Arts festival

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An arts festival is a festival that can encompass a wide range of art forms including music, dance, film, fine art, literature, poetry and is not solely focused on visual arts. Arts festivals may feature a mixed program that include music, literature, comedy, children's entertainment, science, or street theatre, and are typically presented in venues over a period of time ranging from as short as a day or a weekend to a month.^[1] Each event within the program is usually separate.

Arts festivals are largely curated by an artistic director who handles the organizations' artistic direction and can encompass different genres, including fringe theater festivals that are open access, making arts festivals distinctive from greenfield festivals, which typically are weekend camping festivals such as Glastonbury, and Visual Arts Festivals, which concentrate on the visual arts.

Another type of arts festivals are music festivals, which are outdoor musical events usually spanning a weekend, featuring a number of bands and musical genres including pop, rock, heavy-metal, and more. Since the 1960s, world-music festivals have become popular in a variety of countries. The most well-recognized music festival was Woodstock, which took place in 1969 in Bethel, New York. It was attended by 400,000 people and featured performances by The Who, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and the Grateful Dead.^[2][3]