No. 5: 7-9 July 1995

Frenetic volumes long after 10pm until early in the morning, fruit, wine and bread in the shops until after midnight - a town in cheerful anarchy defying the Shop Hours Act and ‘Ordnungsamt’ for three days. City father Dr. Hartmut Franz was, from his Bayreuth colleagues, interested in how he would gain control against the furious bureaucratic regulations. Franz shrugged: I as Mayor ... would simply not know. The country needs such a mayor! thought Maria Kajzer in her review of the Dance and Folk Festival 1995 in Junge Welt. Since 1994, Dr. Franz was able to sleep a little calmer at the thought of the festival: it was the first time the festival had not fallen into the red numbers beyond the intended degree of the towns subsidies - to artistic success there slowly joined a solid financial ground. Said artistic success in 1995 had mainly three names: Country in Focus was South Africa (one year after the official end of apartheid and the first free elections), an oriental night in Heinepark with the mandolin player U Srinivas a Morgenraga that ended at around 5 clock in the morning, and a redesigned Magic Project: At the suggestion of program advisory board member Jo Meyer, the previous form of a spontaneous session was abandoned in favor of a rehearsed during the week before the festival concert. But there were also setbacks: A first attempt to integrate DJ’s into the festival failed - the audience was not yet ready for it. The German Folk Award was won by the Gruppe Grenzganger.

 

40 years after the first, installed by the SED propaganda event, Rudolstadt has built something that goes beyond the pure music. It smells like a cult. (Rainer Köster, Krieszeitung Syke)

Rudolstadt -. This is not just a festival, it is a way of life (Joachim F. Tornau, Göttinger Tageblatt).