RALEIGH -- With all the downtown festivals lately, it would be easy for SPARKcon to get lost in the flurry.
But SPARKcon, which this week returns for the fifth time, has never been like other downtown celebrations. From the beginning it has tried to be a reflection of the latest and most creative thinking in Raleigh - a decentralized, intentionally undefined experiment in "what if."
This fifth version finds it running with new momentum, expanding in sometimes surprising ways beyond what its original organizers imagined. "The spark we were hoping would happen has," said Aly Kalifa, one of the original forces behind SPARKcon.
The festival runs Thursday through Sunday and will include 175 events with 1,200 artists, musicians, designers, dancers - you name it. From a few hundred people who attended the first time around, the festival grew last year to attract more than 30,000.
There will be music, fashion, poetry, film, theater, a circus and more, centered this year on Fayetteville Street, some side streets, Lichtin Plaza in front of the Progress Energy Center, and City Plaza. In fact, the idea for City Plaza - the gathering point at the south end of Fayetteville Street - came out of the original SPARKcon's brainstorming sessions.
The event has always been as much about ideas as fun.
Although SPARKcon has maintained its free-wheeling nature, this year the nonprofit Visual Art Exchange added a little more structure by helping participants. The gallery and artists' exchange became a clearinghouse to help those who wanted to participate in SPARKcon learn how to raise money, to help with paperwork, answer questions and to offer encouragement.
Sarah Powers, executive director of Visual Art Exchange, says about $150,000 will be spent pulling off this year's festival, about half of which in in-kind contributions. About 85 businesses are sponsors. Fundraising is up about 20 percent, Kalifa said.
Bobbleheads at work
There is a streamlined organization to the operation. Would-be participants, working with designated organizers, bring their ideas to five key players, who call themselves the "bobbleheads."
"They're a cross between an advisory committee and enablers," said Powers, who is one of the bobbleheads. "We don't want to say no to ideas. We want to give people the support they need. Our heads bob and we say, 'OK, cool. How are we going to make that happen.'"
Those who find the support to pull off their dreams become part of the festival.
The mission remains to keep SPARKcon from being one uniform, easily identifiable thing. "We know there's going to be fashion, there's going to be music, design - it's what happens in between. We never know what we're going to have," Powers said.
Sometimes the creativity sparks outside the festival's formal boundaries altogether.
"Last year we had a flash mob posing as paparazzi," Kalifa said. "We didn't know anything about it. To me, that's like the best compliment we can get."
Keeping it going
Each year's festival also provides a network of contacts for like-minded people to use year-round.
Kalifa said a fashion magazine recently came to Raleigh and asked for contacts, which were readily on hand. In fact, the network created by SPARKcon fans into other cultural events in the Triangle throughout the year.
That makes the four-day extravaganza far more than just a gathering of tents and fanfare, organizers say.
"I'm going to push for that," Powers said. "How do we keep this engine going? How do we keep these connections alive?"
