Last October, students from Texas A&M University’s Performance in World Cultures class presented silent, black-and-white films as part of the inaugural LoreFest, an event to connect students to the community through folklore. The silent films featured live music accompaniment performed by students in A&M’s Electronic Composition class.
The event was hosted by the lecturers of the presenting classes, Matthew Campbell, assistant program director of Performance Studies at A&M, and William Klugh Connor III, lecturer in A&M’s School of Performance, Visualization, and Fine Arts, both of whom hold doctorates in ethnomusicology, the study of music’s effect on culture. The idea of LoreFest stemmed from a desire to prioritize a Halloween event for filmmakers and audiences. “It kind of ballooned out of there and we were like, ’Well, how are we going to ground these spooky stories? Why don’t we do local folklore?’ And then we ended up expanding that to local folklore stories here, but also from the students,” Campbell explained.
2023’s LoreFest was a three-night-long event, with the film festival bringing in about 200 guests on night two. Nights one and three featured storytelling and ghost walk events. “We were trying to give students a variety of creative outlets, basically,” Connor said. “Some of them are making puppets, some of them are doing performances of other types, theatrical performances or presentations with some sort of performative element.”
Why choose film as a storytelling medium? “We felt like film was just a good outlet,” Connor said. “Everybody’s got a phone, they can go film something – it gives them a chance to do something maybe they don’t have a chance to do in their major or in daily life.”
Photos by Kyle Heise
The filmmaking process was unexpected for A&M political science senior Patricia Lee. While her group initially thought they would be struggling to hit the time limit, they found they went way over. The workload was also a surprise. “It definitely takes a lot longer than you think, both the filming process and the editing process,” Lee said.
As for having a big audience to watch their films, A&M mechanical engineering senior Mitchell Stephenson said it was a first, “Especially for something we whipped up fairly quickly for a class. And having a hundred people behind us, or however many – it was interesting for sure.”
While the students created projects for a grade, Connor highlighted the desire for students to connect with their community. “It’s far less about the grade, it’s about the, ‘Get out there and learn about the community and interact.’ And a great way to interact is go create something with or about the community you’re in.”
As Connor and Campbell were both new to the area, they discovered Bryan, Texas, the city neighboring A&M’s home of College Station, as a unique, historically significant location rich with storytelling potential, especially the downtown area. “We both got here and our first question to each other was where’s the scene?” Campbell said. “What are people doing? Where’s the cool punk love? Where’s the goth night? And we found both of those things and we found a whole lot more and we just started talking to people.” After initial plans to host the LoreFest film festival at The Queen Theatre in Downtown Bryan fell through, the event pivoted to The Village, a café around the corner, with the help of owner Kristy Petty.
“We’re in Downtown Bryan, which is a cool little town and has a bunch of history, but we didn’t really know any of it when we got here,” Campbell said. “We heard that students never come to Bryan and we were like – why? It’s fantastic down here. One of our first inspirations for this was to get students into Downtown Bryan and have them interacting with the local community.”
Connor and Campbell have plans to continue LoreFest next year. “LoreFest will be back in October of 2024, bigger and better. We are already speaking with new vendors and businesses in Bryan/College Station, as well as faculty collaborators in the School of Performance, Visualization and Fine Arts, as well as other departments across campus,” Campbell said.
“There will definitely be community engagement,” Connor expanded. “We are expecting something different next time, but it will be the same theme and possibly bigger.”
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