Dawson City Music Festival gets a new building
New building includes a full recording studio, something the town has never had
The people behind the Dawson City Music Festival have never thought small.
You have to dream big to get musical acts from all over the world to come to the Klondike for one weekend in July, and convince most of the community to get behind the idea.
But they've been doing this every year, pandemic excluded, since 1979, and now the people behind the festival are going to do it from a new building.
The Dawson City Music Festival (DCMF) is opening a new headquarters, complete with something the town has never had: a full recording studio.
"DCMF's role in the community is changing," said festival president Devon Berquist. "We're very excited to support the creation of new music, as well as the presentation of music through the festival and the community programs. Being able to support local musicians at all stages is really something we're looking forward to."
It took a lot of work to get to this point.
The festival's first home was destroyed by a fire in 1996. They moved into a log cabin located on a downtown lot. The building had plenty of quirks and not a lot of storage, but in that tiny office, staff and volunteers were able to turn the festival into a nationally recognized event.
The festival set money aside each year with an eye toward building a new home, and in 2010 they were able to buy the land outright. That set into motion the next phase of the plan: designing a newer and bigger building.
"Our board at the time was very alive to the fact that there were no options in the community for recording of any sort," said Tim Jones, the festival's executive director at the time.
"We saw a need in the community for something like this. There had been a long time dream for a bigger and better and more sustainable space."
In 2019 the board successfully applied for funding through the Canadian Northern Economic Development Agency (CanNor). Other funders, like the Community Development Fund and Lotteries Yukon, stepped up and after years of talking, the project was underway.
"It's been a bit of a slow burn," said Berquist. "We had planned for a four-year building project and once funding was secured, we were put in a position to either accept [the money] and shorten the timeline, or decline the core funding."
The old log cabin was moved off the site and construction began in late 2020. The pandemic forced the festival into a hiatus, allowing staff and volunteers to focus on the new building.
The finished product is a two-story headquarters that includes a classroom and recording studio on the first floor, and expanded office space on the second. The project cost $684,000, but that doesn't include hours of donated labour or the price of installing recording equipment, once things get to that stage.
Jones said while the festival will continue to attract performers from outside the territory — and they will be welcome to use the studio while they're in town — the focus has always been on the community of Dawson.
"This is about creating a community hub," he said. "It's a piece of infrastructure that encourages people to stay in Dawson, encourages people to show their kids that there are paths to grow up as a creative artist, to get their names and their music out to the world."
Jones left the Yukon more than a decade ago, went to law school and now works in Toronto. But a piece of his heart will always be in Dawson.
"The way that DCMF was able to leverage the grant funding and the community investment and the volunteer time to create that space is because of the legacy it has built over more than 40 years. There's this track record of DCMF being one of the best-run and most beloved arts organizations in the nation. And that's not an exaggeration; that's something I hear whenever I tell people in Toronto where I used to work.
"It's everybody's legacy. Whoever worked for the festival over the years, the building is a tangible representation of that work."
