Virginia Arts Festival

The tradition & historical record

The Virginia Arts Festival is a Norfolk-based non-profit arts presenter which serves southeastern Virginia, offering dozens of performances during the spring and throughout the year. Virginia Arts Festival performances have included international ballet companies, along with modern, contemporary, and ethnic dance companies; world-renowned soloists and ensembles in musical genres including classical, jazz, world, folk, rock, blues, bluegrass, country, and pop; opera; theater and cabaret; and collaborative productions with local arts organizations like the Virginia Symphony Orchestra. ¹

The City of Norfolk and a group of arts patrons, seeking to increase local tourism during the spring "shoulder season," approached Robert W. Cross in 1995 to create a performing arts festival that would serve as a cultural destination for the region. Cross produced the first Virginia International Waterside Arts Festival in 1997, presenting an 18-day festival featuring such performers as Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra, the Mark Morris Dance Group, contemporary composer/performer Steve Reich, and jazz legends Ramsey Lewis and Billy Taylor. The 1997 Festival also saw the creation of the first Virginia International Tattoo, an international display of military bands, drill teams, and pipe and drum corps. After four successful years, in 2001 the name was officially changed to the Virginia Arts Festival. The Washington Post has called the Virginia Arts Festival the "Tidewater Tanglewood." From a two-week festival in its first year, the festival has tripled in size and attendance. In 2016, the Virginia Arts Festival celebrated its 20th Anniversary season, presenting 72 ticketed performances throughout the region from mid-April through June, with patrons traveling from 49 states and 13 countries. ¹

Reaching tens of thousands of students every year, the Virginia Arts Festival offers year-round arts education programs, presenting special student matinee performances and aligning visiting performing artists with area schools for master classes, in-school workshops, and demonstrations. According to their 2016 Annual Report, the organization's education programs reached 39,644 area school children during the 2015–16 season. ¹

The Festival's John Duffy Institute for New Opera seeks out and supports the work of opera composer/librettist teams by providing professional mentorship and a professional process for the development of their new work, with the intent to see the works through to full productions. In May, 2016, the Festival will present the world premiere of Kept: a ghost story, a world premiere performances of the new opera Kept: a ghost story, at Norfolk's Attucks Theatre. Created by composer Kristin Kuster and librettist Megan Levad, the work was developed over a three-year process through the Duffy Institute. Additional new operas are currently in the development phase and will receive their premieres in 2018 and beyond. In addition to its commissions through the Duffy Institute, the Virginia Arts Festival has commissioned 18 works of music, dance, and opera: ¹

Brahms Variations - In 2016 the Virginia Arts Festival commissioned a new work from Dance Theatre of Harlem in honor of the Festival's 20th season. ¹

Virginia Arts Festival performances have been recorded for the Naxos label, including the Festival-commissioned song cycle by Rappahannock County, Stravinsky's Les Noces and The Soldier's Tale, and the Schoenberg transcriptions of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde and Songs of a Wayfarer. Additionally, the Festival's presentation of Peter and the Wolf: A Special Report was recorded for NPR Classics. ¹

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Virginia Arts Festival”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. ¹

Virginia Arts Festival is recorded in open cultural data. The structured record cited below does not describe the practice, and this entry has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. ²

The source record links this tradition to 2 external registers, which can be verified through the citation. ²