The Edinburgh International Festival will welcome audiences back to live performance with temporary outdoor pavilions throughout the city this summer:
We are thrilled to announce our reimagined Festival for 2021, marking the return of live performance to Scotland’s capital city after over a year of silenced theatres and concert halls.
Taking place from 7 to 29 August, the 2021 International Festival will use bespoke, temporary outdoor pavilions in iconic, easily accessible spaces throughout the city to safely reunite our artists and audiences to rediscover the magic of live performance.
Our temporary outdoor pavilions, found at three locations including Edinburgh Park and the University of Edinburgh’s Old College Quad, will feature covered concert stages and socially distanced seating to create a beautiful setting for audiences to safely enjoy live music, opera and theatre once more.
The health and safety of the entire Festival community is at the heart of our plans for this year’s festival. That’s why we are working with the Scottish Government, City of Edinburgh Council and other relevant authorities to implement appropriate Covid safety measures.
These will include shorter performances with no intervals, physical distancing, regular cleaning and contactless ticketing.
We will publish full details of our security and safety measures in the coming months.
While we are looking forward to the prospect of bringing the Festival City to life once more, we appreciate that not everyone will be able to attend our performances in person this year.
To ensure that everyone can enjoy a slice of the magic, wherever they are in the world, we will release a selection of high-quality streamed performances, free of charge, during each week of the Festival.
Since Edinburgh’s summer festivals in 2020 were officially cancelled a year ago, we have received extraordinary support from so many people.
As our Festival Director Fergus Linehan says, “We are hugely grateful to the artists who have agreed to come on this journey with us, the stakeholders, donors, and sponsors who have stood by us through a tough year and our audiences who have cheered us along throughout. We look forward to sharing full details of the programme in early June.”
Full details of our 2021 programme, which spans opera, orchestral and chamber music, theatre and contemporary music, will be announced on Wednesday 2 June.
Priority booking for International Festival members opens on Tuesday 1 June before general booking opens on Friday 11 June.
Welcome Back
We are delighted to announce that in August 2021, the Edinburgh International Festival will return to live performance.
Connecting with others is more crucial now than ever. For that reason, we have continued to engage with communities across Edinburgh and further afield during the pandemic, bringing performances and opportunities to schools, families and socially isolated people. These projects are an integral part of the International Festival’s identity, and we will continue them and expand their scope as 2021 progresses.
We are proud of the streamed and broadcast works we have brought you over the past year. These projects have helped us experiment and evolve, and they will continue as a vital element in our work and engagement. But a Festival is at its heart a gathering, a celebration of community and shared purpose. The time is right to take the first careful steps back to live performance.
We are hugely grateful to the artists who are coming on this journey with us; to the stakeholders, donors and sponsors who have stood by us through a tough year; and to our audiences who have cheered us along throughout. We are excited by the prospect of seeing you all at the 2021 Edinburgh International Festival.
Welcome back to your Festival!
The International Festival team
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