After two years online, having St. Albert Culture Days return to in-person events feels like cause for celebration.  

But there was a silver lining to the past few online-only years, Maria Laycock and Dawn Kawahara note: they’ve learned that St. Albert artists have a wider reach than they’d previously imagined. 

“We didn't really realize that not only would we be connecting with our local citizens, but we'd be connecting with the world and kind of showing St. Albert to people,” Laycock notes, of taking their programming online. “We had a lot of people from America, the UK, Australia of all places—these crazy time zones connecting with us, participating or watching whatever programs we were offering.”  

Laycock and Kawahara are the co-chairs of St. Albert Cultivates The Arts Society (SACTAS) which runs the local branch of Culture Days, part of a wider initiative to celebrate local arts and culture across Canada. And the artists, Laycock notes, are eager to be gathering once again. 

“They're [asking], can we do more?” Laycock laughs. “They're just super excited and ready to be engaged and just get back at it.”  

Most of this year’s Culture Days will be in person, with some 40 events, showcases, and workshops being offered, covering a rich array of disciplines from writing workshops to belly dance tutorials to ukulele classes and more. But Culture Days will still feature a number of online options, to maximize reach both within and beyond St. Albert. 

“[The online festivals] really helped us realize that there are those people, even within our community who don't have accessibility,” Laycock notes. “They need to be able to use modern technology to access some of these amazing workshops that people are able to offer.” 

St. Albert Culture Days itself is run by artists—Kawahara is a photographer and writer, and Laycock formerly ran a children’s art studio—and it’s their own connections to the local community that help program Culture Days each year. The nine committee members all have varied artistic backgrounds, Kawahara notes, which helps them find voices to feature. 

“Everybody's got a different forte,” she says, of the committee. “We've got somebody that's in dance, we've got people that are painters, we've got writers, photographers—pretty much everything. A lot of what we do just gets fanned out from those people. And then we can draw in others that are within those realms.” 

In addition to the workshops, SACTAS is partnering with a variety of organizations in St. Albert, including Connecting Generations, which makes opportunities between seniors and youth in the community—a number of Culture Days workshops will seek to do just that.  

Everything at Culture Days is free, too. (They just ask that you register.) The hope is to have as few barriers as possible for anyone interested in getting involved with arts, whether they’re looking to dabble in an artform they’ve never tried before, or sharpen existing skills. 

“If they're coming to take a class, it's not something that they financially have to worry about,” Laycock notes. “Maybe you don't want to commit for five or six weeks, ‘cause you've never done it before. So here you can try something brand new, or something that you're picking up again, then decide from there.”  

“For highlighting our St. Albert artists, it just shows that you don't have to be in the big cities to be able to create something wonderful,” Kawahara adds. “It's so accessible because we've got so many wonderful people here that can show us how to do these things and let our imaginations fly.” 

By: Paul Blinov

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