This Saturday, Macalester will host the annual Springfest, a festival featuring five local bands, three bands from out of town and several Macalester musical acts. The event will take place from noon to 9 p.m., making it longer than past Springfests, which typically lasted seven hours.

This year’s Springfest bands are local artists Keston and Westdal, Pep Love, DJ K Salaam, DJ Natosha and The Humans. Percival Potts, Entrain and The Urban Sophisticates will be flown in.

According to Springfest committee member Senam Gbeho ’04, committee members sought to book musicians that “spread across styles,” while keeping within budget confines. “We have a relatively small budget compared to other schools’ Springfests,” Gbeho said.

“The most difficult part of the process is to elicit names [of bands] from the student body,” Gbeho said. According to Springfest committee member Cara Haberman ’06, this year’s committee utilized “Wall Talk” in the basement of the Campus Center three times to get students’ input about what bands were wanted.

The committee wanted to avoid getting a headliner, opting instead for five or six smaller bands that the student body had requested.

This year, there will be no battle of the Macalester bands because, according to Gbeho, there are not enough bands on campus.

According to Suzie Mead ’07, vendors at this year’s event will be Jamba Juice, Domino’s Pizza, Jimmy Johns and A. Johnson and Florists. The Medical Anthropology class will also set up a booth of pre-packaged foods to raise money for a class project.

Free water and punch will be available for students, and bartenders will sell Summit Beer to students over 21.

Richard Daley ’04 designed the logo for the t-shirts, program and flyers. This logo won a campus-wide contest. In addition to on-campus advertising, posters have been put up all over Minneapolis advertising the event, according to Springfest Committee Member Springfest Committee Member Andrej Slyckov ’06.

According to Craig Moodie ’06, eight paid volunteers and 16 unpaid volunteers from various student organizations will help set up the stage and lighting equipment, drive musicians and work as hospitality, entertaining and accommodating to musicians while they wait for their sets. Three organizations, Afrika!, ¡Adelante! and Pasifika, provided four volunteers each in return for having their organizations’ names appear on the t-shirt. The t-shirts will be available to those who volunteer. Shirts will not be available for purchase this year.

This year will have many non-music entertainment options including moonwalks, slides, beach balls and kiddy pool mud wrestling. The Art Alliance will put up boards for spontaneous student art.

In the case of rain, the event will be moved to the Field House and extended by two hours or so. Magic Lantern Traveling Light Show, who arranged lighting for last week’s Spring-A-Ling, will be available for a light show in the event of rain.