Reykjavik Arts Festival (RAF) is not cancelled. While COVID-19 has postponed it, organisers have said, “will deliver its programme – even if it takes a full year to do so.”
“RAF has now made an agreement with all of its artists, partner institutions and venues to launch the full programme of the festival,” said RAF in a statement on its website.
The plan is to host all of the performances once the lockdown is over, whenever it is possible to do so. Its entire programme has been posted online, but without any confirmed dates. Instead, RAF have made a mailing list for each event so that you can hear when a show you’re interested in gets scheduled.
Highlights from the programme are a new work by Anna Thorvaldsdottir that takes place in a planetarium with visuals from Sigurdur Gudjonsson; Sun & Sea (Marina), an opera by Lina Lapelyte that won the Golden Lion at Venice Biennale 2019; a performance of Damon Albarn’s project The Nearer the Fountain, More Pure the Stream Flows; and Australian circus troupe A Simple Space’s show Gravity & Other Myths.
Organisers added that this year’s theme is ‘world’, “which feels highly fitting at these strange times we live in.”