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Ticket sales at this year’s Standard Bank National Arts Festival “hit a new high, breaking the R7m mark for the first time.
Festival CEO Tony Lankester says in a statement that attendance grew by 6.5 percent compared to 2013, adding that this represented a growth of 21.4 percent over “a rolling five-year period.
He says street parades, a birthday celebration, an array of international performers from over 40 countries and over 2-thousand-800 performances in 11 days, had all contributed to a record 225 538 attendees at the Festival.
Lankester says the biggest growth in 2014 came from sales on the main programme which he said was largely attributable to an expanded programme aimed at commemorating the Festival’s 40th anniversary.
"We're very pleased with the figures we announced this year. It's a pleasing amount of growth that we had in the festival but more importantly I think the buzz, the vibe and the feeling on the streets of Grahamstown was among the best we've seen in recent years," Lankester said.
He added that while they did not do an economic impact study this year, as its something they wil be doing every second year, Lankester said "they're fairly confident that the economic impact of the Festival on both the GDP of the city and of the province will be much the same if not slightly higher than it was last year."
According to the findings of the first socio-economic study of the economic impact of the festival released last year, the report said the National Arts Festival contributed an estimated R349.9m to the economy of the City of Saints and the Eastern Cape province as a whole.
The study also found that visitors from outside the Province spend an additional R27.3m in the Province before and after they attend the event, and the Festival contributes an estimated R90m to the GDP of the City of Grahamstown through direct and indirect spend, job creation and tourism activity.
