Exciting Eisteddfod showcases astounding Zim talent

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This year’s Eisteddfod has been particularly exciting, culminating today with the junior highlights concert at 11am at the Harare International School theatre.

This year’s Eisteddfod has been particularly exciting, culminating today with the junior highlights concert at 11am at the Harare International School theatre.

By Rosie Mitchell

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The event follows last night’s final concert and awards ceremony at the same venue. The National Institute of Allied Arts (NIAA) launched a Facebook group last year, and this has really taken off, especially since the 2016 vocal and instrumental festival began last month. The page has provided an easy and popular medium for sharing information, reviews, photos and video clips of some of the action and performances at the festival. In particular, videos of some of the marimba challenge, one of the highlight events of the festival every year, have attracted much attention, and one of these clips actually went viral. At time of writing, the clip had been viewed over 3,7 million times globally. As interest in this escalated, so several other clips from this event and others have attracted a large amount of interest, and their Facebook statistics have also rocketed daily. So if you love to support and follow arts, especially our budding Zimbabweans artists, as they rise through the ranks and attain proficiency in their chosen genres, join the NIAA Group (www.facebook.com/groups/niaazim) and share in some of the fun and excitement of this and other NIAA festivals.

Artistic talent abounds in this country, and the Eisteddfod and other festivals to follow — Speech and Drama in July as well as Visual Arts and Literary in September — provide an important platform, launching pad and measure of progress in the study and mastery of artistic skills across the spectrum of disciplines for children from a very young age, right up into adulthood.

International pop singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and music producer Ryan Koriya — one of this year’s Eisteddfod adjudicators — is a fine example of a young Zimbabwean who grew up on the NIAA stage. He was already participating in the Speech and Drama Festival by the age of eight and was on the Prince Edward School Beit Hall stage performing solo in the honours concert at 10. He went on to study violin and cello on scholarship at the Zimbabwe College of Music, and then to teach strings and guitars at various Harare high schools, including Arundel, Chisipite, Prince Edward, Eaglesvale, St John’s College, St Georges and Harare International School.

Ryan returned this year to adjudicate at the Eisteddfod for the third time. Since his last adjudication stint in 2012, he has performed solo in 10 countries on four continents, including with well-known rock band Mann Friday, in itself a superb Zimbabwean success story, at the famous Glastonbury Festival last year. He is currently based in Victoria Falls recording new solo material before going on tour again. He delivered a well-attended and enjoyable Eisteddfod performance workshop last weekend at Prince Edward entitled, Learn How to Set Any Stage Alight.