Salt Lake's Living Tradition Festival

Linking up with Friday My Town Shootout
and Weekend Reflections

The Living Traditions Fest has been running now for 29 years. Craig, one of my folk dance friends, was instrumental in starting. It is always held at "City and County Building" block in downtown Salt Lake and is free.

This is the north side of the City and County Building, built in 1894 by the free masons. It was also the original camp site of the Mormon pioneers in 1847. They named it Washington Square after George Washington.

This is a view of the west side of the building which has an identical openings on each side of the building.

A Chinese dance troupe waiting on the side for their turn to perform.

 These ladies are also from the Chinese dance troupe and were sitting in the audience. They gracious smiled as I asked them if I could take a picture. I had missed their performance.

So graceful with ornate hair dressing,  I loved this Chinese dance.

I tried to get a close up of the hair design but got a little too much light in my shot.

Every hour there were at least four different performing groups, one on each side of the enormous City and County Building.

I was not able to be there for all the performances but some of them were Native American Music and Dance, Chili, Burmese, Bosnian, Lebanese, Basque, Turkish, Hopi, Mexican, Thia, Irish, Scandinavian, and the list goes on and on. It is a three day event.

One of the many art booths that interested me this year was Japanese origami of which the artist had made some tiny birds into earrings.  I am the earring queen - it is always the item that draws me in.

There must have been 30 different food booths from every country you can name.

I danced with a group of folk dancers for 30 years - we met once a week at the Student Union Building at the University of Utah. We danced a lot of balkan line dances, Turkish, Romanian, Bulgarian but also Polish, Russian, and French Canadian.