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19th October to 03rd November 2012
Every year, the largest festival of its kind in Ireland brings the best of international art to Belfast and brings international attention to the city’s dynamic arts practitioners. The Festival covers all art forms including theatre, dance, classical music, literature, jazz, comedy, visual arts, folk music and popular music, attracting over 100,000 visitors.
In the beginning there was an enterprising young undergraduate, Michael Emmerson, who started running a small event based on the campus of Queen's University, Belfast. The university, its students and the Belfast public saw that it was good and the infant Belfast Festival at Queen's was born. Ten years later and the Festival was ten times bigger and had already attracted such names as Dizzy Gillespie, Ravi Shankar, Laurence Olivier and Jimi Hendrix!
The dusty archives lurking in the caverns of the Festival House basement read like a who's who of prominent artists during the latter half of the 20th century.
In the 1970s the Festival was a cultural oasis in a landscape dominated by political upheaval and it was to act as a catalyst for the city's future cultural renaissance. By the early ’80s under the directorship of Michael Barnes, a former History lecturer, the Festival had expanded into a two week long arts extravaganza across the whole of the city and was hosting everything from Moscow State Ballet and the Royal Shakespeare Company to Dexy's Midnight Runners and the Flying Pickets! Billy Connolly and Rowan Atkinson had visited the Festival before they were famous and were welcomed back, while Michael Palin vowed never to take his one-man show anywhere else on earth such was his love of the event.
One of the Festival's enduring key roles is as an advocate of local work, giving Belfast's arts practitioners a unique opportunity to present their work on an international platform. Eminent figures Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, James Galway, Van Morrison, Stewart Parker and Marie Jones were welcomed early in their careers and recent productions by local theatre companies such as Tinderbox, Ransom, Prime Cut and Kabosh have thrived during the Festival.
More recently, the Festival has welcomed Robert Wilson, Alfred Brendel, Merce Cunningham, Philip Glass, Nick Cave, Kylie Minogue and Yoko Ono as its guests.