After a two-year hiatus due to the pandemic, the Berkshire Mountains Faerie Festival returned to Adams, MA.
Costumes, elf ears, fairy wings, wizard robes, and broomsticks were all on display at the event, which happened on Saturday, June 18, 2022. This year’s Festival was held in honor of director and artist Phil Sellers, who unexpectedly passed away in 2020.
Producer Dave Fraser takes us there in this Digital Exclusive.
Read the full transcript:
Singers: ♫ They all warned me what would wait for me… ♫
Deirdre Sullivan, Berkshire Mountains Faerie Festival: So, the Berkshire Mountains Festival was started in 2016 with the idea of celebrating the arts, celebrating whimsy. Celebrating this idea of the fairies coming down from the mountains to help entrepreneurism in the area, and also to celebrate the earth, to celebrate nature and our natural beauty that we never take for granted.
Deirdre Sullivan: Look at you beautiful costumes!
Deirdre Sullivan: I’m the Director of the Berkshire Mountains Faerie Festival this year, and I play the part of the Faerie Queen and have every year since the festival started.
The idea was a kind of whimsical sense of…all our cares and woes and just letting those go and going back to fantasy and fairy tales and things that the people, no matter where they are from — in the world, have stories and lore that they — they look into that which can’t be seen: the the beauty of the imagination.
The Faerie Village is set up over behind me in that corner. And the idea is that the children make their own faerie houses. We don’t have a prototype, “This is a faerie house.”
So, children sometimes start using these materials like slate and rocks and sand and build a little faerie house and somebody else will come along and add to the faerie house later.
It really is about people dressing up, doing different things. Some people have said it’s kind of like a little bit of steampunk meets Renaissance, Medieval. We have adults dressed up, we have kids dressed up.
So, it’s it’s really about celebrating the arts, creativity, and the imagination.
