Putting together an event on the scale of the National Arts Festival is no mean feat, and to bring it home, here are some of the more remarkable Festival facts and figures.
Putting together an event on the scale of the National Arts Festival is no mean feat, and to bring it home, here are some of the more remarkable Festival facts and figures.
Thirty two tons of additional equipment are brought into Grahamstown to help transform every corner of the city into a performance space, with more than 1 000 lights rigged in an unprecedented 59 venues.
With more than 80 productions on the Main programme, eight on the Arena and a record 390 shows on the Fringe, the programme will continue to delight the national, continental and international visitors who make this annual arts pilgrimage.
Last year the Festival reported attendance of just over 200 000 at its various events, crammed into 34 square kilometres of space in Grahamstown. The 11-day Festival contributes more than R60 million to the GDP of Grahamstown each year, with a bigger impact being felt on the surrounding Cacadu District and Eastern Cape Province.
Practical internship and mentorship programmes are being implemented in conjunction with Rhodes University, The Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, The Tshwane University of Technology, and the University of the Witwatersrand, with an additional 400 jobs created during the Festival.
But it's not just about numbers – the quality and diversity of this year's offerings give Festival-goers an extraordinary range of choice. This year's National Arts Festival programme is packed with excellence and innovation.
Not without challenges faced by the country in general, it is nevertheless an abundant, rich and diverse programme, says Chairperson of the Festival’s Artistic Committee, Jay Pather. Most important, it makes conscious attempts to extend the range of work from the classical to the cutting-edge contemporary.
Several inter-disciplinary works and collaborations and a whole new category of live art that blurs boundaries between genres and invites out-of-the-box thinking bears testimony to a programme that secures the tried and the tested, but that invites and probes works that take risk and break new ground.
Several international works, including those from the much-anticipated French/South African season, ultimately make the Festival impossible to miss. There are works across the disciplines that walk a tightrope of edgy aesthetics from such diverse and far-flung sources and places, that viewed altogether in one space in just over a week, will make for rich pickings and substantial debate, as we watch this Festival grow in size and authority.
