Announcing Half Moon Festival: Online, from Cork

It’s a proper summer. The sun is shining. Beaches are open again. It’s RAG Week: Icebergers Edition.All in all, a great summer for festivals to be literally illegal.Fortunately, Half Moon Festival will be here to fill that gap in the last days of June. Named after the road next to the Crawford Art Gallery and springing out of UCC, the festival was originally to be a live event but now moves online. It’s a good thing that it’s still on, because there’s a lot to love about the lineup:There’s an eclectic range of artists, ranging from podcasts to stand-up comedy as Gaeilge to experimental drone/trad act Trá Pháidín. No matter your personal taste, there’s something to be found here: From just the music side of things, all the featured artists are worth delving into before the shows. We’ll be putting up some exclusive coverage of the event on this website, so stay tuned.To find more details, check out the festival’s website, halfmoonfest.com (not to be confused with halfmoonfestival.com, which is a biweekly techno festival set in Koh Phangan, Thailand.) Events will be primarily be hosted on the website from June 26^th-28^th.The press release follows:About Half Moon Festival:Tús Nua is delighted to announce, Half Moon Festival, a multi-disciplinary arts festival premiering online from Friday June 26th to Sunday June 28th 2020. The Festival takes its name from Cork’s Half Moon Street, a thoroughfare that provides access from Cork’s City Centre and Lavitt’s Quay to the cultural quarter housing both the Crawford Gallery and the Cork Opera House. Inspired by this creative energy and the way in which Half Moon Street acts as a bridge between everyday life and the cultural spaces that are central to Cork, Half Moon Festival aims to celebrate different perspectives, to embrace connection and creativity, and to platform collaborative work between artists.How the festival came about:Initially conceived as a week-long festival as part of our studies for the MA in Arts Management and Creative Producing at UCC, Half Moon Festival was due to be launched on March 26th in The Kino with events taking place in various venues in April including The Green Room (Cork Opera House) and other venues in Cork City.Half Moon Festival launch:As a group of producers, we feel very fortunate to have had the opportunity to move our diverse programme of artistic work online. Details of the Festival and the lineup of events will launch on June 16th on our website, and we invite you to join us in our website launch ahead of the Festival at www.halfmoonfest.com at 12pm tomorrow.Half Moon Festival 26th – 28th JunePlease take the time to explore our website which serves as the main performance venue for the Festival, with events including music, dance, poetry, theatre, film, comedy, podcasts and panel discussions, socially engaged artwork, Irish language arts, visual art and sound art.Half Moon Festival aims to showcase new artistic partnerships, collaborations and events that cross artforms as well as revisiting collaborations and innovations that have forged new creative beginnings and connections between communities in the past. Through our programme and with an eclectic lineup of artists, we want to celebrate difference and different perspectives, to share our experiences of art and creativity, to invite audiences to celebrate the fun and joyous moments that art offers, and to provide an antidote to the detached living of the present day. In doing this, we are thrilled to support the work of our artists during this time when the artistic community is grappling with the fall out of the pandemic.We are very excited to present this programme of work as our producing debut, and we invite audiences everywhere to connect with us and with each other at this crucial moment when physical interaction does not define our sense of connection to community in as much as our commitment to keeping the energy of exchange alive. Stay tuned to the University Express for more coverage of Half Moon Festival over the coming weeks.