The British Council’s Festival Management Training Programme in Vietnam, phase 2  

 Following the first training workshop in Hanoi in March on ‘awareness of arts festival organisation within a Vietnamese context’, the British Council has successfully organised the 2nd workshop on festival programming and production in Hue in June 2010 for potential Vietnamese festival producers and directors.

The workshop, led by UK festival director Nick Dodds and Ary Sutedja, Director of JakArt, Indonesia, looked at how the Hue Festival is prepared and delivered. Using ‘Behind the Scenes’ format, every morning, in the heat of 40 degree Celsius, all workshop’s participants started their day with visits to the festival sites to meet with the festival staff, to observe the set up and rehearsals; in the afternoon when the heat was getting unbearable, they got together to discuss about programming, production and technical aspects of festival delivery and festival developments. Each day of workshop often finished at night when people came back from the festival performances.   

During the workshop, the participants also discussed about how contemporary arts festivals in Vietnam might develop over the next few years and how to make critical assessment of contemporary performance.

‘After this workshop, we will divide into 3 groups and each will develop our own imaginary festival, using the knowledge we learnt at the workshop. Of course, we all hope we are able to make it happen in the real life. This workshop has been extremely useful for me, and I am really looking forward to the next one’ said by one of the workshop’s participants- Ms The Thanh, General Director of Saigon Media.

This is part of the three year capacity-building programme on ‘Arts Festival Management’ co-organised by the British Council Vietnam and the Ministry of Culture, Sports & Tourism of Vietnam which aims to strengthen festival management skills for Vietnamese arts promoters and festival organisers and to create links between festivals in the UK and Vietnam. The program includes a series of workshops on arts festival management in every three months and a series of wrap-around events to showcase UK and Vietnamese arts to audiences of the two countries.

The first training workshop in the series was held in Hanoi in March 2010 with the participation of arts promoters and festival organisers from Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Quang Ninh, Khanh Hoa, Hue, and Binh Thuan.