PORT ANGELES — Greeta Bell was a homesteader in Alberta, Canada, who made art part of daily life. She taught her children to cook, sew and create — all the way down to her great-granddaughter, who spent her girlhood in Seattle.The two would spend weekends working on projects at home. The girl got an education from her great-grandmother, and from the Seattle arts scene flowering around her. The Northwest Folklife Festival, a celebration of the people, music and art from near and far, began when the girl was a teenager. This girl learned to play the guitar at a recreation center near her home. She sang in the choir through junior high and high school. Then, after college, she moved to Port Angeles, to bring up her daughter. It was 1979 when Nancy Vivolo arrived on the North Olympic Peninsula. She found seasonal work in Olympic National Park, and even brought her guitar up to the Hurricane Ridge visitor center, where she would sing and play.A single mother, she needed stabler work, and found it at United Parcel Service, then Federal Express, then Olympic Van Tours, the predecessor to the Dungeness Line bus company.By the time Vivolo’s daughter Jessica was a teenager, she was wont to say what many small-town teens have said. “There is nothing to do here.”Except both mother and child discovered something else.There is a live music scene here, one that could blossom much more with some promotion.“There are things to do. But you have to be one of the ones to make it happen,” says Vivolo, a veteran volunteer who has been helping to make the Juan de Fuca Festival of the Arts happen for 20 years now.In 1994, festival founder Karen Hanan invited Vivolo — and their kindred spirits — to create the four-day event from the ground up. And Vivolo not only played her music at that first festival, but also became a kind of set dresser and designer. Until this year, Vivolo’s 24 hand-crafted banners greeted festival-goers. These signs symbolized the festival’s home-grown style: Vivolo photocopied the festival logo, then enlarged it, over and over, to make a paper pattern. Then she used those copies to make forms out of sub-flooring foam. She dipped those in paint and used them to stamp the logo onto the white banners.Her great-grandmother Bell would have been proud.Two decades later, the Juan de Fuca Festival is part of the Juan de Fuca Foundation of the Arts, with a batch of brand-new, professionally made banners. Vivolo and crew kept that local, though, using Bailey Signs and Graphics of Port Angeles and a logo by graphic designer Laurel Black.Now, Vivolo is the 2012-2013 president of the foundation’s board of directors — still a volunteer — and enthralled with this year’s Juan de Fuca Festival.The event, based as always at the Vern Burton Community Center at Fourth and Peabody streets, is what Vivolo and her compatriots hoped for: a pageant of music from across the Olympic Peninsula and around the planet. It coincides with the Northwest Folklife Festival in Seattle and books some of the same acts, but on more accessible stages. The Juan de Fuca Festival has a reputation across North America, Vivolo says, for being a music showcase — and a place where everybody gets to dance.The band Tangoheart, led by bandoneon player Bertram Levy of Port Townsend, will play at 7:15 tonight at the Elks Naval Lodge ballroom, 131 E. First St., and “I will probably be out on the dance floor,” Vivolo predicted. Also an avid swing and contra dancer, she learned the tango from Port Angeles teachers Becky Hall and Cliff Coulter.Vivolo also is a fan of the festival’s After Hours shows, those 10:30 p.m. performances in downtown venues. Tonight, the final night of this festival’s After Hours lineup, brings bluesman David Jacobs-Strain to the Next Door Gastropub; comedian Damonde Tschritter to Bella Italia and The Sam Chase band to Bar N9ne.Jacobs-Strain is one of the artists who proved to be a classic Juan de Fuca Festival discovery. He first wowed festival audiences with a clear voice and fierce guitar a few years ago, and is back this time with a band, to play Next Door tonight and the main festival stage at the Vern Burton at 2:45 p.m. Monday.Yet another artist, Scott Cook of Edmonton, Alberta, is a troubadour Vivolo wanted to bring to town last year. She pestered Juan de Fuca Foundation Executive Director Dan Maguire about him until Cook was booked. He turned out to be a big hit, and is back, with an acoustic trio, to play the Elks stage at 3 p.m. today.Watching Cook “was like an out-of-body experience,” Vivolo recalls. This, she remembers thinking, is what the festival is about.Hanan, who produced seven Juan de Fuca Festivals before stepping down to run the nonprofit Arts Northwest, said Vivolo hasn’t changed much in 20 years.“She is relentlessly cheerful,” Hanan says. She’s also rock-solid when it comes to getting things done. Vivolo has long been the Juan de Fuca Festival’s venue setup-and-decorations maven, marshaling those banners, backdrops and other moving parts.“That is a monster job,” adds Maguire. He notes that Vivolo also organizes volunteers for the Juan de Fuca Foundation Season Concerts, performances that run July through April in Port Angeles. Many volunteers do something for a few years and move on, Maguire says, but Vivolo shows every bit as much passion for the festival as she ever has.What she doesn’t have is a lot of time on her hands. Vivolo has worked at Clallam Transit for nearly 18 years, starting out as a bus driver and working her way up to operations supervisor.Like Vivolo’s own daughter Jessica, who now lives with her own family in Albany, Ore., many Port Angeles kids grew up with the Juan de Fuca Festival of the Arts. Some of those young people, Vivolo is proud to say, are on the festival stages this weekend.The Stevens Middle School Jazz Band — in which Jessica played flute — plays the main stage each year. Vivolo fondly remembers band leader Ed Donahue’s ability with his students. “Kids love music when they learn it from him,” she says. “There are so many people here who are passionate about what they do.” Also at this year’s festival, fiddle virtuoso Erin Hennessey, 18, will play alongside David Rivers, a 20-something guitarist. Both grew up in Port Angeles. The duo will step onto the Chamber Stage, aka the Port Angeles City Council chambers, at 1 p.m. Monday. Rivers, who returned to his home town after attending Boston’s Berklee College of Music, will then do a 2 p.m. set on the Chamber Stage with a band called the Pillars of Power. The Pillars also include guitarist-singer-songwriter Paul Chasman and bassist Hayden Pomeroy, a 2011 graduate of Port Angeles High School.Vivolo emphasizes that she is one of scores of volunteers who put on the festival. The Juan de Fuca Foundation has just two staff people: Maguire and education coordinator-office manager Carol Pope. And this summer, the staff, board members and other volunteers will also produce the Discovery Arts Camps at Jefferson Elementary School in Port Angeles, and begin planning for a season of concerts in the fall and winter.This weekend, though, all of that can wait.“I am so in the moment,” Vivolo says.One of her favorite sights, she adds, is the face of someone who is utterly immersed in the music.As for Vivolo, she’s true to her name — Italian for full of life — through the four-day cavalcade.“I am digging every second of it,” she says.
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