader. While they were happy for the chance to advertise their art form, it was a great help to the organizers of The Discovery Festival so that they could offer a new heritage component to the community without sacrificing any of their other programming. The festival gave a monetary donation to the group for their input and effort. This component was such a success that in addition to clogging in next year’s festival, the organizers plan to greatly expand the theme of dance to integrate other forms such as Native American dance, square dancing, and Scottish dance. They will work until then to identify more groups in the community who practice and can demonstrate their traditional dance.