An international dance competition, organised by dance director Felix Busuttil, had children performing between 8.30pm on Monday and the early hours of Tuesday to the consternation of upset parents.
Called the Malta International Dance and Competition, the event aimed to “discover talents”, “support creative initiatives” and “promote choreography” but scores of parents who called Times of Malta yesterday were not impressed.
“My 14-year old daughter performed her act at 4am. I did not even watch her as I was due in for the 6am shift at work,” said an irate parent.
Another father said: “My daughter came home at 6.30am. I was utterly disgusted. Who on earth can dance to their best of their abilities at 3.30am? I thought it was very arrogant of the organisers not to tell us how long the show was expected to go on! All that he [Felix Busuttil] kept saying was that we need to support the show and to please stop complaining. How cheeky!”
One mother said: “I couldn’t pull my daughter out of the competition. We were trapped for 10 hours. It was a farce.”
A number of parents suspected a profit motive, after about 100 dance routines out of 200 made it to the final Grand Gala night. “There were supposed to be 50 finalists not 100. But the number was probably doubled so that more parents and relatives would buy seats,” said a parent.
The prices for the tickets for the final night ranged from €18 to €40. Participants paid a registration fee and bought costumes.
Mr Busuttil, organiser, artistic director and compère of the event – which he described as his own “innovative venture” – confirmed that the event finished at 6am on Tuesday but said: “The theatre is not a prison. Parents could just have picked up their children and left.”
“Did the parents tell you what their children won,” he snapped. He said an international jury selected 50 talented artists and awarded them dance scholarships.
He said the duration of the event was “a genuine oversight” and he took “full responsibility” and apologised. “Nevertheless, it was done in good intention as I wished lots of participants to be re-judged and re-exposed.”
Asked whether the reason for the doubling of the finalists was to sell more tickets he replied: “Tickets sold anyway. And, in any case, all they had to pay for this experience was €20. I never forced people to buy tickets.”
He said the budget for the event was €75,000. “I still have to make my calculations but I didn’t make any money on this.” When pressed, he said he got a total of €16,000 in funding for the event: €8,000 from the Ministry of Culture, €5,000 from the Malta Tourism Authority and €3,000 from V-18 Foundation. A spokesman for the Malta Council for Culture and Arts said that Mr Busuttil had applied for art funds but was not successful.
Mr Busuttil is a member on the Mediterranean Conference Centre’s board of directors. The board falls under the Tourism Ministry, which is responsible for the MTA from where Mr Busuttil got part of the funding. The dance event was held at the MCC.
Mr Busuttil promised a post-mortem. “This was the first time we did something of the sort. The mistakes will be ironed out by the next one in 2018,” he said.
He stressed that those who won, “are very happy and there’s no complaining”. On Facebook, his students posted messages thanking him and saying “he was an inspiration”.
However, parents who spoke to Times of Malta said they were complaining before the results were anywhere in sight. “Everyone was leaving the minute their children performed. At that point, nobody was interested in the awards,” a father said.
Others said Mr Busuttil threatened to confiscate their mobiles if they took any pictures. “But, in the end, the official photographer ran out of print paper so I do not even have a single souvenir of this comedy evening.”