Domestic art festivals involve active cooperation from civilian artists, investment of association classified by different art genre, corporation sponsorship to start with.
In this case, the festival maintains its independency with ideal plans, ma...
Domestic art festivals involve active cooperation from civilian artists, investment of association classified by different art genre, corporation sponsorship to start with.
In this case, the festival maintains its independency with ideal plans, management, and performance selection and such festival includes; Keochang International Festival of Theatre, Chuncheon International Mime Festival and Seoul International Dance Festival. The festivals can maintain their unique color when investment within different genre of arts is active, positive cooperation from artists, continuous and independent programme development and by adhering to specialty of gentre.
Unlike any other local festivals, Keochang International Festival of Theatre (KIFT) has been well established and maintained its identity for 22 years as one of the largest theatre festival. This was possible as the festival was not leaded by the government but by private art organization with passion.
Also, without the art director’s philosophy on the festival and practical arrangement of artistic values, this would not be possible. The permanent organization that is fully in charge of the festival itself has already been launched as a corporation aggregate in 2001, and showed relatively stable organizational management. Thus, this became the foundation for the festival to maintain its unique color whilst maintaining the vision and directivity of the art director.
Since 1989, KIFT has been established as a representative of domestic outdoor theatre festivals under the broad topics of nature, man, and drama. KIFT was the grand prize recipient for National Threatre and Arts Department selected by the Ministry of Culture, sports and Tourism. In a natural environment ‘Suseungdae’, one of the foremost tourist attractions, KIFT supplied fresh ideas and found a means of escape in a state where the outdoor threatre in Korean Art is nothing more than a cultural wasteland. KIFT where rapid growths were repeated, total attendance at the festival has topped more than 140 thousand which is the twice of the local population. By maintain this achievements, this festival has been evaluated as an exemplary event to many local theatre festivals and has proved the possibility of the agriculture and fishery development into resort city of culture.
Yet, due to set period of the festival and limited outdoor theater, the scale of the festival in the last few years showed no growth but tied-up. Despite of high increase in ticket sales and total attendance present (including both free and charged audience) every year, the main reason as to why the scale of the festival is fixed is that Suseungdae, the festival site, has reached the saturation state. Henceforth, to be able to gain continuous growth capacity, KIFT should seek for new festival site other than Suseungdae and improve further from there.
In addition, KIFT has started in a form of indoor theater festival carried out by local theatre companies, and from the 10th KIFT in 1998, as it changed into outdoor performance, current performing arts festival was established and found the characteristics of culture and tourism festival. This is attributed to the spatial, environmental characteristics of the main festival site ‘Suseungdae’; KIFT is performing arts festival as well as ‘the TourFest’, and is deployed into admixed form with the characteristic of local festival.
The reason why the current state of KIFT is analyzed and derived its measures, Thus, this investigation found most suitable to draw future direction and strategy to set the basic status required for national art festivals and the tour festivals to grow further into worldwide festival brands.
In this paper, a case study of overseas advanced festivals and current state of the similar domestic performing arts festivals were examined. Also, the background and the history of KIFT, a term status and various facilities were analyzed. Furthermore, Analysis on the most recently conducted survey of visitor’s satisfaction and through long term roadmap, most suitable future direction were searched for KIFT that is inviting twenty-third years of conduct. For this matter, internal and external publications and various papers and reports were referenced, Depend on the festival’s objectives and the principal components, and difference in goals and aim of various arts, tour and the local festivals, wide range of literatures were cited, examined, compared and contrasted to draw individuals’ issues and themes.
As a long-term development plan of KIFT, and to sum up the development plan as a local festival, it requires theatre centered revitalization of local community sub festival development focused on the local residents, development of professional human resources within Keochang region, investment and production of creative work based on the cultural, historical resources and background of Geochang and lastly the specialized production of <World Premiere Play> for creative contents development and systematic human infrastructure through Geochang Drama School Lastly, the development plan as a performing art festival include continuous investigation on festival sites using natural resources in environmentally friendly outdoor theater and constructing new indoor theater for future use. Also, security and expansion of infrastructure and complementary facilities within Suseungdae is one of them. To perform all the necessities, it is crucial to form consortium, centered by Keochang Theatre Festival development association Ltd, the provider of KIFT, and that includes the relationship authority and sponsorship with Geochang-Gun, Kyongsang-Namdo, and the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. Also, it must include supporters’ organization from general business to large companies.
With the art industries as a base foundation, sub analysis for the study should discuss the different methods of local governance formation which could produce cyclic synergy where community, organisation and education departments work together for the best outcome. The value-chain of this cultural enterprise will cover the network configuration of regional cultures which includes Geochang area and furthermore, the schemes that will go beyond the local region should be considered; the region may include Chinju, Daegu, Gwangju, Gwangju, Chonju and Ch'angwon