New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Forests think in decades, not hours. Beloved Festival (Aug 10-13 in Tidewater, OR), the annual gathering uniting eclectic music and ecstatic experience, thinks similarly, building community and building soil in the middle of the boreal rainforests of Tidewater, Oregon. Every year, the festival seeks out artists and movement teachers from around the world whose work speaks across boundaries, who can bridge broad divides yet keep an incisive edge. It hosts art that reveals all we have to learn from one another, in a space that mixes playfulness and thoughtfulness.
This first phase of this year's lineup announcement includes Angelique Kidjo and Femi Kuti, Trio Da Kali, Innov Gnawwa, Novalima, El Búho, Chancha Vía Circuito, Plantrae, and Kaleema.
Beloved also hosts nationally and internationally renowned yoga teachers and other revered teachers of other spiritual disciplines and practices. They conduct workshops and sessions in stunning custom tents with a top-notch production and live music or DJ sets. All serves to elevate and expand, to heal and connect via the spirit.
Yet exploration of spiritual heights is insufficient on its own. For Beloved and the community it has fostered over more than ten years have realized they need to address the soul, the deeper core of each person must be in contact with the depths of the struggles of humanity. "In its earlier years, Beloved focused explicitly on spirit, on ecstacy. However, as the festival has matured, it has been asked to be made whole and to get in touch with soul," Rasenick says. "We're choosing to go deeper, to be willing to have difficult conversations and to be engaged in the world.
Spirit may not talk about rape or about gender and sexual violence. There is a spiritual plane where white supremacy and the painful inequities of a racist country get overlooked; and to make things whole in the world or in our own lives, we have to be in touch with soul, and to face the pain in the world.."
The festival stops programming at the very height of the excitement to address some of these issues of power and privilege, striving to create a safer space for people of all backgrounds. It asks the audience what it can do to foster more diversity and inclusion. It offers explicit food for thought about consent and white supremacy, hoping to help festival goers connect their personal experiences to the greater conversation on social justice and social justice movements."Our festival has always been an experiment," adds Rasenick, who first created Beloved to unite the global music and electronic dance music communities. "It's a spiritual experiment and if some people feel they can't participate fully, then the experiment fails. We want everyone involved. That, for us, is a successful festival."
