The Sunday News
Bruce Ndlovu
FOR the past few years, the organisers of the Intwasa Arts Festival koBulawayo have faced a barrage of criticism from some who felt they were not doing enough to elevate Bulawayo’s premier arts extravaganza.
To some critics, Intwasa has fallen from its heydays, the glorious days when it used to announce the coming of spring in the City of Kings.
The festival no longer turns heads, critics said, and instead of illuminating the city it was getting outshined by new kids on the block like the Bulawayo Arts Awards, an event which seemed to have a well oiled machine behind it.
For some, the festival has looked on its last legs in the last few years, recycling artistes that audiences had seen countless times on its stages.
After a year of taking in criticism and soul searching, the organisers of the fest believe revamping the arts extravaganza is not only possible but necessary.
A year later, nothing much seems to have changed financially for Intwasa.
The festival’s organisers are still putting together the arts fete off the back of a shoestring budget and donors, the lifeblood of many such events, are hard to come by in economically trying times.
For Intwasa to be born again, the organisers have had to find new ways of enticing crowds that have dwindled over the years.
One of the ways to bring back the people through the turnstiles at Intwasa is to make sure that artistes have as much invested into the success of Intwasa as the organisers.
“In the past we used to pay for everything. We would pay for the artistes transport, advertising, their accommodation and their fee on top of that. This is not sustainable and donors have said so. What we need now are artistes that will meet us halfway,” Baya said.
According to Baya, the challenge was to get artistes to bring their own audiences especially now when the festival’s popularity seemed to be on the wane.
“The problem is that we’ve got no Intwasa audience. So what we need are artistes that are able to bring their own audiences.
People have been complaining that Intwasa always brings the same artistes over and over again but this is Bulawayo and sometimes the new artistes don’t necessarily have audiences. So in the end we revert back to those artistes that everyone has seen before because we don’t have the finances to bring in attractive acts from South Africa or wherever,” Baya said.
Baya said that one of the keys to the festival’s revival was realisation by artistes that organisers were not the ones solely responsible for the success or failure of Intwasa.
