page_title: OM Festival
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: OM Festival / History
caption_attribution_description: Picture of "OM Circle" in which people were holding hands and standing in a circle around Nessie the hydraulophone
context_page_description: The OM Festival was a community-based summer solstice festival that ran annually in southern Ontario from 1998 to 2004. The festival, organized by Sumkidz, primarily featured electronic music as well as dance, workshops, art, and other forms of acoustic music. It encouraged its attendees to participate by volunteering and promoted free expression and a no-spectator, leave-no-trace philosophy. At its peak, Om drew in just over 3000 participants from all over the world.
context_section_description: The event had multiple stages, a free community kitchen which produced thousands of meals throughout the weekend, a healing area, and an educational hub where people shared ideas and offered hundreds of workshops on everything from knitting to independent media.
  The annual gathering attracted people who enjoyed electronic music, considered themselves knowledge-seekers, environmentalists, spiritual travelers and other individuals who sought the enlightenment of the human spirit. The festival also supported many musicians (primarily electronic) and artists from across Canada and internationally as well as a wide range of collectives, offering them the opportunity and funds to produce and showcase their own work and skills to a large and diverse audience.
  Ideals espoused by the core group of festival organizers and participants were togetherness, freedom, volunteering and spiritual tolerance and exploration.
  Former festival attendees and Message Board members sometimes called themselves Omies.
  The final Om Festival occurred in 2004. It ended as a result of many factors. Provincial politics and false media surrounding the booming electronic music scene at the time made it increasingly difficult to produce outdoor gatherings of that magnitude. An unsustainable, volunteer-based organizational structure that required many coordinators to work, unpaid, on a nearly full-time basis for months at a time was another significant factor.
  The Festival was organized and maintained by Sumkidz (now known as "Suma"), a collective of artists and activists living in and around Toronto, Ontario.
caption: OM Circle at the Reunion 2007.  Visible also are data projection screen in background and hydraulophone in center of OM Circle.
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