District Festival of Arts to showcase best performances
Denise Enriquez
The district level Festival of Arts are ongoing countrywide and it’s all leading up to a week of activities for the National Festival. A month long art exhibit is also included in the national festival and it’s opening next Tuesday at the Bliss. According to Creative Arts Development Officer Denise Enriquez, the exhibit will feature different types of works from students and new artists from across the country. The performances that win gold in the district festivals will also be highlighted in the national showcase. Enriquez says there’s much more on the agenda for the young artists.
Denise Enriquez, Creative Arts Development Officer, ICA
“What we’ve done every year is we have a series of different activities to commemorate the national festival. It incorporates dance, music, drama, visual arts; every area of the art and we bring in artists from all over the country to participate. The national festival will actually start this coming Tuesday; it will kick off with off with our art exhibit here at the Belisle gallery and we will be exhibiting ceramics, paintings, drawings, even some animations in the visual art exhibit. Our curator is Gilvano Swasey; he’s very excited about the pieces he’s gotten. We’ve gotten pieces from every single district so we want to thank all the artists and the students from the districts for submitting entries and the Ministry of Education also for working closely with us to nurture those youths so that they can bring out their creative juices and we’re gonna definitely see it this coming Tuesday for the exhibit.
The festival itself runs for one week and it starts May twenty-ninth, the following week. The actual festival starts with an opening ceremony at the House of Culture and it will finish off with a parade that same day. So we will be bringing in artists from all over the country and they will be parading the streets of Belize and showcasing their art. So it will start, like I said with the opening ceremony and the parade, and then we have the visual arts showcase where we will be bringing in all those golden entries from the district festivals.
I also want to highlight the fact that aside from the showcase, we’ll also be doing a concert for the youths; just for the youths to end the festival of arts. That will be June second here in the parking lot. It will be an open concert, we will have big names performing. We have the General [Supa G], we have—oh I’m dying—we have a whole lot of Belizean artists that will be performing for the youths. There will be no alcohol, just positive vibes and beautiful music to party with. That will start four o’clock the Saturday evening here at the Bliss Parking Lot. But before that we will also be doing a culinary fair.”
The Art in the Park display will also be held in the Battlefield Park on June second.
