Celebrating the Arts

A three-week festival celebrating the arts running between July 28 and August 20 is how we can describe this year's Malta Arts Festival being organised by the Malta Council for Culture and the Arts (MCCA) within my Ministry. Full details of this festival were announced last Tuesday during a press conference I chaired.

The festival will be centred on the Old Opera House site and Freedom Square which will be appropriately transformed for the occasion. Other venues will include the Mediterranean Conference Centre, the MITP theatre and St James Cavalier-Centre for Creativity in Valletta, as well as the Cottonera Waterfront in Vittoriosa.

The festival this year has been placed into a concentrated three-week period. This will be ideal for the event to be marketed abroad in future. Thousands of persons daily go by the Old Opera House site and Freedom Square, and what the festival seeks to achieve is that there will be many more who come back to this area in the evening and experience what Malta has to offer by promoting the best of talent available in this country.

We want people to enter Valletta and feel the atmosphere of the festival through the exuberant setting that is being presented. MCCA has been restructured and the festival will be the first endeavour of the new council. The council has collaborated with other entities within the Ministry of Tourism and Culture, such as the National Orchestra, the Mediterranean Conference Centre, St James Cavalier and the Manoel Theatre. The Valletta council has also been instrumental in making the festival happen.

The festival is being complemented by an initiative of the Valletta Alive Foundation which will be present 'BoV Streets Alive!' through which there will be much activity in the streets close to the performing area. It proves that the arts generate not only a good feeling but also a great deal of economic activity.

This year the Malta Arts Festival offers a package of cultural events including light orchestral music, chamber music, dance, theatre, visual arts, multimedia performances and literary evenings along with street entertainment in our capital city.

Two headlining events at this year's festival are dedicated to Dmitri Shostakovich and Samuel Beckett, being the 100th anniversary of their birth. A novelty this year is a comic theatre performance by a theatre company that sails on board a Dutch herring logger. From the August 15 to 20 the Ship of Fools will perform The World Upside Down in the natural setting of the quayside at the Cottonera Waterfront.

The festival's entire programme consists of no fewer than 30 events over a three-week period. The festival combines well the two different hats within my own portfolio - tourism and culture. It is now widely acknowledged that tourism is not so much about presenting Malta as one more destination as it is about promoting our country as a unique experience.

Our cultural heritage is a crucial component of that experience. Equally, projecting Malta as a vibrant centre of the visual and performing arts adds colour and charm to the visitors' experience and encourages tourists to revisit as well as to talk favourably of their experience when they get back home and talk about what they went through, with family members and friends.

The Malta Arts Festival is being organised for the third consecutive year and is assuming new dimensions. Already it forms part of our vast calendar of events to look forward to. Much credit is due to the four new arts executives who have recently been recruited by the MCCA as part of its restructuring.

My gratitude is also due to Lino Farrugia who is again offering his professional assistance and ensuring the festival's success. Equally I appreciate the hard work put in by the different artists and performers who dedicate their energies, talent, as well as their time to ensure that it works well on the night.

Behind every successful performance or representation there are countless others who offer their help behind the scenes, be it to ensure that there are the right light effects, proper sound management, the right props at the right time on stage, front of house duties, designing and building sets, assisting with wardrobe, providing make up, seeing to publicity, or adding that particular touch as the director requests - ultimately it is a question of all details falling in place. The devil is always in the detail and the more we become aware of all the different components that make up a successful production, the more we can appreciate it when we are presented with one.

I shall give one example: Only recently I was at Fort St Angelo, Vittoriosa, to watch Evita - the Musical, brilliantly staged by the St Lawrence External Festivities Committee and the St Lawrence Youth Section. Over six months of preparations, rehearsals together with explosive enthusiasm by all the cast and those working back stage resulted in an exuberant and enjoyable production that brought happiness to all those who attended. It was a question of combining perfect miming, choreography, stage effects, lights and countless other details.

It then comes through over one weekend and it's all over but the persons who worked together to make it happen share the satisfaction of realising that all the hard work that was poured in voluntarily has had one major reward: a satisfied audience. Well done - you have done us all proud, and I was only too glad to do my own part to offer concrete encouragement and support.

Back to the Malta Arts Festival: One interesting characteristic this year will be the animation that will go in the surrounding areas. In the very first three days of the festival, wine bars and cafés of South and Strait Streets will put out their tables on the streets to enliven the late hours of the city. Street art and performances, busking and all that jazz come together for an entertaining weekend out on the streets.

That apart, every Friday night, Valletta Alive Foundation in collaboration with MCCA, is organising additional street activities which will complement the Malta Arts Festival. 'The BoV Street Alive!' will include street music, visual arts, walking tours and children's entertainment. Museums will extend their opening hours for the duration of these activities and various restaurants will remain open for after-performance dining.

A new event that has been added to our cultural calendar over the past two years now becomes one of the ingredients of the festival. I am referring to the event, 'The National Orchestra Goes Pop'. The National Orchestra, normally associated with an operatic and symphonic repertoire, will step down its formal attire to appear in a lighter guise in an evening of light music. This event is a unique opportunity to offer music lovers the chance to experience a high quality concert of pop music with the backing of our orchestra.

This year, guest artists include Chiara, who will interpret songs by Christina Aguilera, and Ivan Grech, lead vocalist of the rock band Winter Moods, with songs by legendary bands U2 and Pink Floyd. The Maltese singer Tara, currently pursuing a solo career in the UK, will also be introduced to the Maltese public. Sigmund Mifsud, himself a member of the National Orchestra, will direct.

Other events include Beckett's Endgame, to mark his birth centenary, which will be staged together with a mime, Act without Words; a staging of Mireille and Mozart Requiem by Ballet d'Europe, brought over to the festival by Malta's Dance Council; a flute and piano recital; Golden Oldies featuring some of the most memorable tunes from the Fifties and early Sixties; Carmen - A Flamenco Dance Show; Big Band Brothers in Concert; a recital by mezzo-soprano Sophia Grech and pianist Eleonora Bekova; an evening of music through Maltese traditional instruments as revived by Ruben Zahra's Nafra... apart from various sessions of visual arts, including photographic, sculpture, live modelling and other art exhibitions. The examples presented here by no means represent the entire list of events that will form part of the festival.

Celebrating the arts is what this year's festival is all about. We are determined to present Malta as a vibrant country that comes alive through the sheer talent and dedication of all those who make such events come about. In the process we may well be spoiling potential audiences for choice but that is part of the renaissance that we are going through in the process.

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