Lorefest Mission
Lorefest seeks to unite Bryan-College Station’s diverse cultural communities in the creative preservation and expansion of local folklore. Lorefest, our annual, public-facing festival, is a unique opportunity for Texas A&M students and scholars, local artists and business owners, family and friends, to explore and expand theirs and their neighbors’ cultural heritage through intercultural and multimedia storytelling in a variety of mediums and venues.
Furthermore, Lorefest seeks to...
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Educate: Through project-based courses, community workshops by visiting artists (e.g. theater directors, filmmakers, puppeteers, effects artists, etc.), arts fairs, and academic symposiums, we provide students and local community members with the tools to engage in public scholarship and self-discovery. Learning about one’s home, discovering the wide-range of diverse elements that thrive in Bryan-College Station and the greater Brazos Valley region is vital to maintaining a living, growing Texan culture.
Preserve and Revitalize: Gathering folklore in all its forms, and providing future access to the local communities from which it arose through storage, digitization, and exhibition is essential to preserving the cultural heritage of Bryan-College Station. Furthermore, local/glocal cultures will be invigorated through new additions and creative reinterpretations of folkloric art and oral histories created by students and local artisans.
Create Performing and Visual Art: Festival performances offer a fantastic way to enlighten communities about the diverse cultures in their own backyard. At the same time, concerts, readings, and storytelling sessions provide opportunities for community members to express themselves and educate their peers through the language of cultural heritage, providing spaces for social commentary while forming (and strengthening) shared, cultural roots.
Bolster Communities and Local Business: Creating bridges between local communities allows all parties to help each other thrive. Lorefest wholeheartedly supports this effort by bringing together populations in College Station and Downtown Bryan, as well as artists, culture bearers, and residents from surrounding communities in central Texas and beyond.
Entertain: Lorefest, as well as being educational, empowering, expressive, and business-boosting, is also down-right fun!
The Lorefest Story
When Drs. Campbell and Connor first moved to College Station, they sort out Halloween events, outlets to discover local folktales, and generally sought out the local "scene" that highlighted the creative culture of the Bryan-College Station area. Strangely, most people they asked did not seem to think there was anything of the sort to be found. Many of their students had not even travelled from College Station to Bryan, less than 5 miles away and basically the same town as the one in which they lived and studied.
They decided to do something about this situation. First of all there was plenty of cultural things happening in the area, but there did not seem to be enough communication or publicity about these aspects of the local area - people effectively did not know things outside their immediate circles existed! Furthermore, the area is rich with folklore, spooky tales, and a plethora of communities whose culture shape Bryan and College Station.
The mission, then, became how to bring all this together and give the communities and students a means to engage with each other, produce creative works, and bridge the towns, business, people, and cultures that are BCS. Thus Lorefest was born!
Students from various classes (initially in the Performance Studies and Music classes) at Texas A&M University were invited to research local folklore and use that research to present something creative - a reinterpretation, a new version of these stories, something visual, aural, textual, dramatic - anything that they wanted that would respectfully engage with and educate both the community and students via the local/glocal folklore.
To date, Lorefest has seen a film festival, puppet performances and walkabouts, "campfire" style storytelling, live music, radio dramas and podcasts, fashion design, musical instrument construction and performances, dance, theatre, and wrestling, all inspired by local and glocal Bryan-College Station folklore. The shows and presentations are made available free to the public and take place at the end of October. Furthermore, there is also an annual Lorefest Folklore Conference that offers an academic and performative outlet for those who want to take the research related to local folklore to a traditional scholarly setting. Additionally, research gathered by the students is currently being added to a Lorefest database that will be fully searchable and made available to the public soon. The first full engagement with the new database will result in a folktale book of local BCS stories curated from tales in the Lorefest collection, which will be published in time for Lorefest 2026.
Meet The Team
Dr. Matthew A. Cambpell
Organizer
Dr. William Klugh Connor III
Organizer
Dr. Joseph Lopez
Organizer