I’m Cem Zafir, the founder, back in 2000, of Zula Presents, organizing concerts, series, tours and festivals for nearly a decade in Vancouver and the islands in BC. Since June 2014, Zula’s main project has been Hamilton’s Something Else! Festival of Creative Music, several back-to-back days of double-bills with contemporary jazz artists, improvisers, sound artists and avant-pop performers. This year Zula added an ongoing series “Watch It Burn,” pairing film, and live performance, to our planned activities, and a diversified June festival lineup.
Since COVID-19 hit, we still haven’t officially postponed or cancelled the festival, but so far, the “Watch It Burn” series dates for March 15, April 24, and planned festival dates June 18-21, 2020 are the only things we had to let go, but just the dates, not the artists! Everything is postponed indefinitely. We hope to honour these agreements once on the other side, with 25-some acts, who were going to play our festival and series. We will postpone the festival indefinitely and hope to reschedule it for fall sometime. If the situation won’t allow by year end, then we would skip/ cancel 2020 festival.
Hopefully we will follow through on all of them within a year or so.
Not much else I can do! We are mostly focusing on going back to live, in-the-moment presentation. We will release some festival and series archival videos on our websites. We may have interviews streamed along with some solo performances to tide audiences over, but we’re not excited about such possibilities.
As for how people reading this can stay in touch with what we are doing and planning, our websites and facebook page will be updated as things progress: somethingelsefestival.com, zulapresents.org and @zulapresents.
