How to Start a Festival

I am often in conversations about how to find the best way to bring amazing people together. Sooner or later we end up with us talking about festivals.

Festivals are these “temporary autonomous zones” where music, art, and culture are at the very center of our shared experience. It is where we get to experiment with different ways of being together.

They elicit the transcendent, the joyful, the effervescent, and the collective.

Artists grace us with the courage and the gift of their authentic expression. Showing us the best of what we can become.

Some say that music is what makes us human. And festivals are the spaces where we get to be more human together.

Here is a story about a festival. About the creation of the legendary Caribbean Music Festival in Cartagena Colombia.

Enjoy this conversation with my friend Paco de Onís, Executive Director and Executive Producer of Skylight. One of my favorite clients, together we design the SolidariLabs series that I get to facilitate throughout Latin America.

It was Paco who created the Caribbean Music Festival of Cartagena. An annual event that for twelve years touched and moved the lives of thousands by bringing together the vibrant diversity of what is Caribbean music.

This is the story of how he made that happen.

If you follow my work, if you are into the Evolutionary Leadership Workshop, if I have coached you or your organization’s Leadership Team, if you have been part of something I have facilitated, you know that much of my work is about taking an idea out of your head and into the world. My work is about making things happen, it is about making dreams real.

I am moved by stories of people who know how to do just that. Paco is one them. One of us.

I am Caribeño. I think of the Caribbean as the Heart of Africa outside of Africa. People have stretched the cultural idea of the Caribbean beyond the Caribbean basin and all the way from Salvador, in the Northeast of Brazil, to the City of New Orleans, in the Gulf of Mexico.

Our cultural footprint, and the reverberations of our musical sound, are far greater than should be proportional given our landmass and population.

Is there anyone among you who does not think Bob Marley was a Prophet?

I feel like the very idea of myself is woven with the sounds of the Fania All-Stars, from Hector Lavoe, to Cheo Feliciano and Celia Cruz. In my own generation, the romance of my teenage heart was forged by the music of Gilberto Santa Rosa. I still sing his songs to Tuesday, the love of my life, today.

These days I still come alive as the whole world moves, shakes and dances to the syncopated rhythms of reggaeton. I am fed from Tego Calderon to Don Omar to Residente, Bad Bunny and Anuel AA.

Something remarkable happens in these waters.

And Paco was able to gather it. Bring it together. And give it back to us all.

Listen to his story, and make sure you find our songs! (Below in the notes section)

Abrazos,

Gibrán