Bali Culture Festival 2008

International events include :

1. the World Wayang Festival.
2. the All-ASEAN Ethnic Music Festival.
3. the Bali Cultural Congress.

National-scale events include :

1. The Java-Bali Student Arts Festival.
2. The Festival of Traditional Regional Artworks by members of Mitra Praja Utama.

The Bali Provincial Culture Office has announced that to date, 12 foreign arts groups and 20 provinces from Indonesia are scheduled to take part. Even so, the arts of Bali will still dominate a majority of the performances, with local artists from all eight regencies and one city in Bali – an estimated 12,000 artists during the five weeks.

The Culture Parade kicks off the Bali Culture Festival each year, at Puputan Margarana Square, Renon, Denpasar, right in front of the Monument of the Balinese People’s Struggle. Most of the other main events will take place at Taman Budaya Bali (Werdhi Budaya), better known locally by the English name Bali Arts Center.

The cultural parade that opens the Bali Culture Festival tends to be far better known to tourists than the five weeks of performances that follow at Taman Budaya. Tourists tend to neglect these performances; the audience is mostly Balinese. Although it is not meant purely as a tourist attraction, if you are alert, you can see a great variety of arts during these five weeks – art forms reconstructed from the past, innovative new creations, cultural attractions, and appreciation of local communities’ arts and culture. Aside from performing arts, there will also be exhibitions of products of small-scale industries and household handicrafts.