The Eighth China Art Festival will be held in Hubei Province on November 5-20, the Ministry of Culture and Hubei provincial government jointly announced the news on Wednesday.

The China Art Festival is the highest-class and largest art festival in China.

The main hall for the art festival will be set in Wuhan, while several branch halls for the art festival will be set in Yichang, Huangshi, Xiangfan, Jingmen, and E'zhou. The festival's opening ceremony will be held in Wuhan and the closing ceremony will be held in Yichang.

About 54 stage dramas will compete for the Wenhua Award during the festival -- an all-time high. All these stage dramas are considered as fines works produced in recent years. They include 3 Peking operas, 3 Kunqu operas, 11 stage plays, 3 modern operas, 3 musicals, 7 dance dramas, 14 local operas, 4 children's plays, and 6 evening parties with acrobatics and song and dance performances. In addition to the stage dramas that will compete for awards, there will be 20 stage plays that are performed to celebrate the festival. Also, ten orchestral symphonies from foreign countries, including the Radio-Symphonie Orchestra Berlin, and stage troupes from Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan will also be invited to give performances during the festival.

The first China Art Festival was held in Beijing in 1987. Since then, the art festival has been successfully held in places like Yunnan, Gansu, Sichuan, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang.
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(Chinanews.cn July 27, 2007)