Festival International: The Free City Stage
Near Lafayette, Louisiana
On the last full weekend of April each year, downtown Lafayette becomes a free outdoor concert venue of some scale. Stages go up on multiple city blocks. Musicians arrive from Mali, Haiti, South Africa, Brazil, Jamaica, and France, alongside Cajun and zydeco acts from down the road. Four hundred thousand people attended in twenty sixteen. No ticket required.
Festival International de Louisiane began in nineteen eighty-seven. Its founding premise was both local and outward-looking: celebrate the French heritage of Acadiana by connecting it to the larger world of French-speaking culture. Louisiana's Creole and Cajun traditions did not emerge in isolation, they came from Atlantic exchange, from the Caribbean, from West Africa, from France itself, and the festival makes that lineage visible. A Malian kora player and a zydeco accordionist share a city block and the connection is not metaphorical; it is historical.
In twenty twelve and twenty thirteen, the festival was voted Best World Music Festival by readers of About.com. It remains free to the public, which is a deliberate decision rooted in the idea that a community celebration ought to be accessible to the community that gave rise to it.
Lafayette is not a large city. Its metropolitan population sits around two hundred fifty thousand people. That a free festival of international scope originated here, and has been sustained here for nearly four decades, says something about how seriously the people of Acadiana take the proposition that their culture is worth celebrating, and worth sharing.
