Annual Report 2022-2023 Fiscal Year

 

Aurora Fiddle Society President's Report for 2022-2023 AGM 

The 2022-2023 fiddling season was a busy one for Aurora Fiddle Society (AFS). AFS was successful in continuing to promote fiddling in Yellowknife and the North Slave region of the NWT.

In July 2022 board members Teresa Watson and Robert O’Rourke chose to stay on as board members for the 2022-2023 year and Cailey Mercredi, Iona Strachan and Stephanie Whitecloud-Brass joined the board as treasurer, member at large and President respectively. Our president Stephanie Whitecloud-Brass was appointed to the territorial bench and had to remove herself from all boards she was on in the fall of 2022. AFS operated without a president for the remainder of the fiscal year. Iona left the board in the fall of 2022 as well.

We had a few AFS community members join us at meetings for over half of the fiscal year - Kathryn Oraas, Candace DeCoste and Nancy Vail. They’ve attended meetings with the board and assisted with volunteer hours and funding applications - a huge thank you to them!

Andrea Bettger remained Program Director for AFS for the 2022-2023 season. Andrea has contributed many hours to the administration, coordination and delivery of the AFS workshops, annual programming, fiddle dances and a trip to the South Slave with the Fiddle Cats. Without Andrea’s involvement in AFS our organization would not be as successful as we are currently. 

AFS held 5 weekend workshops as well as our annual fiddle workshop at Folk on the Rocks. 

• April 2022 - We had 22 registrants for this workshop and they were held by JJ Guy, Gordon Stobbe and Andrea Bettger.
• June 2022 - We had 8 registrants for this workshop - this was only open to our Fiddle Cats Performance Group fiddlers as an advanced class. At the end of this workshop the Fiddle Cats along with the instructor Daniel Gervais performed at the Longshadow Music Festival outside in Yellowknife.
• July 2022 - We held a free workshop for youth at Folk on the Rocks on the Sunday. We brought fiddles from our storage collection for first time fiddlers to use. By the end of the workshop we had them playing a full fiddle reel all together!
• September 2022 - We had 30 people register for this workshop! We flew in some amazing fiddle instructors Zavallennah Young, Linda Duford and Andrea Bettger.
• January 2023 - We had 32 people register and the workshops were put on by Stacey Read, Linda Duford and Andrea Bettger.
• March 2023 - We had 32 people register and the workshops were put on by JJ Guy, Gordon Stobbe and Andrea Bettger.

AFS held four fiddle dances this year, most of them we held in coordination with the Tree of Peace Friendship Centre. We found these events to be very popular in the community and when held in the same weekend we have instructors hired for workshops it helps us to reduce our travel/accommodation costs.

• September 24, December 3, January 20, February 19

Youth programs were very popular this year, Andrea added one section of first-time fiddlers to Wednesday night as the regular Friday night sessions were so full. We had 4 cubs classes and one cats class. The programs run from September to June. Each fiddling group was registered for the Yellowknife music festival in March and they all received certificates from their performances. Our entire AFS fiddling groups were invited to play at a few events this year:

• Ecology North Coffee House at Fred Henne part in June 2022
• Snow Castle in March 2023

The Fiddle Cats performance group had several chances this year to perform.

• May - Music Festival
• June - Longshadow Music Festival performance at Somba K’e park
• August - Farmer’s Market performance
• December - Baker’s Centre lunch with a bunch 
• February - Fort Providence and Hay River trip along with the Yellowknife Youth Choir. They held 3 concerts over this weekend road trip.

Fiddle jam nights continued this entire year and are held biweekly at Andrea’s space above Fiddle n Sticks. There was a change to make the first hour of james for beginner and intermediate players and the second hour for more advanced players. 

Our board, our community volunteers and our program director have had a really successful year of fiddling. We had some creative ideas that we were able to bring to fruition and managed to continue with regular programming and jams that the community is used to. We all are hopeful that the 2023-2024 fiddling season will continue to build on this post-covid momentum.
 

Prepared by Cailey Mercredi - Treasurer for Aurora Fiddle Society