Bruce Ndlovu, Sunday Life Reporter
WHEN it was announced that the country’s oldest surviving arts festival, the Intwasa Festival koBulawayo was postponed due to financial constraints, the arts in the city looked set to endure a bleak spring.
In a drought-stricken year that has left both taps and pockets dry in Bulawayo, arts practitioners hoped that the festival would once again usher in a season of fresh hope. After all Intwasa, (spring), is supposed to signal renewal, heralding brighter days on the horizon with the rainy season approaching.
However, the announcement that Intwasa would miss its spring window as it would be rescheduled for December drained some of the last bit of hope that they might have that this year in the arts could be salvaged.
Last week the organisers of Intwasa announced that the festival had been rescheduled to new dates between 28 and 30 November, restoring the faith of those who have always held the festival as a standard bearer in the city.
“Traditionally, Intwasa Arts Festival has always taken place during the month of September, aligning with the season of Intwasa, hence the name,” the organisers of the festival said in a statement.
“However, due to unforeseen circumstances, this year’s festival has been rescheduled to November 28-30, 2024. We are excited to share that this edition will run under the theme ‘Imagine it, experience it!’”
In an interview with Sunday Life, festival director Raisedon Baya said this year’s festival would see Intwasa trying to reconnect with communities in the city’s townships, as in the past they felt that the festival was not accessible to people it rightfully belonged to.
“So, we the community engagement we are trying to do things differently. Our main event is always in the CBD and we always get these not everyone can come to town and partake in activities that we organise there.
Not everyone is mobile enough to leave their places of residence and experience the products that we might have packaged for them before going back home.
This year we got support from the Culture Fund to do several activities that reach the community. We have tried this before but, as we sometimes say, resources don’t always permit. We are going to Cowdray Park, Mzilikazi and Nkulumane,” he said.
Baya added that spreading acts far and wide in the city would also give artistes a chance to showcase their skills to a more diverse audience.
“So, the idea is to get a stage into the community so that people in those areas don’t have to hear about Intwasa happening in the CBD. They then become a part and parcel of the festival.
We are spreading the stages and this is going to be for the benefit of the artistes as well because the more stages we have, the more platforms or opportunities for young performers,” he said.
Baya said it was also a chance for the city’s artistes, most of whom hailed from the townships, to show the communities they came from they were worthy of stardom.
“We are taking local acts to where they belong, which is the community. These are audience-building exercises because we believe you can’t want to go perform on bigger stages nationally, internationally when the people in your community don’t know about you.
So, the idea is more about encouraging our young artistes and showing them that charity begins at home. You need to start performing within your localities so that the communities push you towards the bigger stages, whether that’s regionally or internationally. So that’s the reason behind our community engagement activities,” he said.
Baya said the revamped edition of the festival would see them concentrate on new acts instead of the tried and tested.
“We are looking for particularly new acts. We are not looking for old groups because people usually sell a group name and say we are this group or that group. That is not what we are looking for. We are looking for a product.
It might be an old group with a new product and that will be okay. We want people that come to us and say, we have a new dance or a new theatre production. If a comedian has new material or an artiste has new music released, that’s what we want.
Our audiences cannot see the same things year in and year out. That’s why we are making this call. We are doing so in the hope that artistes who have new material might show interest and then we can work on something together,” he said.
Baya said after two decades of Intwasa, they felt that it was time to unearth new voices, as they were wary of feeding their audience of the same acts over and over again.
“We also sent out a call, asking artistes to signal their intention to perform at the festival. Hopefully, we can identify a few new faces that we can put on our stages and maybe make them more accessible to mainstream audiences.
We are also realising that our role is to develop artistes and that particularly applies to the young ones who are still trying to find their feet.
That, I believe, is what makes us different from the other platforms that have gone commercial and gone big. Our mandate is basically to develop and transform artistes that have just popped into the sector,” he said.