Bruce Ndlovu , Sunday Life Reporter
THIS year’s edition of the Intwasa Festival koBulawayo, is unlikely to see a return of the arts extravaganza’s popular big stage at the City Hall car park, as financial constrains continue to hamper one of the country’s long running festivals.
Running under the theme, Imagine it and Experience it, the springtime fiesta will run from 26 to 30 September this year. For years, the City Hall car park was the nerve centre of Intwasa, with performances running through the duration of the festival.
However, due to the prohibitive cost of hiring the big stage needed for performances, the last few years has seen the festival make-do without the use of the car park, robbing it of the spark that made Intwasa the life of the city during its run.
In an interview with Sunday Life, Intwasa Arts Festival koBulawayo director Raisedon Baya said while they had initially targeted a return of the big stage, a lack of financial muscle meant that it was now unlikely that the car park will become a hive of activity once again during the last week of September.
“We are actually panel beating our programme for music, theatre and other activities here and there. Initially, when we started this year, we wanted to go back to the car park because we believe that stage is what Intwasa is known for. There you can have a bigger stage, a lot of performances and audiences walking in and out. But without resources its always difficult so it might not happen this year but we have a full theatre programme that we are finalising. We will have afternoon and evening shows at the theatre and we have a good a musical programme at the gallery, which will see about three days of musical performances,” he said.
With the festival happening just a month after the country’s harmonised elections, Baya said that they had faced a lot of difficulties in getting the needed concessions from their commercial partners.
“It has been a difficult year to organise a festival, because a lot of businesses, corporates and even NGOs were kind of on hold. Elections sidetracked a lot of people and obviously that affects our planning, it affects our activities and what we want to do. I always say January, you have this big dream of what you want to do and as each month passes, you are either subtracting or adding on your goals. But commonly, what happens is that we do more adding than subtracting once decisions that are supposed to be made are not made,” he said.
Despite the many obstacles faced, Baya said they were now on course to conclude the festival’s final programme.
“Like we said earlier this year, we are one festival that tries to make sure that, challenges or no challenges, we try to make sure that the festival happens every year. We are running all over trying to make sure that happens. Our usual challenge is the scarcity of resources but we believe we are that flower that continues to germinate through hard rock. We will always try to make sure that we survive and so with that being said, the festival going ahead,” he said.