Infecting the City
Infecting the City - Public Arts Festival
Infecting the City (ITC) is an avant-garde public art festival, conceived to deliver provocative and novel site-specific performance art. It has been planned and executed with the specific intention of being sited and staged in the public domain..
Infecting the City prides itself on having shifted the boundaries and conventions of accepted performance and festival programming since its’ inception. It is with plucky irreverence that the ITC turns Cape Town CBD into an edgy theatre venue to exhibit diverse, high quality, thought-provoking, boundary breaking works that also forge important links with international performing arts networks.
The work’s enliven and invigorate the communal spaces of Cape Town and are free and accessible to the public. The Festival is a significant event both for the performing arts in South Africa and for Cape Town as a creative, iconic city. Audiences are asked to discover the hidden spaces and unexpected perspectives of the City.
After a call for applications, the Festival programme is made up of a mixture of new collaborative works, specifically commissioned artworks, and invited works. Each year, the Festival addresses a specific social issue that in turn defines the nature of the Festival programme and artworks.
The flagship of Infecting The City is the New Collaborative Works project, which culminates in two new performance pieces made by teams of collaborating artists from a variety of creative backgrounds. This project is our primary tool for developing new public art forms for our evolving urban society.
From a pool of submissions made by artists throughout the world, seven artists were selected to participate in an eight-week creative residency. For three weeks during November 2009 the artists attended an intensive course on the Festival theme HUMAN RITE, during which they explored the meaning and role of ritual in our society. They also investigated the hidden stories, social dynamics and sites of trauma within our City.
At the end of their second week together, the artists were divided into two teams. Thereafter they spent another week developing concepts in response to a creative brief. The artists then returned to Cape Town in mid-January to spend a month making their performance pieces. The New Collaborative Works are titled Meet Market and Quiet Emergency.
The third edition of the Festival, Infecting the City 2010 takes to the streets and public spaces of Cape Town from the 13th to the 20th of February. This year talented creative artists from around the world interrogate the theme HUMAN RITE, presenting collaborative performance works, art installations, choreographed pieces and public interventions that grapple with the knots, scars and wounds of the City and Country. Audiences are invited to attend thirteen evocative works that explore ritual healing. Each is a transformative journey that celebrates our fundamental right to be human.
The third edition of the Festival, Infecting the City 2010 takes to the streets and public spaces of Cape Town from the 13th to the 20th of February. This year talented creative artists from around the world interrogate the theme HUMAN RITE, presenting collaborative performance works, art installations, choreographed pieces and public interventions that grapple with the knots, scars and wounds of the City and Country. Audiences are invited to attend thirteen evocative works that explore ritual healing. Each is a transformative journey that celebrates our fundamental right to be human.
To see brief coverage of the performances from ITC 2010, click here.
Watch a round up of the ITC 2009 festival here.
For more information about the Festival and the current Infecting The City programme, as well as for access to footage and the archive of the previous Festival performances, go to: www.infectingthecity.com
Jump to celebrate your right to be human at Infecting the City 2010