It was gone for a while but the secondary School Festival of the Arts was revived last year. This year it is back for encore with 18 schools participating and more than one hundred entries in the arts of drama, music, dance, and the visual arts. The first of five nights of performances begins in a short while at the Bliss Center but the festival was officially opened this morning. 7NEWS was there and we got a preview.
For the next five nights it will be a parade of music, dance, and drama on the stage at the Bliss Center. The Institute of Creative Arts' program director Leroy Green says there are more than a hundred entries for this year's secondary school festival of arts.
Leroy Green - Programme Director - ICA
"We can expect quite a number of dances, musical pieces, and dramatic pieces. I do believe that most of the entries are musically oriented pieces."
13 high schools and another 4 private or vocational schools will participate. But that is the good news. The bad news is that the number of entries per school has decreased. Green says the Secondary Schools' Festival is an important vehicle and more need to get onboard.
Leroy Green,
"We hope to motivate or inspire the secondary institutions to really put the arts on their timetable and thereby ensuring that there is a continuum of artists from primary school right through to high school to adulthood."
Speaking at the opening - NICH's President Yasser Musa says the survival of the Belizean culture as we know it - rests with the dancers, singers, and actors who will perform on this very stage during the next five nights.
Yasser Musa, NICH President
"This stage was built for you, the young people, for you to survive culturally because if you can't express yourself, and if you don't cherish the freedom of expression that you have, then we will die as a people - our soul will die. I believe that great art, whether it is a dance, created, choreographed, whether it is a piece of music composed or played, whether it is a painting made, or whether it is a play written - those things have yet to be brought forward into our cultural domain and it is you the young people that we are looking to in order to bring great art into the Belizean cultural experience."
And this morning's preview is any indicator - the Belizean culture seems to be thriving.
Showtime on all five nights is 7 pm and tickets are $3 for children and five dollars for adults. The winners will be celebrated at a grand awards night next Monday at the Bliss Center.
