LEWISTON – Despite shrinking crowds and revenue, the Festival FrancoFun will continue.

“We’re not ready to call it quits because there’s a lot of people who come and enjoy it,” said Rita Dube, a founder of the festival. “We’re going to keep it going as long as the people keep coming.”

On Saturday afternoon, an audience of about 200 watched Celtic musician Michael Black perform with his three daughters in the Franco-American Heritage Center’s grand performance hall. Downstairs, workers prepared for a bean supper with a crowd expected to reach 400 people.

On Friday night, the audience was thinner.

However, Dube figured that the attendees, who are typically in their 60s, tend to stay home in weather like Friday night’s torrential rain.

Dick and Therese Perron of Lewiston came on Friday and Saturday.

“This is a beautiful place,” Dick Perron said, still sitting in his plush seat after Black left the stage. “I think we should have a full house.”

The afternoon performance would have been tiny at the old Festival de Joie. For 13 years, the festival drew thousands of people to the downtown, first at Kennedy Park, then at the Androscoggin Bank Colisee and finally at Simard-Payne Park alongside the Androscoggin River.

It dissolved after the 2005 festival, when the required army of 200 or so volunteers had fallen to fewer than 150. Many people were too old or too ill to help anymore.

It had taken a week to set up, requiring electricians, plumbers and carpenters. Perron, a plumber, donated time each year.

In the end, the volunteers were too old, he said.

Too few younger people had the connection to Franco culture and language that would lead them to give their time to the event, Therese Perron said.

“We had French in school,” she said. “Our children didn’t.”

Dube and others created Festival FrancoFun in 2006 as a scaled-back answer. Last year, the festival was held at the Colisee. The crowds were too small for the venue, Dube said. So, she and others brought the festival back to the Franco center, figuring on entertaining hundreds rather than thousands.

“It’s much less work and much more affordable,” she said.

The intimacy gave the festival’s operators a chance to change quickly Saturday when singer Gizele Laliberty had to cancel at the last minute due to a family emergency.

Richard Martin, the Franco center’s programmer, went to Phill McIntyre, who operates the Skye Theater in Carthage and helps run the Lewiston center’s Celtic Tuesday concerts.

McIntyre brought Black.

“It’s good to have partners,” Martin said.

Dube has managed to raise a volunteer force of about 70 people. Their biggest job: preparing Franco foods.

Saturday morning’s crowd overwhelmed the kitchen, which sold out of crepes. It’s something Dube vowed would not happen on Sunday, when this year’s festival ends.

“We made more,” she said.