LAFAYETTE, La (KLFY) – Festival International de Louisiane organizers are making progress as they prepare for the huge music festival that attracts hundreds of thousands right here to the Hub City.
You may remember, just recently, organizers were faced with the issue of rounding up enough sponsors for this year’s festival, but they’ve overcome adversity and the future is looking bright for the 31st annual festival.
Friday morning, organizers announced the lineup for the festival which features performers from at least 18 different countries.
“The community really stepped up and our situation is a whole lot different now then it was two months ago,” said festival Executive Director, Scott Feehan.
After last year’s event, the festival lost one major sponsor and others were in limbo.
“With the oil crunch and the economy things looked really, really bad pretty quick this year,” said Feehan.
Feehan says they began searching for new sponsors, but had trouble at first.
“We weren’t sure what was going to happen,” said Feehan. “We spent about six months trying to figure that out, and that’s when some of the decisions were made to make some adjustments on the stages.”
It later came out that some festival stages would have to be cut. Although that’s still the case, Feehan says they won’t take as hard of a hit as they expected.
“The heritage stage is still gone, but we took that program and distributed it out to some of the other stages,” said Feehan.
Feehan credits the community for stepping up when they fell on hard times.
“When the stories hit we got a lot of phone calls,” said Feehan. “Some of them were existing supporters that stepped up to a bigger degree and some of them were new supporters.”
To their surprise four new sponsors jumped on board to help.
“We had about a $335,000 differential that we had to make up, so we’re not completely out of the woods yet, but we do at least have the corporate piece for the most part taken care of,” said Feehan.
Feehan says this isn’t the first time things have been rocky for the festival.
Karen Juneau says she attends the festival every year and couldn’t imagine not having it.
“Everybody plans for that (the festival), everybody looks forward to having a free festival right here in Lafayette,” said Juneau. “It makes us that big city, but we’re still that family-oriented, family-friendly town.”
Feehan says they still have another section of the lineup that will include theater and the arts–which will be released in the next few weeks.
Festival International will run from April 26-30.
