The annual Singapore Arts Festival, hosted by the National Arts Council of Singapore, is being held in Singapore. It runs from May 23 to June 22.
This year's arts festival invites artists from more than 20 countries, offering more than 500 activities, attracting up to 700,000 attendances. It is a 4-week infusion of performances and events that inspire and capture the public imagination of the city.
PD online reporter Liang Jun had an exclusive interview with Goh Ching Lee, director of the Singapore Arts Festival, on June 13.
Question: As we know, this year's festival has been the 31st festival since it started in 1977. Would you like to tell us something different between 2008 arts festival and last year's?
Goh Ching Lee: Well, this year's arts festival is different in the sense of that we are tracking of the roads less travelled, less familiar to us. It is the first time that we have countries from Slovenia, Bosnia, from central Asia attending this year's arts festival. So it's a part of the arts festival that we wish try to discover new artists coming from new regions, bring them to Singapore and give opposition to the new generation. We had very established artists last year. But this year we have chosen to visit places and regions and show more interesting and exciting arts works to the public. This is a particular emphasis and difference of this year's arts festival.
Q: What kinds of roles did the arts festival play to promote to Singapore as a global arts city?
Goh Ching Lee: The arts festival has become a vehicle to promote Singapore in the international culture scene. Because Singapore is a very small country and has very small population (some 4 million), quite often many foreign people don't know that Singapore has many artists working. So the arts festival actually offers a window for international society to looking into Singapore. It also serves a platform by which we can connect Singapore artists to the foreign artists. In this sense, the arts festival plays an important role in raising the international profile of Singapore as a global arts city and raising Singapore's international connectivity with other countries.
Q: Would you like to talk about the arts festival's influences on the domestic society, especially on the children?
Goh Ching Lee: Well, now more and more people are getting involved in arts and culture activities. The number of the people attending the arts festival has doubled in recent years. Obviously, people enjoy and benefit from the festival's educational value, cultural value and social value. Now many families are regarding the arts as something important to develop children's creativity and imagination. Arts in Singapore have much more stronger position in the minds of general public compared to ten years ago when most children were only expected to be lawyers and doctors. But minds and attitudes are changing now. People are more accepting of arts as career. And now we create more arts school for young people from 13 years old to 16 years old. It's not possible 10 years ago. It also shows that in the last 5 years, there have been a lot of changes in terms of government's support and public's acceptance.
The Singapore Arts Festival celebrates the arts in its global and contemporary dimension. Started in 1997, it has grown to celebrate the best of the artistic and aesthetic in the performing arts in Singapore and the rest of the world, and to date remains and event of national enjoyment.
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