Arts festivals stay alive during lockdown

Vrystaat Kunstefees will live on in 2020 – even though it won’t be physical.

One of the greatest things national lockdowns provided the world is innovative ways to interact with art – mostly for free.

The festival is using this month to provide talks from artists on a variety of topics to show what the art spaces really do. It goes a long way because central to arts festival are talks and walkabouts that introduce new insights.

For this month so far, festival director Ricardo Peach introduced dates for talks on youth art, online publishing, poetry and producing dance. This is to keep the fairly new festival alive as it will miss it’s 2020 dates.

As it stands, the organisers of Aardklop in the North West say the festival will continue in September. Right now organisers are busy working on a programme for arts, theatre and other live entertainment.

Right now it is unclear how it will take place as lockdown threatens to linger longer – but as a predominately Afrikaans festival there is another path if new laws come to pass that won’t allow the festival to take place.

Optog e-Concerts announced last week they made more than R1 million from e-ticket sales since they started a variety of digital concerts and performances.

Many of these were shows and performances meant to take place at Atterbury Theatre. Shows are only R50 and available globally.

But even before the lockdown, Aardklop began using a virtual office to put the 2020 festival together. Motivation for this was saving money but also moving with the times.

To find out more about these performances and talks visit www.optog.co.za/e-konsert

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