Kaustinen Folk Music Festival finds the ways to do it online

Thousands of cultural and heritage events throughout the world have been cancelled due to covid-19 pandemic. Kaustinen Folk Music Festival, the major Finnish folk music and dance event and one of the majors in Northern Europe, also had to tell this sad message to its dedicated friends.
In order to support practising and sharing living heritage under current conditions and to keep up the festival community, consisting of 4000–5000 professional and amateur performers and 40000–50000 visitors annually, a virtual online festival was quickly created. The core of the VirtualKaustinen 2020 online event, 13.–19.7.2020, is the general invitation to all willing groups and individuals to record video performances, upload them to Youtube and share the link to the festival organization. Several hundred videos are expected, and the festival publishes daily a selection of dozens of links.
The programme also consists of daily streamed concerts and workshops, interviews and a webcast radio by The Finnish Folk Music Institute offering archival concerts from earlier festivals and a playlist of Finnish folk music classics. In MyKaustinen Facebook group festivalgoers can join weekly virtual jam sessions and singalongs and share their festival memories starting all the way from the establishing year 1968.
VirtualKaustinen is free of charge and registration.
All the materials stay online until the end of July 2020.