25TH Flame Tree Arts Fest preparations underway

The 25th Annual Flame Tree Arts Festival next year is shaping up to be one of the biggest, if not the biggest, Flame Tree Arts Festival in recent memory.

Planning for the event by the Department of Community and Cultural Affairs-Commonwealth Council for Arts and Culture and the Flame Tree Arts Festival Committee has been underway for several months as it is set to be the largest festival of its kind in the Pacific in 2006.

Twenty artist delegates from all of the islands of Polynesia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Australia are being invited to participate in the event, which is set to be a weeklong extravaganza.

Activities will include traditional voyaging and other arts and cultural symposiums and conferences, a Pacific film festival, a publication of poetry by Pacific island youth, talaya and spear fishing derbies, traditional games, a canoe village, cooking demonstrations, school workshops and performances, the Parade of Cultures, and nearly 150 booths featuring the works of hundreds of traditional and contemporary artisans, as well as a main stage and separate traditional performance areas that will feature thousands of performing artists.

“Everything about the 25th Flame Tree Arts Festival will be enhanced,” said Commonwealth Council for Arts and Culture executive director Robert H. Hunter. “This year’s event brought in over 500 off-island participants and unknown numbers of visitors, especially from Guam. These are folks who stayed at hotels, rented vehicles, ate at our restaurants, and shopped. Unlike other events, this is an event that participants and visitors will likely make an effort to come back to.”

The event serves a vital role in the community, assisting to promote and support local artists and, at the same time, providing an additional activity that not only serves visitors that are already here on vacation, but is actually a draw in itself.

“The same off-island participants return for the festival year after year, and we believe that the festival will encourage the same return travel by our visitors.” Hunter said. “It is evident by the duration of the event its importance to the community. It has grown tremendously in terms of both participant and visitor numbers. We want this to be a world-class activity and we work every year on improvements to the event to reach this goal.”

The CCAC has already begun the effort to raise funds for the festival, which will cost substantially more than this year’s event. The estimate for this year’s festival is $300,000, according to Hunter.

“The cost of the festival, when you think about it, is nominal in terms of the role it plays in the community, the effect it already has in terms of visitors and promotions and its innate potential for the visitor market. We will need the support of our entire community, our private and public sectors, in order to raise the funds necessary to make this a spectacular event,” he said.

The CCAC will be announcing the opening of booth, performing artist and special activities registrations over the next few months. For additional information about the 25th Annual Flame Tree Arts Festival, contact Hunter or festival coordinator Angel Hocog at 322-9982/3, or festival promotions chairperson Catherine Perry Anderson at 664-2576. (PR)