“When the third version of the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts, or PIFA, breaks out around town beginning April 8, it will represent a more modest version of the arts extravaganza that ended with 200,000 people thronging a Broad Street fair in April 2011,” writes Stephan Salisbury in Saturday’s (4/2) Philadelphia Inquirer. “The festival will be shorter—two weeks instead of the four weeks of 2011 and 2013…. The budget for the festival, organized and presented by the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, is … $4.5 million … down from 2013’s $5.6 million, and $10 million in 2011 [the latter the result] of a $10 million donation from [the late] philanthropist Leonore Annenberg…. The Philadelphia Orchestra, the Pennsylvania Ballet, and Opera Philadelphia are not participating [as they had in prior years],” though Philadanco, the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, the Curtis Institute of Music, and the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia will perform. Also planned is a multimedia Holding It Down: The Veterans’ Dreams Project with pianist/composer Vijay Iyer and poet/librettist Mike Ladd, and a collaborative work, Article 13, a “memorial to migrants who have disappeared.”
Posted April 6, 2016
