Introduction

INTRODUCTION TO THE SINGAPORE ARTS FESTIVAL AND THE EDINBURGH FESTIVAL FRINGE

The festival that I attended for the field trip is the Singapore Arts Festival. First started out in 1977 to celebrate the local arts activities of Singapore, it had played an important role in transforming Singapore into one of Asia, if not the world’s cultural capital today. Organised by the National Arts Council, it has more than 400 activities within its four weeks calendar which stretches from 15 May – 14 June, and is able to attract up to 500,000 attendances to its performances.

A similar festival that can be found in another country that is similar to the Singapore Arts Festival is the Edinburgh Festival fringe in the United Kingdom. Although both of them are art festivals, the Edinburgh festival fringe is considerably a larger scale event as compared to the Singapore Arts festival.

The Edinburgh Festival fringe first started out in 1947 when several groups turned up uninvited for the Edinburgh International Festival, and from then on, more and more groups turned up at Edinburgh to perform during the Festival. The interesting thing about the Edinburgh Festival fringe is that anyone can perform there without constraints. They just have to follow the steps shown in the website and get their performance or program registered with the Festival fringe Society. For the past three years, the Edinburgh offers more than 28,000 performances of more than 1,800 shows over more than 200 locations.