BRATTLEBORO — On Aug. 30 and 31 and Sept. 1, The Future Collective hosts its second annual Future Fest, a three-day music and arts festival expected to draw more than 40 bands and performance artists from all over New England.
Music performances on Friday night and Saturday are at the Stone Church, 210 Main St., Brattleboro.
Sunday, an outdoor variety show and carnival in Brattleboro includes games, skill shares, and acoustic performances. The location will be revealed in a zine guests receive when they purchase tickets.
Proceeds from this fundraiser benefit The Future Collective, which said it is saving for a permanent performance space and community center.
The Future Collective bills itself as “a group from and for a diverse Brattleboro community” that holds community art and musical events. Its mission is to provide “fun, accessible, inclusive, anti-oppressive, community-minded spaces and events that foster creative, political, and personal expression.”
As Gussin explained, The Future Collective holds community meetings about every two months. A five-member steering committee meets about bi-weekly.
Core members of The Future Collective include Gussin, Hannah Cummins, Jonas Fricke, Stevie Riley, and Tess Lindsay.
“For the past two years, this group of folks in Brattleboro have worked promoting culture and expression in our community,” Gussin said.
The group's major events include a popular annual Halloween show at Equilibrium and the Mystery Band concert at the Stone Church, “where we put musicians' names in a hat and then pull them out to create new bands, which then encourages both creation and collaboration among participants,” Gussin said.
Future Fest festivities begin Friday, Aug. 30, at 7 p.m. and continue until midnight with a gathering of electric bands from throughout New England at the Stone Church.
Gussin said the event will be drug-and-alcohol-free.
The groups include Bang Tail Cat and Strange Men, both from western Massachusetts; GROKE, from Providence, R.I.; Final Frontiers from Burlington; Shots Fired, Curb Alert, Barishi (formerly Atlatl), and Happy Jawbone Family Band, all from Brattleboro; and The Great Valley from Brattleboro and New York City.
Tickets are on a sliding scale, from $7 to $18.
The second part of the electric bands concert at the Stone Church begin at 3 p.m. and continues until midnight on Saturday.
Brattleboro bands include Subtle Action, If Not I Than Who Then; The Big Ass Hearts; Tall Boys; Joint Chiefs of Stuff; and Wooly Mar, as well as Bird Names, which hails from Brattleboro and western Massachusetts.
Also from western Massachusetts: the Flaming Dragons of Middle Earth.
Bands descending from elsewhere in New England include Zebu! and Home Body from Northampton, Mass.; Crank Sturgeon from Maine; Aykroyd and Guerrilla Toss from Boston; and Secret Lover and Jacob the Terrible from Worcester. Spoonboy will come up from Washington, D.C.
Tickets for this all-day event are on a sliding scale, from $9 to $25.
The festival concludes Sunday evening with a free outdoor variety show and carnival, location to be announccd. From 11:30 a.m. until 2 p.m. an acoustic show will present more than 20 musical acts.
The carnival includes a piñata, face painting, “future” haircuts, circus acts, painting, free food, a kissing booth, astrology and tarot readings, and more.
From 2 p.m. until 3:30 p.m., circus acts will include diablo, hoop and acrobatic dance, and dance performance and puppetry.
From 3:30 to 5:30 p.m, more acoustic acts and carnival will continue the festivities. At 6 p.m., a horror comedy by Brattleboro's Jean Trapchak and Dylan Fettig, rounds out the events.
At 6:30 p.m., everyone is invited to join in a parade into town.
There will be a Future Silent Auction throughout the weekend backed by donations from community members. Items include knitting lessons, one-on-one skill shares, and mini-adventures.
In the event of rain, the location will be Soba Studios at the Cotton Mill.
Family-friendly is subjective
Parents take note: although Future Fest is promoted as a “family-friendly affair,” some families might find select offerings unsuitable for children. At least one band name and a play involved in the festival are named things our editorial policies prevent us from printing here.
Asked over email to confirm what organizers mean by “family friendly” in light of the names of some of the acts they're hosting, Gussin replied, “We do consider it to be [a family-friendly] event. We haven't requested that individual performers alter their performances to fit into anyone's definition of 'family friendly,' which would certainly be different from person to person, but we did not invite any acts that we consider to be violent, bigoted, or harmful.”
Gussin added, “There will certainly be acts that some people will think are not 'family friendly,' and that is unfortunate, but we will stand by our decisions and our self-imposed designation of 'family friendly.'”
Discussing the music of one band in particular, the name of which this paper finds too vulgar to print, Gussin said, “They are really just pop songs about love.”