The city of East Lansing is considering holding a scaled back Folk Festival this year as a preview of the full festival’s potential return in 2026.
The preview would feature folk music during existing events like the city’s summer concert series or at the Albert El Fresco pedestrian space.
Luke Hackney is part of the subcommittee exploring options for the festival.
“We are looking at, sort of, I don’t want to say piggybacking, but essentially they would just schedule folk artists around those specific dates on one particular weekend in order to drum up excitement if there is going to be a 2026 festival,” Hackney said.
The city previously hosted the Great Lakes Folk Festival, an event put on by the Michigan State University Museum that ran from 2002 until 2017.
East Lansing’s city government formed a committee last year to look at reviving the festival. The full event could feature programming on multiple stages over two to three days.
They will make a recommendation to City Council in the coming weeks on the feasibility of reviving the full festival.
Micah Ling, the public programs coordinator for the Michigan Traditional Arts Program, worked on the original festival from 2012 until the time it ended. She’s now on the committee exploring the festival’s potential return.
She said the committee has considered trends in festivals around the country, pointing out that many have either paused or closed altogether in recent years, largely due to increasing costs since the COVID-19 pandemic.
“There are a lot of considerations like that that are very real, and I think that we’re taking that seriously and knowing that utilizing the old budget from the former Great Lakes Folk Festival are not necessarily going to be reflective eight years on,” Ling said.
Staffing the event, which in the past drew tens of thousands of visitors over three days, could also be a challenge that the city would have to plan for, Ling said.
But she said the amount of public comments the committee has received demonstrates the level of interest the community has in seeing the event come back.
“My hope is that there is a way to move forward with a recommendation that will take all those factors into consideration and offer our community exactly what it’s hoping for and more,” Ling said.
Produced with assistance from the Public Media Journalists Association Editor Corps funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the American people.