ENG-1956 — Page 308

Chapter 20: Arts

THE Hong Kong Festival of the Arts, 1956, again an out- standing event in the life of the Colony, followed the same general pattern as last year, being divided into the same four sections: Drama, Music, Literature and the Visual Arts with many new events in each. The souvenir programme lists twenty seven societies participating in the Festival-eleven dramatic societies, six music groups, two literature groups and eight organizations in the visual arts section-a repre- sentative cross-section of cultural activities in the arts in the Colony.

Western and Chinese drama, music, painting and other cultural activities played their part in this Second Festival of the Arts, and the various groups, while they retained their own individuality, worked harmoniously together to make the Festival achieve its aim of showing what Hong Kong is doing, successfully and continuously, in the arts. Some 60,000 people, including older students from the schools, visited the Festival Centre, a temporary structure on the Central Reclamation lent by the Chinese Manufacturers' Union. At this centre were housed exhibitions of European and Chinese art. Chinese antiquities and classical and modern paintings occupied the ground floor, the Hong Kong Art Club and the Photographic Society shared the first floor, and the Handicraft and Painting Exhibitions of Hong Kong Schools organized by the Education Department occupied the second floor. The drama programme on the English side makes impressive reading, including 'Othello' very suc- cessfully staged at the Lee Theatre, Priestley's 'Desert Highway', Somerset Maugham's 'The Circle' and the performance by the University group, the Masquers, of Dryden's 'The Secular Masque' and Milton's 'Comus'.