From this year onwards, ICAF is not only international in its festival programming, but also in the very heart of the organisation. We’d like to introduce you to our third and final guest curator: Bonnie Chan. Bonnie is a theatre practitioner, performer and researcher originally from Hong Kong and currently based in London. Get to know her by reading the short interview with our assistant programmer below.
Jasmina Ibrahimovic: What are your artistic and social criteria for community arts?
Bonnie Chan: I always think that the idea of change is essential in a good community arts project. The change can take place on the level of the individual, for example for a person who participated in the project, or on the level of the society. This level I believe to be more important, since the impact can be bigger and more sustainable. The change can be either good or bad; of course we don’t want to see a negative change, but who knows what good things can be derived from it later on.
JI: How do you imagine your role as ICAF guest curator?
BC: I’m feeling a bit nervous to be frank, because this is the first time that I am in such a role. However, I’m already expecting some miraculous chemistry to happen between all the different people and art forms! I’m also glad that this time we’re hopefully bringing more artists and communities from Asia to ICAF, including those from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and Korea! I think I will learn a lot from each one of them as well, and it will be a great experience for us all. ICAF is an amazing event where people coming from different parts of the world meet, exchange and share experiences of how the arts change them and their communities. This is also a chance for us to gather the power of the arts to bring change in a broader sense: not only in our own local communities, but to the world. I do believe that we all want to change the world with arts!
Read more about all three of our guest curators of ICAF 2017 here.