The Future of The National Arts Festival: Letters from the Future Project

COVID 19 severely affected many businesses during the pandemic, including arts and culture, music, literary and comedy festivals that were celebrated throughout the country.

In collaboration with Future Festivals, Rhodes University, King’s Collage University, South African Cultural Observatory and sponsorship from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, the National Arts Festival (NAF) is taking on the task of creating a 360 virtual world that will present the aspirations of the festival and its followers regarding how the festival will be in 2030.

The virtual world will be a collage of images, poems, letters, videos, voice notes and sounding recording that were submitted by followers and past attendees of the festival as they write letters to themselves from the future with the prompt: What will the National Arts Festival look like in ten years’ time?

They encouraged participants to delve into the experiences they will see at the future festival; What has changed? What is new on the programme? Is some of the art being displayed online or virtually? Are some of the art and events viewed live? Are the audiences intimate or are there crowds yet again? Are there new types of art being displayed? Will some performances be toured? How far do you see future NAF collaborations going, and with whom?

The project sees a vast and versatile range of professionals collaborating, including multi-medium artists Francois Knoetze and Duduetsang Lamola (blk banana), a team from the NAF, and professionals from Rhodes University and supporting institutions in the UK.

This project is supported by research done for the Future Festivals South Africa Project, which investigates the adaptive processes of local festivals, through a collection of quantitative and qualitative data from festival audiences, and mapping of the effects of COVID on the attendance and occurrence of South African festivals. The project aims to reduce the impact of COVID on festivals by developing new ideas of performance and participation.

As expected, there was a significant amount less festivals in 2020, 115 festivals, when compared to how many occurred in 2019 before COVID, 214 festivals. The project recorded festival reaction to COVID as those which occurred before lockdown in March, those which held events that followed lockdown capacity regulations, those which had live audiences and live streamed, those which were completely online and the many which were cancelled.

The research includes three case studies of adaptive solutions practiced by local festivals including The Cape Town Carnival, Suidoosterfees and Buyel ‘Ekhaya.

The Cape Town Carnival spent the year planning, refining and adapting to create the highly-anticipated ‘Walk the City’ Creative Hubs – a multi-location Carnival that will have 5 covid-complying capacity venues with assigned walking paths through the city that will showcase a range of small locals businesses.

Suidoosterfees is a well-attended music and comedy festival that often draws crowds from the western part of the country. The festival was adapted into a live drive-in venue performance, where participants remained in and close around their cars, and adhered to COVID protocols and safety regulations, as they enjoyed multiple comedy and music performances.

Buyel ‘Ekhaya is a popular music festival in the Eastern Cape that due to COVID, hosted a televised virtual festival with attending audiences’ of about 400 000 people. Despite tackling the challenge of the conversion from a life performance to a televised performance, the festival received many new viewers and followers, and is promising both virtual and live content in the future.

With aspirations of fashion on the programme, language education workshops to accompany performances, translations and subtitles in a variety of international languages, continental collaborations and tours already accumulating on the first installment Festival Opening Ceremony in Fingo, inspiration is running deep and the Festival continues to enrich and open our minds.

Published in Grocott's Mail

Images from:

https://www.future-festivals.org/

https://www.future-festivals.org/blog