Festival Stories

The Restaurant Tours: Featuring Bun Lai, Miya's Sushi

Here’s a little pre-tour teaser and a sample of what the edible journey I am going to be taking people on will be like:  People often ask me what I do and my simple answer is sushi, but if I have a few minutes and I sense that they want to hear it from me, this is how I explain it:  In my cuisine, I use the technique of sushi as a medium to delve into ideas of what it is to be human. For example, to create my "Tyger Tyger Burning Bright Roll," I asked myself, "If sushi were to have been invented somewhere else what might have it been...

Lucille Bruce
Staff member at IRIS
Refugees in the '09 Festival This year, the Yale Summer Film Institute, International Festival of Arts & Ideas, and IRIS (Integrated Refugee & Immigrant Services, a local non-profit), joined forces to produce The Future Will Be Possible: Documentary Films on Today's Refugees June 13-14 at the Whitney Humanities Center. As a staff member at IRIS, I'm working with Charlie Musser, Yale Film Studies professor and director of the Yale Summer Film Institute, and Festival staff on this series of powerful, thought-provoking films that tell a few modern-day refugee...

Where History Has Been Written: the Budapest Katona József Theatre
Anna Lengyel

             After the suppressed revolution of 1956, Hungarian cultural politics realized the necessity of allowing a few tiny leaks in an otherwise densely woven web of censorship. One such example was the predecessor of Katona József Theatre, which later became its most-devoted ally: the provincial Kaposvár Theatre, where a young theatremaker named Gábor Zsámbéki was made artistic and managing director (two functions usually filled by the same person in most Hungarian theatres until recently) and where a still...

Click here to read the feature story by Christopher Arnott about the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, "the festival that helps us cope with reality".

Click here to watch preview videos or find out more about Circus, Buckwheat Zydeco & Slavic Soul Party!, Really Real, Mavis Staples, The Good Dance-dakar/brooklyn, Robert Farris Thompson, Frank McCourt & Rose Styron, Jill Abramson, Favorite Poem Project Community Reading with Robert Pinsky, Kelly Brownell, Alex Ross, Jonah Lehrer, Miguel Zenón, Tania Libertad, and Rupa & The April Fishes.

Click here to purchase tickets online.

Richard Colton
Really Real post-discussion moderator*

I'm thrilled about my first visit to this great Festival. I love that the visceral excitement that the Festival's performances seem to inevitably generate is complimented daily by reflection and scholarship in all kinds of panels and discussions before and after these performances. If I could duplicate a Festival this would be it! Arts & Ideas has great performances night after night and highlights the fact that these performances can be disseminated as thought. No small feat and one I find ideal and of critical importance.

I can't think...

by Kate McEvoy
Festival Enthusiast and active participant

The 2009 Festival is only 5 days away. I can hardly wait. I'm sure that you feel the same.

What a sense of anticipation is aroused by the Festival. Yes, the area around the Green has lulled somewhat now that Yale has released its campus for the summer. Temple Street, again flowing through, is pretty serene. Concert halls are still, and the Long Wharf Theater will soon be resting in an interval from its regular season.

But all around, there are both traces of Festivals past, and a gathering of energies toward the next. So soon it will...

Click here to read the article by New Haven Register Arts Editor Donna Doherty about the U.S. Premiere of "Circus" at the International Festival of Arts & Ideas.

Click here to watch a preview video of Circus.

Click here to purchase tickets online.

Raymond Keane
Artistic Director of Barabbas Theatre Company
And creator and director of CIRCUS

I'd like to start by answering the question I ask myself almost on a daily basis which is, "Why do I do what I do, or, why do I make theatre?" And the only answer I can truly give is "Because I have to!" Making theatre is what I am. Being a clown is who I am. At the core of all that I am and do is the sublime discipline of Theatre of Clown. What is clown? For me the clown mirrors all of humanity, in all its joy, love, beauty, truth, vulnerability, gullibility and failure, with all our bumps,...

Executive Director Mary Lou Aleskie was featured on WTNH News Channel 8, discussing the Festival's effort to be more conscious of its environmental footprint.

Click here to watch the video clip.

Click here to make an online donation to the Festival.

Celebrate this year’s Festival theme, Global Identities/Local Heroes,
with Festival staff at the 2009 Festival Launch Party! There will be
drink specials provided by New Haven’s “Best New Bar” (2009 New Haven
Advocate Readers’ Poll), Festival prizes, and fun with KC 101.3FM,
southern Connecticut's number one hit music station:

Thursday, June 4, 2009

4pm-11pm

Lansdowne Bar & Grill, 179 Crown Street, New Haven

Free (no cover charge).

To kick off the summer travel season, USA Today's Travel staff tracked down free events and attractions in every state (and the District of Columbia). The International Festival of Arts & Ideas is featured as the "Travel Destination" in Connecticut.

Click here to read the article.

Click here to watch a preview video of Slavic Soul Party! or read about the Ideas panel with Kenji Yoshino.

Cathy Edwards
Director of Programming

May 8, 2009

I went to Sprague Hall this past Sunday, May 3, to hear Concerti Grossi of the Baroque, performed by music students working with Robert Mealy, director of the Yale Collegium. The concert this past Sunday featured music by Vivaldi, Handel and Bach. Robert was a very dynamic and engaged leader of the ensemble, and this was the first time I had seen or heard the "natural horn" (the valveless horn that is the predecessor to today's horn), which was part of the Water Music suite by Handel.

Robert is working with the Festival to put together the...