Hong Kong Flamenco Festival
Festival and Objectives
The Art of Flamenco landed in Hong Kong around later early 1970s. It was started with Flamenco Guitar in the beginning and progressed to having professional dance teachers in the last few years. Due to the growth of dance community size, the art becomes more active and well known. The integration of Flamenco Music, Dance and Singing, however, is still in the experimentation stage. By large, most of the performance in Hong Kong are small scale guitar performance involving teachers and students.
The performance of Mi Camino Flamenco of Hong Kong and Mi Fuego Dance Company of Taipei at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre in March 2007 marked a new era of Flamenco Performance. It is the first instance of a Flamenco show covering major styles/palos, including Solea, Alegrias, Tangos, Farruca, Rumbas etc with Dancers, Singer and Guitarist with reasonably large audience size on the soil of Hong Kong.
Ian Fu is the person started the festival. One of the objectives of this festival is to develop the art in Chinese Community. His vision is to create a platform locally allowing the art to be expressed on stage with three elements: Dancing, Singing and Music. His idea is to leverage the experience of other region, like that of Taiwan, to build a platform to allow local dancers to work with live music and singer and vice versa.
The second objective is to provide means to educate general public and community in Hong Kong to appreciate the art form. This could be achieved through performance or workshop or seminars. For those who have been learning Flamenco for sometime, the festival will try to provide them trainings opportunities. For these people, the festival could create some depth of Flamenco knowledge.
The third objective is to build a bigger player base with deeper knowledge of the art. The depth of knowledge could be developed through continuous practice in a common platform. With this large players base and platform, the art would be continuously developed and knowledge could be shared in Hong Kong. By the way, higher levels of Flamenco Players could emerge.
The recent growth in Flamenco community size indicates that the Art get recognized to be an interesting art form. It has certain demands by the audience and players. Organizing a Flamenco Festival would be a very effective way to focus this demand and expedite its growth.
The festival started with a series of Flamenco Dance Workshops, Seminars and eventually evolves into Flamenco Performance where talents of Flamenco Art are explored and exposed. These workshops will be focusing on bringing participants the feeling of real and authentic Flamenco with live musician and singers.
As of September 2007, the project was known in the community of Flamenco in Greater China, including Hong Kong, Some Parts of China and Taipei. Some of the events in the Hong Kong Festival will go beyond the scope of Hong Kong, reaching Shanghai as well as Taipei, where activities of similar natures will be organized to share the common vision of future Flamenco Festival for Greater China.
