Around Town

The traditional Chinese New Year celebrations have been brought under the umbrella of ‘China in London 2007’, which kicks off on Thursday at 4.45pm with a lantern-lighting ceremony at Oxford Circus. Now in its second year, this two-month festival of Chinese arts and culture embracing more than 100 events at venues all over London  is supported by Mayor Ken Livingstone, who has opened London offices in both Beijing and Shanghai to encourage more visitors from China to discover London’s charms.  

Timed to coincide with the capital’s celebrations for the start of the Year of the Pig, Chinatown Arts Festival: The Circle is a three-day showcase of British East Asian art at Royal Opera House Linbury Theatre in Covent Garden. Focusing on dance on Friday, theatre on Saturday and music on Sunday, there are performances in the evenings and family workshops each afternoon. The event will launch Chinatown Arts Space, a new charity initiative intended, eventually to provide British East Asian arts with their own home in the capital.‘A permanent venue, in or near Chinatown, is five years, if not longer, down the line,’ says creative director David KS Tse. ‘ The Chinese community is the third largest ethnic minority in this country but culturally it’s pretty much invisible. In the short term we want to address that’.

Tse’s plans for the coming year include a public competition for visual artists to produce sculptures for two sites in Chinatown. And this time next year he’d like to stage an event similar to the 2004 screening of ‘Battleship Potemkin’ with a live score by the Pet Shop Boys in Trafalgar Square by commissioning British-born Chinese band Chi2 to compose a live soundtrack for a classic silent Chinese movie.Meanwhile  at City Hall there’s an exhibition of 40 sculptures selected from hundreds made by local and international artists in China in response to a competition for work designed to depict the spirit of the Olympic and Paralympic Games.