Arts festival
An arts festival is a festival that can encompass a wide range of art forms including music, dance, film, fine art, literature, poetry and is not solely focused on visual arts. Arts festivals may feature a mixed program that include music, literature, comedy, children's entertainment, science, or street theatre, and are typically presented in venues over a period of time ranging from as short as a day or a weekend to a month.[1] Each event within the program is usually separate.
Arts festivals are largely curated by an artistic director who handles the organizations' artistic direction and can encompass different genres, including fringe theater festivals that are open access, making arts festivals distinctive from greenfield festivals, which typically are weekend camping festivals such as Glastonbury, and Visual Arts Festivals, which concentrate on the visual arts.
Another type of arts festivals are music festivals, which are outdoor musical events usually spanning a weekend, featuring a number of bands and musical genres including pop, rock, heavy-metal, and more. Since the 1960s, world-music festivals have become popular in a variety of countries. The most well-recognized music festival was Woodstock, which took place in 1969 in Bethel, New York. It was attended by 400,000 people and featured performances by The Who, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and the Grateful Dead.[2][3]
History[edit]
Probably the two oldest arts festivals are located in England. The Three Choirs Festival in the West of England was established as a "yearly musical assembly" by 1719.[4] The other is the Norfolk and Norwich Festival which first took place in 1772.[5] The largest arts festival in England today is the Brighton Festival Fringe.
Leading arts festivals include the Edinburgh Festival in Edinburgh, Adelaide Festival of Arts in Adelaide, the Biennale of Sydney, Festival d'Avignon in Avignon, France,[6] and Tongyeong International Music Festival in Tongyeong, Korea and Sanskruti Arts Festival, Upvan, India. One-off arts festivals have included the Liverpool08 European Capital of Culture in 2008.
In the summer of 1793, revolutionary France was invaded by foreign armies which resulted in the destruction of all signs of royalty. During this time, French citizens sang, danced, and theaters as well as indoor music multiplied. By 1793, two dozen new venues for music and drama had been established, as a result of the end of restrictive monopolies that previously ruled. Art dealings were rapidly increasing and as a flood of paintings were for sale, this reduced artists to near impoverishment. Therefore, as a result, this called for an attempt to replace the old system of the arts with a new one. This gave rise to festivals that were used not only as an artistic outlet, but also for political protest against the old government system. These festivals often included religious symbolism, political messages and embodied the spirit of liberty, equality and fraternity. In 1792, The "Festival of Liberty" included a Declaration of the rights of man, busts of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Franklin, a hymn to liberty, women in white carrying chains, and a large chariot with a seated statue of liberty[7]