The annual festivities incorporate aspects of Catalan traditional culture and attract 10,000 visitors from around the region.

Malini Srinivasan dances to stay connected to her community, her culture, and herself.

Watch highlights from the performance in the Festival’s Big Top and hear Dolly Jacobs explain her journey into the circus world.

Watch a video of Listo Trapèze Volant, an aerialist team formed specifically for the Smithsonian Folklife Festival to showcase some of the best flying trapeze artists from around the world.

When I think of Hawaiian music, I first think of the ukulele, but slack-key guitar is just as uniquely Hawaiian. Ledward “Led” Kaapana is a ukulele virtuoso, but to my ear, he shines brightest when playing slack-key guitar.

Family is central to Sheila Kay Adams’s music and identity. She is, after all, a seventh-generation Appalachian ballad singer.

Since 2000, this 400-year-old Guatemalan tradition has also been practiced in Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., by the Guatemalan communities here.

On opening day of the Folklife Festival, audiences witnessed an unexpected and touching moment when cofounders Paul Binder and Michael Christensen presented the “keys” to the Big Apple Circus to one of its new proprietors.

Cajun music is rooted in the songs and fiddle tunes of the Acadians—French speakers who migrated from France to Canada in the seventeenth century, and from Canada to Louisiana in the eighteenth century.

In the face of colonization, migration, and other forces that cause people to leave home, those on the move often have few to no belongings to remind them of home. Instead, they must preserve traditions