What's on: Mintfest, Kendal, September 2 to 4 (From The Westmorland Gazette)

What's on: Mintfest, Kendal, September 2 to 4

1:30pm Friday 2nd September 2011 in Cumbria news By Adrian Mullen, Arts correspondent

Kendal's Mintfest International Festival of Street Arts starts tonight.

Now in its fifth year, the acclaimed international street arts festival boasts a world-class line-up of around 150 outdoor entertainers all with one notion in mind - to fill Kendal with an intoxicating mix of dance, comedy, music, drama and magic.

The final event in the Lakes Alive 2011 programme, one of this year’s Mintfest highlights is the Garden of Delights – bursting with performance, art and surprises, and transforming Noble’s Rest at Maude Street on the Friday and Saturday evening (7pm-11pm) into a fantasy land.

Described as a ‘pleasure garden for the 21st century’ the mix of acts and experiences, includes dancer and choreographer Ziya Azazi, who hails from Turkey, and famed for blending contemporary and traditional dance styles in mesmerising fashion.

Another stunning Mintfest spectacle will be created by Company Ecart, which present Chin Chilla, an incredible cinematographic dance piece performed in Kendal's Drill Hall on Queen Katherine Street on the Friday and Saturday (9pm), fusing real and virtual video images with live performance to create a striking visual show.

The Brewery hosts Piaf - a Mint Room Cabaret night on the Friday (10.30pm), which celebrates the music of legendary French chanteuse Edith Piaf, and there’s plenty going on in the arts centre’s Mint Garden on the Friday night and over the weekend.

And let’s not forget Mintfest on the Streets, where the hilarious and downright wacky perform across the town from noon on Saturday, 1pm Sunday.

Finally, the massive Mintfest climax - As The World Tipped, by Wired Aerial Theatre, on Sunday night at Abbot Hall Park (8.30pm), ingeniously combining dramatic video visuals with a breathtaking aerial performance to tell the story of a world hurtling towards an ecological disaster.

Excited at the prospect of a terrific Mintfest, Julie Tait, director of Kendal Arts International, which creates Lakes Alive with Manchester International Arts, said it would “amaze, thrill and captivate audiences of all ages.”

She added: “We’re delighted to have signed up some of the world’s very best outdoor performers to appear and we’ve introduced new venues and performance spaces that promise to make Mintfest 2011 streets ahead.”

Lakes Alive tweets

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* Mintfest takes place across Kendal from Friday, September 2 to Sunday, September 4. For more information, click on the links below.