By Ruth Melville

When the Covid pandemic hit in 2020, Sue Frisch and the rest of the Weekend in Norfolk (WIN) team were, like so many other art and cultural organizers, faced with a tough question: How can we keep going without an audience?

Since its inaugural session in 2016, WIN, a weekend-long festival designed to celebrate the best that Norfolk has to offer, had continued to grow every year, and Frisch didn’t want to lose that momentum. “We wanted to keep WIN in people’s minds,” she says.

After much discussion, the decision was made to go virtual. Programs—whether tours of sites of local interest, children’s workshops or musical performances—were available either live-streamed or on-demand on the festival’s website. John DeShazo, who had provided technical assistance for performers during previous WINs, was responsible for most of the filming, with additional work by Elias Olsen and Ann DeCerbo.

As the number of videos kept growing with successive pandemic-era winter and summer WINs, and as people continued to visit the WIN website to watch them, the WIN committee made sure that all the videos were easily available on a WIN YouTube channel.

There are now about 60 videos online, and they offer a wide sample of the highlights of Norfolk life: a tour of the stained glass windows in Battell Chapel; Doug McDevitt’s lessons on fly casting and fly tying; studio tours by local artists and craftspeople such as Adam Keller, Susan Aziz and Susan Rood; Spanish cooking classes with Martiña Gago; musical performances by Michael Cobb, Andrew Thompson or Jude Mead; tours of local farms; and making ice at the Norfolk Curling Club.

Most of the videos have had 30 to 50 viewings, but a couple have proved particularly popular, including one on making the Spanish dish Tortillas de Patatas (368 views) and the Battell Chapel tour (591 views).

Although the idea was born out of necessity, Frisch thinks that putting events on video offers advantages. Most obviously, it provides an opportunity for people to enjoy Norfolk even if they can’t make the journey to town. Also, she particularly likes the way the virtual studio tours not only present the artwork but also help reveal the artist as a person. “The viewer feels in touch with the artist and with their work. There is interaction here, even if virtual,” she says.

Asked about her favorites, Frisch finds it hard to pick, but she mentions a video of singer Angela Luna and her daughter, which has such a very different, more intimate feel from another video of Angela Luna, this time of her singing with with her band at Infinity Hall.

Frisch has also started putting other town videos up on WIN’s channel. One of the first is a tour of artist Tom Hlas’s studio that was originally done for the Norfolk Library, which itself has a YouTube channel.

Regardless with what happen with Covid in the future, Frisch is planning to continue to film and post WIN content online. “More and more I’m hoping to expand our coverage.”

With all these videos highlighting the best of Norfolk available on any computer, tablet or phone, Frisch says that now “every weekend is a weekend in Norfolk.”