speech on the topic 'How would you like to celebrate festivals during pandemic? '
Answers
Answer:Festivals are meant to be a special coming together of people, an enchanting celebration of what it means to be human, a concentrated succession of extraordinary in-person events. But what can you do if you are the director of a festival in the midst of a crisis situation, facing the question of whether or not your festival should be canceled as a pandemic sweeps the globe?
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Salzburg Global Seminar program, What Future for Festivals? was postponed from March 10-15 to October 24-28. Weeks earlier, Tisa Ho, executive director of the Hong Kong Arts Festival had been confronted by the similarly difficult decision to cancel the world class performing arts festival, which features over 100 performances and events in February and March each year.
The Salzburg Global Fellow generously shared her insights in a webinar hosted by Susanna Seidl-Fox, Salzburg Global Program Director for Culture and the Arts, for participants around the globe who had been scheduled to join the What Future for Festivals? program. During the conversation, she described the various learning points she has gained and continues to gain from this unprecedented situation.
The decision to cancel is historic – it is the first time in the festival’s 48-year history that it has been cancelled. As Ho explained: “It began with some international artists expressing anxiety about coming to Hong Kong… and also our venues remaining closed for a certain period. After the Chinese New Year, when the venues were not yet open, we were still anticipating that they would reopen before the festival began and then it seemed less certain and less certain and the situation seemed to get worse and worse.”