There’s an old saying that “When the cannons speak, the muses are silent”. We believe in the opposite, that when the cannons speak, the muses are heard. The focus of JetLAG 2022 was an anti-war message and a fundraiser, although we wished and hoped that Russia’s aggression in Ukraine would stop by the time the festival came around. We know that even once this war is over, a more continuous, global and vicious circle of war, violence, repressions, hatred, partitioning, division and displacement, will be still ongoing as it has always been. We therefore saw it as a time to contemplate the roots of a great tradition of open-air music festivals countering this evil with the wisdom, beauty and boldness of the liberal and transformational arts, striving for freedom, peace and justice, for a better world to come. Symbolically enough, JetLAG’s site is located near Woodstock, where one of the most memorable and iconic festivals relevant to this great tradition has taken place once upon a time. The peaceworker and freedom-seeker spirit of such festivals, utterly American, is also very international. It has similar and different channels all over the world. We share the legacy of the Soviet Joan Baezes and Bob Dylans, the “bardic (folk) song” movement with its underground open-air forest “slyoty” (gatherings), the clandestine productions, and other social and cultural resistance practices from direct protests to internal and external emigration. As a diaspora-initiated festival of three generations, we recognize immigration, displacement and exile as our shared destiny, which is also, in fact, an American destiny. So, we dedicated JetLAG-2022 to supporting Ukrainian aid efforts. Our goal was to collect 50K from ticket sales profit, merchandise sales and donations and to donate it to the aid efforts. We raised $33,563.00. Wow. Thank you, from the bottom of our hearts.
