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Last year, London had its inagural Moon Festival, a cosmological tribute to all things lunar expressed through music, art and literature. The 2020 edition has been eclipsed by the lockdown, but there is an online offering: The Canadian Moon Festival, an exploration of ‘Canadian Culture and the Moon’. Why Canada? We’re guessing that’s because it’s sponsored by the High Commission of Canada in the UK.
So what’s on the programme? There’s an interview with science journalist Alanna Mitchell about the relationship between the moon and the world’s oceans and a performance from opera singer Janet Fischer. But the headliner is a brand new moon-themed fable from Canadian author Margaret Atwood, who gave the opening address at the London Moon Festival in 2019. You can listen to the first part of the story, ‘The Full Moon Mall’ here. Part 2 will be released on the closing day of the festival, August 3.
It’s all fairly indefinable and fragmented (then, the interesting festivals often are). As Atwood said in her opening speech at that first London Moon Fest, ‘a venerable tradition may indeed have been established right here, before your very eyes... or, it might not’.