Volunteers: Front Of House

Front of House is a large team of volunteers who steward each of the performance venues, checking tickets, guiding Festival-goers to their seats, answering queries and generally welcomiing people. They also sell programmes, artists' CD's and so on and sometimes they help with excursion buses and that sort of thing. Some of the venues (eg the Cathedral) have no fixed seat numbers; in such cases Front of House have to go through the entire hall, putting numbers on seats and letters at the ends of rows. As you can imagine, there is a lot of organisation involved in the run-up to and during the Festival.

This is the last of the posts about volunteers. If you have a look at Les' "Inside The Tent" posts, you can hear about the separate team of volunteers who work on the Magfest events. There are yet more volunteers who are part of committees organising the Festival Club and Publicity/Marketing. And the there's the Board itself, which oversees the whole enterprise.

So if you're here at the Festival as a performer or as part of the audience, do bear in mind that almost all the people you're dealing with, front- and back-stage, are unpaid and have often sacrificed lots of their personal time during the year running up to the SMF. Without all these volunteers the SMF could not happen, so be nice to them :)