Red Deer Festival of the Performing Arts

Every spring, several thousand performances move through Red Deer's churches, school halls and theatre spaces as part of one of the longest-running competitive arts festivals in Alberta. Entrants range from six-year-olds playing their first graded piano piece to adult choirs and senior speech-arts competitors, across disciplines including piano, strings, voice, band, choral, speech, drama and dance.

The competitive framing is really an educational one. Each performance is heard by an adjudicator brought in from outside the region, who gives written comments and then works with the performer in front of the audience - a short public lesson that is often more valuable than the mark. Recommendations from the festival feed into provincial-level competition, but the day-to-day purpose is coaching.

For the region's music teachers, school programmes and community choirs, the festival is the fixed point in the calendar that everything is prepared toward. It is also entirely open to the public: sessions are free or nearly free to attend, and dropping into a morning of strings or speech is one of the least-known good ways to spend a spring day in Red Deer.