2022-01-26

Theatre Festival postponed until October

Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

Organizers of the Liverpool International Theatre Festival have postponed the biennial in-person event yet again due to the current wave of COVID-19.

Organizers made the announcement Jan. 19, saying the event will now be held Oct. 13-16, rather than the previously scheduled dates of May 12-15. The in-person event, which was last held in 2018, had been scheduled for 2020, but it has since been postponed a couple of times.

"The past 22 months have been challenging for everybody," LITF chairperson Jean Robinson-Dexter said in a news release. "Based on this current wave and the uncertainty of when we can be fully open as a community, we felt we could not hold the festival in May."

Robinson-Dexter later added in an email to LighthouseNOW, "We're hopeful by that time, we will have the ability to safely have full houses in the theatre, international travel will be a smooth process and our hosts will be comfortable having our troupe members in their homes."

Despite the change in dates, organizers still anticipate that the second biennial LITF Virtual Short Cuts festival will be held next year as scheduled, and at this point "we're still determining when we will have the next in-person festival," said Robinson-Dexter.

Theatre groups from Algeria, Belgium, Virginia, Maryland, Greece, Uganda, Italy, Malawi, Egypt, Morocco, Ontario and the country of Georgia were invited to the 2020 festival, and it's expected that they will be in Liverpool in October.

The festival, the only one of its kind in Eastern Canada, has attracted thousands of theatre-goers from across the U.S. and Canada since its debut in 1992.