WATER VALLEY – The 22nd annual Water Valley Celtic Festival, originally scheduled for June 20, has been postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, said organizing committee member and treasurer Elly VandenEnden.
“We’ve got a lot of remarks from the musicians that they won’t be able to practise at all at the moment,” she said. “Since Calgary has cancelled all their festivals until the end of June and 80 per cent of our visitors come from Calgary, we can’t say, ‘Hey you cannot play in Calgary so please come to Water Valley to play’.”
Current provincial social distancing regulations make live music festivals impossible.
Asked if the Water Valley festival could still go ahead in 2020, she said, “I don’t know. We are taking it day by day and seeing what the possibilities are. Of course we don’t know when all the restrictions will be lifted.
“We would not like to skip a year but at this point we don’t know. Nobody knows what’s going to happen in the future. We have to take it as it comes.”
Organizers plan to keep musicians and the general public updated on future plans through social media, she said.
More than 800 people attended the 21st annual festival last June, with more than 100 musical groups and individual performers and more than 100 volunteers involved.
