Chronicle Editor
Bruce Ndlovu
Last year Intwasa lost the spring in its step. For the first time since it was founded in 2004, the 18th edition of the festival which was scheduled to take place from September 26 to October 1 under the theme: Re-Connect, saw the arts fete shift seasons after it was postponed to between 29 and 31 December.
This was a significant change. By its very definition, Intwasa is a spring festival and in Bulawayo, it is the one art extravaganza that has always welcomed the season with an explosion of colour and energy on the city’s streets.
In December however, long after the last flowers of spring had bloomed, the festival lost some of its flavour, as it became just another footnote in a period filled with many entertainment highlights.
Intwasa, an annual platform that celebrates the diversity of human cultures and creativity in music, film, spoken word, theatre, dance, literary arts, fashion and crafts, was always going to find the going tough during a season when people’s time is divided between partying and spending time with family.
It is for this reason that the festival this year is looking to regain the spring in its step, announcing last week that it will run from September 26 to 30 this year. The theme for this year’s festival “Imagine it and Experience it” is also set to run for the next few editions of the arts extravaganza, as it looks to build some momentum after a tumultuous few years that were triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Our dates are out and I think we have a theme that we want to run for maybe three years,” said festival director Raisedon Baya.
“This is because while we’re trying to get back to normal, we also want to change a few things here and there. This is because we want to become more interactive and we want to see more engagements here and there.
“We want to see our programming change into something more meaningful and vibrant for our local audiences.”
Baya said last year’s challenges had also taught the organisers the value of collaboration, as they learnt that they could not always go it alone when hosting such a big showpiece event.
As it bids to entice the crowds that it used to attract, Baya said that Intwasa would also endeavour to improve the quality of its programming.
“We’re also hoping that as we push towards normality, we also engage as many partners as possible. We came to the realisation that you cannot run a platform like ours without collaboration and so that’s our focus for this year’s festival. We want to curate a programme that’s about collaboration more than anything else.
“As we engage further with stakeholders, I’ve always said that a festival is about its audiences and thus the programming itself. For us to bring back the audiences that we used to have, we need serious programming and serious engagement,” Baya said.
“Our theme is ‘Imagine it and Experience it’ and we chose this because we’re now saying Intwasa is not just a festival, but an experience. We’ve realised that people are not just coming to events for the sake of events, but people are coming there for experiences,” he said.
Baya said Intwasa plans to present new and groundbreaking programming at this year’s edition. “So, our appeal or promise is that we’ll try to give our audiences this experience that they want in terms of our programming. We’re also saying that we want to see new material. During Covid-19, we were using the excuse that people were not creating and thus could not come up with new material, but this is no longer the case.
“Spaces are no longer closed, people have been creating and if we’re really interested in giving people new experiences, it can only come from new productions,” he said.
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