The Golden Showcase to Begin for the 2019 National Festival of Arts
The opening ceremony for the 2019 National Festival of Arts was held today at the Bliss Centre for the Performing Arts. It’s the hallmark event for expressive art lovers, especially teachers and students who worked during and even after classes to secure golden performances that will be showcased during next week. News Five’s Duane Moody attended the opening and files this report.
Duane Moody, Reporting
One of the most anticipated creative arts showcases begins this weekend at the Bliss Centre for the Performing Arts. It’s the National Festival of Arts 2019 that will pool together talented youth from pre, primary and high schools across the country who, since the start of the year, were chosen as golden performances. Today, an official opening ceremony was held at the Bliss under the theme: “Creative Young Minds Today, Innovative Leaders Tomorrow.”
Kim Vasquez
Kim Vasquez, Youth Development Officer, ICA
“This is the culmination of the district festivals that have been happening since the start of the year and up until yesterday actually in Belmopan. This is nationals now. We continue with the preschool golden showcase and then starting Tuesday we have the showcases continuing as well as two competitions: the teacher’s competition, the secondary schools competition and then we are going to close off with a showcase that is still relatively new, Chords and Voices, which is our music showcase. That showcase has been growing and we understand that this year has some surprises in it as well.”
To launch the activities, there were several presentations from various schools. From dramatized poems, a rap, various types of dances and a unique performance from a choir. The auditorium was bursting with talent.
Melvin Manzanero
Melvin Manzanero, Principal, Mount Carmel R.C. School, Benque
“We look forward to our teachers participating in the festival of arts and normally we have quite an amount of items to present. Our coach, Jose Perez; he practice arduously with them. We went through the zone elimination and managed to go through gold; as a matter of fact, we have three items coming gold for next week Wednesday. La Pollera…it is actually a song that Mister Perez put together the song itself. I mean people know about the song, but the steps and everything. He was the one that came up with it.”
Yoel Vis
Yoel Vis, Music Teacher, Eden SDA High School, Santa Elena
“Eden High School has a full four years music programme that includes marching band, choir, vocalist, individual classes. So they do have classes in their scheduled time and also practice afterwards, so pretty much we have stuff ready for any event. Preparing for it, well the choir in particular which is the group here today, we have two rehearsals every week—one period class report and sometimes extra rehearsals before events.”
With the creative arts having been introduced into the curriculum, the presentations have improved since teachers are being trained in the programme. Youth Development Officer at the Institute of Creative Arts, Kim Vasquez says that it is important for the holistic development of the students exposed to the expressive arts.
Kim Vasquez
“This is very much a part of their education and it is a holistic approach to educating children and the expressive arts compliments many other subjects from social studies to language arts….everything. And it is so important for children to get that exposure and not only have a short exposure, but a long term exposure and to really grow in the arts. We are always noticing that when we have the festival of arts, whatever is the current social atmosphere, children will reflect it on the stage. And we had a number of items: dances, a lot of dramatized poems, monologues that touched on the I.C.J. matter; that touched on patriotism. We also saw this year as well, schools taking cultural elements and putting a modern stamp on it which is something that we love and we advocate for.”
Duane Moody for News Five.
