See it, feel it, do it

In Chinese, the character 觉 (jue in pinyin), means to feel, to sense and to awaken. And the Jue Festival does exactly that, bringing people together to experience something unique. Turning four years old, the annual music and arts extravaganza offers Shanghai and Beijing audiences a three-week long festival.

"There is so much inspiration and creativity here. It's about everything coming together," said Abby Lavin, the marketing and media manager of Split Works, the festival organizer. In Shanghai, the Jue Festival this year lasts from March 9 to 25, with more than 40 groups or artists performing at some 25 venues.

Scottish inspiration

Lavin said that the idea behind Jue came from the founder of Split Works, Scots-born Archie Hamilton who drew inspiration from the annual Edinburgh Fringe Festival. He hopes that Jue can also achieve international recognition in the same way one day. "The Fringe Festival is a collective event, and set a template for Jue," said Lavin. "Every year artists are selected to come to China for the festival, and it gives them a great platform for promoting their works here."

The Jue Festival is "open-source," which means people in artistic communities, including musicians, theater groups, galleries, artists and curators, can also organize their own events as part of the festival. "Instead of organizing every single event, we would rather it be a community festival. We organize maybe half of all the events, and for the other half, we help brainstorm about them and then help promote them," said Lavin.

Hosting about 15 events in Shanghai in its first year in 2009, the festival has been steadily building up its profile, attracting 32,000 people to 91 events in the two cities last year. This year the scale will be slightly smaller, however. "Of course we always have really great events and partners, but this year we would like pay more attention to quality instead of quantity. This means the audience will have a more manageable calendar," said Lavin.