Beaufort Delta to dance many nights away with 3 music festivals next month

People living in the N.W.T.'s Beaufort Delta will dance many nights away with three different music festivals planned in the region next month. 

The music will start on Aug. 1 and 2 at the 40th annual Midway Lake Music Festival south of Fort McPherson on the Dempster Highway. 

Then, the Arctic Ocean music festival in Tuktoyaktuk is scheduled for Aug. 8 and 9. The mayor of Tuktoyaktuk, who is also a singer, hopes that the festival he's organizing could foster new musicians in his community up the Arctic coast.  

"People are anticipating it, they're looking forward to something," said Mayor Erwin Elias. "I think that's really critical, especially this day and age, with mental health and everything that people are going through." 

Elias pointed to the Midway Lake festival as a source of inspiration for youth. 

"Midway Lake is one of the longest-running festivals we have in our area and you can see the results from that with all the young fiddlers we have playing today," said Elias. "It's because of people putting up events like this." 

The Arctic Ocean festival will showcase local and regional musicians, and it'll have a headliner coming from the south who hasn't been announced yet. 

Elias said August is a great time for music festivals because the days are getting shorter. He hopes to lift peoples' spirits with live music.

To cap things off, Inuvik's annual Fiddle and Flow festival is happening Aug. 15 to 17. It was started by the Town of Inuvik four years ago with COVID-19 resiliency funding from the federal government. 

Since then, the festival has been taken over by the volunteers at the Inuvik Community Events Society. Jackie Challis, one of the members of the society, said the festival still gets support from the town but their society does the planning. 

The event features musicians from as far as Ulukhaktok.

Challis said seeing musicians mentor younger talent is why the society puts on events like it.

"It's just so great," she said. "You'll have youth from Ulu playing with McPherson and jamming with people from Inuvik. That's what it was really supposed to be about." 

Fiddle and Flow is still looking for artists to get involved. The deadline to apply is July 25.