Fringe Festival to be IC’s first event in 2017

The Cultural Affairs Bureau’s (IC) first festival next year, the 16th Macau City Fringe Festival, will be held from January 13 to 22.

With the slogan “A Feast of Creativity, Bon Appétit,” the sixteenth edition of the Festival will feature 23 programs and a total of 70 performances.

The 16th edition of the Macau City Fringe Festival, which has a budget of MOP2.8 million, was going to be held last month but had been postponed to January 2017.

The Bureau explained in a press conference yesterday that the event had been rescheduled so that there would be a significant cultural event in the region every four months.

IC vice president Leong Hio Ming explained that the Bureau would host the Arts Festival in May and the International Music Festival in October.

In 2015, the Festival’s budget amounted to MOP2.2 million. Leong explained that the increased budget was due to the rising costs of the sites they would occupy.

From theatre halls to narrow streets and from forbidden rooms to the outdoors, the Festival’s concept is “all around the city, our stages, our patrons, our artists,” according to the organizer.

The ten-day Festival will also feature collaborations with foreign artists, including “Funeral for the Living,” directed by Daisuke Sagawa and performed by Japanese company Theatre Moment. The feature was awarded the Macao Literary Prize for Best Script.

There will also be a performance of “The Other Side of the Sacred,” produced by local choreographer Candy Kuok in collaboration with Greek Nina Dipla.

Hong Kong stand-up comedy champion Vivek Mahbubani will also collaborate with Macau’s local artists in “Seven Up.”

Other productions – such as “The Smooth Life,” a puppet show set to Arabian music which tells the life story of director Husam Abed in a Palestinian refugee camp – will also be presented at the 2017 Festival.

In a bid to continually develop local art professionals, Fringe Festival directors invited several art organizations in Asia to come to the region for arts festivals and artists-in-residence programs.

The 16th edition of the Festival also features the “Workshop on Environmental Dance Theatre,” “Workshop for Specific Social Arts Workers” and the “Fringe Reviews.”

The workshops encourage interactions between the audience, art professionals and critics.

The shows will be staged in locations such as the Old Court, Macau Art Garden, Ox Warehouse, the Ruins of St. Paul, the Nam Van Lake area and Ká Hó, among others.

Tickets go on sale from Sunday. Registration for the workshops will open on the same day.

According to the IC, the annual Festival is a platform for cultural exchange between local and international artists.