Chapter 2: Radio as Resonance Chamber

Enter: Lotus

Based in Bloomington, Indiana, the non-profit Lotus Education and Arts Foundation offers a mission statement on its website in bold print: “Our mission is to create opportunities to experience, celebrate, and explore the diversity of the world’s cultures, through music and the arts.” In particular, the site continues, the foundation’s annual World Music and Arts Festival, first held in 1994, is “one of the oldest world music festivals in the U.S. and the only festival of its kind in the state of Indiana” (Lotus, n.d.). It has apparently hosted artists from over 120 countries over the last three decades, including many acts local to Bloomington, an inclusion that theoretically blurs imagined lines between local and global.

Figure 2.14: A map of the primary performance venues of the 2016 Lotus Festival. Map created in uMap. Interactive version at companion webpage.

Taking place in downtown Bloomington over four days in late September, a typical Lotus Festival weekend includes ticketed performances on outdoor stages set up for the event on blocked-off streets and inside churches and a local theater, free daytime workshops and demonstrations in parks or other public spaces, and free visual arts exhibits in various outdoor spaces; major venues of the 2016 festival are mapped out in Figure 2.14. Less visible but as constant a part of the festival’s programming is its partnership with WFHB, culminating in each year’s installments of the Lotus Live series.

Every year, Lotus Live features live sessions with festival artists, typically in anticipation of their performances at the festival. The performances take place at and are broadcast from either WFHB’s downtown studios (adjacent to one of the usual Lotus tents) or from another space in town (usually a studio but occasionally a public space open to a live, in-person audience) engineered to feed directly to the WFHB studios, broadcasting live to a six-county terrestrial radius and to the station’s online stream. A small contingent of WFHB staff and volunteers, usually including the paid music or program director, produce the sessions in cooperation with Lotus Foundation staff, beginning planning several months in advance to ensure all technical setup goes as smoothly as possible on the day of the live session while also working around the artists’ busy weekend schedules. The series offers audience members in the six-county listening area a free preview of the Festival’s lineup in twenty-minute segments that typically include two to three live songs interspersed with short interview segments during which a host, one of WFHB’s regular on-air programmers, speaks with the artists about various topics typically focusing on their personal and musical backgrounds, styles, and upcoming works. The global focus of Lotus often lends itself particularly well to questions about how the artists position themselves regarding genre and tradition. The sessions are later posted in full on the WFHB website with web copy largely borrowed from the Lotus website’s artist biographies plus session song listings when available (not all hosts follow the practice of asking artists to confirm song titles before or after the sessions, and in some cases, the performances do not have specific names) and personnel credits. Between 2011 and 2019, WFHB personnel also selected a number of archived Lotus Live tracks every year for compilation CDs given out as premiums to donors during the station’s fall fund drives. I have been involved as a host and, at times, associate producer of these sessions since 2014.

In his monograph on community media, which features a chapter on WFHB in the late 1990s and early 2000s, media scholar Kevin Howley lists the presence of Lotus Festival artists on the station’s airwaves before the formalization of the Lotus Live series (and in some cases before the station even had a website) as one of many ways in which WFHB works toward the goals explicitly named in its mission statement, which I reiterate: WFHB exists to provide an open forum for the exchange and discussion of ideas and issues, and to celebrate and increase the local cultural diversity. In Howley’s assessment, the musical range of WFHB “appeals to audiophiles of every race, creed, and color… [and] provides a vibrant sound alternative to the Bloomington community” (2005, 111) compared to commercial and public stations, with Lotus sessions clearly playing into some notion of “cultural diversity.” Howley questions how much the local community can truly be said to shape WFHB’s content; as Guo has modeled in her research, there is likely a gap between the community WFHB aims to serve and its actual listening audience. I would argue, however, that WFHB’s live performance series are among the station’s most community-connected programming, relevant as they are to more visible local events. Howley concurs:

In the weeks leading up to the Lotus Festival, WFHB’s program schedule prominently features visiting artists. In addition to helping promote, organize, and staff the Lotus Festival, WFHB music programmers and volunteers welcome Lotus performers to the Firehouse Studios for on-air interviews and live performances…. Without the Lotus Festival, and WFHB’s support for this much-anticipated yearly event, it is unlikely that very many international artists of this caliber would ever visit Bloomington, Indiana. (ibid., 116)

Though speculative, I highlight Howley’s comment here because it makes overt a narrative implicit in the continuing effort put into both the Lotus Festival and Lotus Live: that each plays an important role in shaping an imaginary of Bloomington, Indiana as having a place, if a temporary one, for artists from far outside of it. In the next section, I describe and analyze one particular session from 2016, a year in which I was not physically present in Bloomington for Lotus Festival and so was not involved in Lotus Live.

Figure 2.15: A map showing the distance between Blockhouse Studios and downtown Bloomington. Map created in uMap. Interactive version at companion webpage.