A look back to the birth of the city’s longest-running performing arts festival takes us to Feb. 26, 1930, when a public meeting was called to discuss the feasibility of hosting a musical festival in Kamloops. Fifty people representing most societies/associations of Kamloops attended the meeting and so fruitful was the discussion that by the meeting’s end a motion had passed to establish a musical festival association and a 14-member ways-and-means committee formed to start planning a 1931 festival.
Hosting its inaugural festival on May 12, 1931 in the Kamloops High School auditorium, the YCMF drew 300 musicians from seven communities within the Yale-Cariboo district, confirming the region’s hearty appetite for an annual music festival to call its own. Securing official society status in 1932, the YCMF’s first official Festival was held in the spring of 1933, drawing 900 amateur performers.
Financial struggles encountered with the 1938 festival forced organizers to suspend the festival for a year. Unbeknownst to all, a world war would thrust the festival into a decade-long dormancy.
In 1947, the Local Council of Women took on the arduous task of reviving the festival and with tiresome efforts, resurrected the festival in the spring of 1948. Since then the festival has steadily grown.
Much has changed since the festival’s modest beginnings. While most festivals of the early years were affairs of music, the YCMF was quick to complement music with elocution and dance. And keep things contemporary by continually adding new classes like bagpipes, accordion, mouth organ, pop organ and highland dancing. To more accurately reflect the non-musical categories, the festival was renamed the Kamloops Festival of the Performing Arts in 1982.
Since its creation almost nine decades ago, 200,000+ aspiring artists have used the festival as a platform to nurture their craft—a platform that would not exist without the support of a herculean team of volunteers, teachers, merchants, service clubs and civic leaders. As articulated by school inspector McArthur at the 1950 festival: “Although Kamloops has many organizations which do a great deal for the community and district, there are not any with an influence so widespread as the festival.”
The not-for-profit KFPA has played a pivotal role in the region’s cultural development and looks forward to supporting the next generation of artists.