Since originating in 1995, Olympia's Procession has evolved into the Puget Sound's largest annual Earth Day event. It helps define Olympia as a cultural tourism hub. Captivating audiences with art, music, and dance, Procession now draws people from around the nation as they seek to share this unique, heartwarming appreciation of the natural world.
The Founding Tenents
1. Use our energies to create a long-term cultural exchange rather than a short-term entertainment event or political protest.
2. Hold the arts as a very powerful tool to raise the collective consciousness and awaken our culture's numbed aesthetic values, thereby inciting a hunger for personally protecting the natural world.
3. Foster diversity of expression and participation through an inclusive invitation where the dignity of the human spirit is elevated through a process of imagination, creation and sharing.
4. Promote public outreach by organizing and providing numerous art and environmental workshops with the understanding that everyone has something to teach and everyone has something to learn.
5. Be an example of sustainable community practices by emphasizing the use of recycled, natural, and donated materials for art project construction.
6. Place music and dance into the hands of as many people as possible by providing workshops for free or at minimal cost with no one turned away for lack of funds.
7. Request a donation of two cans of food for the local food bank as a registration fee to nourish the understanding that by taking care of nature we naturally take care of ourselves.
8. Empower our role in global preservation by discovering, recognizing, and understanding our local connection to the world around us.
9. Envision that for each person the Procession is a journey, a process of experience and vision, ending in a collective expression of joy and appreciation.
What Does the Procession Look Like?
A preschool class attending as frogs after making their masks out of cereal boxes and paint.
Two young friends in batik butterfly wings, fluttering high in the air on stilts.
Species of all kinds created in a wide range of nature art.
People of all ages bound by a common desire to play music, who learn to drum in a workshop, form a band, and celebrate by dressing as the element of fire.
A community group in love with movement, who form a dance group and choreograph their steps to become a night of swirling stars.
The Procession is a few thousand people, melded into a sea of celebration--colorful, diverse, alive. They flow through another 30,000-plus people who are watching, laughing, dancing, and cheering to the infectious beats of homegrown bands.
From jazz to samba to world beat rhythms, community musicians pound out sound on five-gallon buckets, tin can shakers, and handmade and conventional musical instruments.
It looks like all of us, using our creativity to celebrate the natural world and holding these things (and each other) close to our hearts.
