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Enlighten Canberra is an outdoor annual art and cultural festival held in Canberra featuring illuminating light installations and projections, performances from local and interstate musicians, dining and film events. The festival is an Australian Capital Territory (ACT) Government initiative held annually in early March, encouraging people to "See Canberra in a whole new light." The centrepiece of Enlighten Canberra is the illuminating of Canberra's cultural institutions after dark, including Old Parliament House, Questacon and the National Gallery of Australia. There is also live music, film screenings and after-hours tours. Since its inception, Enlighten has become increasingly popular, attracting 115,000 visitors in 2013, and 131,500 in 2014, despite poor weather. Attendance rose again in 2015, to 287,874 visitors. ==History of the event== The beginnings of Enlighten could be said to be 2008, when ACT Labor made an election promise to deliver a new autumn event for Canberra. In December 2010, Andrew Barr, ACT Minister for Tourism, Sport and Recreation, announced Enlighten would be a major annual event, commencing in March 2011. In its first year, along with other events, Enlighten hosted rock band INXS, jazz guitarist George Benson, and world-music supergroup Afro Celt Sound System. To help promote Enlighten, INXS arrived in Canberra in a helicopter, landing on the lawns of Old Parliament House two weeks before their concert appearance. INXS band member Kirk Pengilly told reporters that the show planned for Enlighten 2011 was "probably the biggest production that we've put on at any show in Australia." Despite the big-ticket performances and media stunts, the inaugural festival cost $2.4 million, and there was poor community interest, with just 8600 visitors. The first Enlighten did however attract 2400 visitors from interstate or overseas who came to Canberra specifically for Enlighten or extended their stay because of it. In its second year, Enlighten was made a part of the Canberra Festival. The merging of the festivals was met with criticism from the Canberra Liberals, with Brendan Smyth describing the Labor Government's attempt to create a new festival as "embarrassing". The Enlighten entertainment lineup featured in the 2012 event was scaled back significantly from the 2011 event to instead feature local Canberra artists. Of the nearly 100 artists contracted to perform in the 2012 festival, 53 per cent were local artists, paid 11.5 per cent of the Enlighten programming budget that year. In 2013, Enlighten hosted a spiegeltent, which put on dozens of shows featuring comics, acrobats and musicians. The festival also included Canberra's first Dîner en Blanc, a pop-up picnic in which all guests dress in white and bring their own food, table, table-setting and chair. More than 700 people attended the picnic, the third Dîner en Blanc to be held in Australia. Dîner en Blanc was repeated in 2014, with over 800 people attending, but the dinner was not included as part of Enlighten 2015. For its first five years, Enlighten has been coordinated by Electric Canvas. Electric Canvas's managing director Peter Milne has also worked on the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games and the 2006 Melbourne Commonwealth Games. In November 2014, the ACT Government announced the Night Noodle Markets would be coming to Canberra during the Enlighten Festival in 2015. ACT Tourism Minister Andrew Barr told media that Canberra's Night Noodle Markets were expected to host up to 25 hawker style food stalls, and that the ACT Government had committed $200,000 to bring the 2015 noodle markets to the city. Around 156,000 peoples visited the inaugural Enlighten Night Noodle Markets—of whom 24,000 visited on the opening night, far exceeding expectations. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Enlighten Canberra」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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