Bellevue Porchella: ACT II, May 15

by Charles McGuigan 03.2020

From the moment it ended, people were calling for an encore.

Bellevue Porchella, which sprang to life last October, was the brainchild of Brooke Ullman. On May 15, with May 22 as a rain date, Bellevue Porchella returns. What’s more, this day of music will repeat again in the early fall, becoming a semiannual event in the Northside.

Brooke Ullman got the idea one night last spring as she passed a home on MacArthur Avenue. “And The Bellevue Bon Temps were out there on their fiddles, playing on their side porch,” Brooke told me. “I actually recorded it and did a little video of it and posted it, and I tagged the Bellevue Civic Association on Facebook and said, ‘This is so great.’”

In July, Brooke watched from her front yard as a family with three kids strolled along the sidewalk across the street. They briefly stopped in front of the home of Haze and Dacey, two local musicians who were playing on their front stoop.

“Wouldn’t it be cool if we had an outdoor walk-around little music thing,” she said to the musicians a little later.

They both nodded. “Yeah, it’d be great,” said Dacey.

“That is where the germ originated,” Brooke told me.

To put it mildly, Bellevue Porchella was a roaring success.  In mid-October last year, on a weather-perfect Saturday, more than a thousand people strolled through the neighborhood sampling the musical offerings of seventeen bands scattered through the community.  It was like a mini-Richmond Folk Festival, which was cancelled last October for the first time in sixteen years due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I think it went over really well,” Brooke says. “We were fortunate to have the full support of the Bellevue Civic Association (BCA). Since last year’s Porchella, wWe’ve had a lot of people who would stop us while we were out on dog walks asking when the next one was going to be. It will be back this May. We are asking for musicians and host houses. And we plan another one in October. So twice a year now.”

“I was thrilled with the way it happened with such a small group of people behind it,” says Rob McAdams, director of Partners in the Arts, which, among other things, trains teachers on how to integrate the arts into their curricula. Rob also has a son who plays with The Neons, a local band that’s been together since its members were in elementary school. 

As a sort of band-parent roadie, Rob McAdams has a keen understanding of logistics where live music is concerned. Ever mindful of the pandemic, he was instrumental in creating the time allotment, and the number of sets each of the seventeen bands would play.

“So how can we have this happen without clusters and packs of crowds in one place?” Rob remembers thinking last year when Porchella was still in the planning stages. “Shorter sets. The idea of doing thirty-minute sets that you repeat made it so that people could be in one place for a time, and then go see another band at a different location. And it gave the performers the opportunity to show their best stuff.”

“Our guiding principles last year were: Let’s do something safe, let’s do something that supports bands and supports people seeing each other,” Rob recalls

At this year’s May event, Brooke hopes to see merchants on Bellevue and MacArthur Avenues involved in the day’s activities. “The suggestion and the thinking is, could we have the restaurants possibly come up with small menu items that are easy grab-and-go items so that people can take them with them and eat at a performance?” says Brooke. “We’re also suggesting that the retail stores perhaps offer a coupon or a discount, or they offer some sort of demonstration of their services inside.” 

There’s also been discussion about creating a sort of bucket brigade. “Like what they do at the Folk Festival,” Brooke says. “Money would go toward the bands and the Bellevue Civic Association, but we haven’t formalized anything around that.”  

Rob McAdams mentions a musician who addressed the audience on Fauquier Avenue between sets last October. “He was talking to the crowd and said he hadn’t played at all since COVID started,” says Rob. “And then he said, ‘This feels exactly right. The right amount of people on the right amount of space.’”

Looking to future Bellevue Porchellas, Rob McAdams poses a question. “What do we want it to be?“ he asks. “Do we want it to be a neighborhood thing and keep the numbers down, or, as COVID goes away, do we want the spring event to be more of a neighborhood event, and in the fall open it up a little bit more?”

To find out more about this spring’s Porchella, or if you want to be a house host or perform this year, Brooke Ullman suggests you periodically check the BCA’s Facebook page. “There’s no stand-alone website where you can find out all the information about this event,” she says. “But we will be posting something on the BCA Facebook page.”