With just 10 programmes - as opposed to last year's 25 - scheduled for this month, City Festival 2011 is looking a little anorexic. According to Benny Chia Chun-heng, director of the Fringe Club who organises the annual event, the scaling down is partly due to a lack of money. After its restaurant tenant M at the Fringe moved out a year ago, and The Pottery Workshop last month, to make way for its delayed renovation, the venue's income has been drastically reduced, he says.
'We still want to keep the festival going all the same,' Chia says, 'but in a new format.'
To begin with, the City Festival will no longer be confined to January but will spread out throughout the year. Chia believes the traditional concept of an arts festival - that it has to take place during a specific time of the year at specific venues - has to change with the times.
'The City Festival challenges the conventional way of staging a festival,' he says. 'Over the past few months, we've asked ourselves some simple but hard questions. Is it still relevant to do things in the way passed down to us? New technology allows us to roam free as never before. It has given us easy access, convenience, control over where, when and how we choose to enjoy the arts.'
So the Fringe Club has come up with the idea of a 'festival without walls', one that 'can take the arts beyond their city boundary, take sufficient time to explore ideas, and build relationships'.
Instead of dividing the festival into categories such as music, cabaret, theatre, dance and its 'spotlight' programme, which focuses on the urban culture of a specific city, it now takes on just one theme: this year will be 'the sounds of the city', in particular the indie/non-commercial music scene in Greater China and the region.
Songs and music are the most persuasive art form today, Chia says, and with modern technology artists no longer need record labels to distribute their work. 'Now they can simply upload their music onto the internet and people can download it and carry it with them anywhere at anytime.'
