The Brighton Festival is an annual arts festival which takes place in the city of Brighton and Hove in England each May. It was founded in 1966, and is the largest multi-art form festival in England.[1] The 2006 festival organised over 200 events during 23 days which were attended by over 500,000 people.
The festival includes organised processions such as the Children's Parade, outdoor spectaculars often involving pyrotechnics, and a great deal of theatre, music, literature and visual arts in venues throughout the city, some of which are brought into this use exclusively for the festival.
One feature of the festival is the Artists Open House concept, whereby artists and craftspeople literally open up their houses for the public to view or buy their work.
The Festival regularly commissions new work from companies such as DV8 Physical Theatre; 2006's Festival included the world premiere of new work by Stomp's Brighton-based creators, Yes/No Productions. It also encourages cross-fertilisation between different art forms, such as 2006's "Stories In Motion", a multimedia collaboration between Chuck Palahniuk, Irvine Welsh and Orbital's Phil Hartnoll. also 2006's "Warp Moves", a collaboration between artists from Warp Records and dancers from Random Dance.
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Since 2009, the festival has featured guest artistic directors: in that year, Anish Kapoor fulfilled the role,[2] followed in 2010 by Brian Eno[3] and in 2011 by Aung San Suu Kyi.[4]