THE PRESS TUESDAY, MARCH 7, 1978. A broadening festival

Press, 7 March 1978, Page 16

THE PRESS TUESDAY, MARCH 7, 1978. A broadening festival

The arts festival, in full swing in Christchurch at the moment, is offering a variety of events and attractions in a number of artistic fields. Many who are taking advantage of the festival will be finding their time short and their pockets strained as they indulge only their existing, well-established tastes. But the festival will enrich the city’s cultural life to the fullest extent only if people seize the opportunities the festival offers to broaden their acquaintance with forms of expression which thev find difficult to understand—even boring or at first repulsive.

At the opening concert the festival’s most distinguished visitor. Aaron Copland. spoke of the attitudes of mind people should bring to concert-going and expressed a hope that audiences would gradually include in their musical loves those newer idioms which seemed at first strange to them His remarks could apply equally to attendance at any

other cultural event or attraction. The festival will be a thorough success if those whose first impulse is to go to see “Orfeo ed Euridice” also turn up at “Steptoe and Son”; if those whose musical tastes are conservative risk attending a concert at which modern or electronic music will be played: if those whose great passion is pottery or some other craft mingle with the theatre crowd at a performance of one of the festival plays.

Those who use the arts festival in this broadening way will be likely to find that one of the more serious objections to the whole idea of an arts festival—that a two-week surfeit is usually followed by months of famine—has less force. The more their tastes are broadened under the stimulus of the arts festival, the fewer will be the periods in which people living in Christchurch are starved of satisfying entertainment or artistic delight.