The triennial China Arts Festival, the country's top arts and culture gala, was unveiled here Friday evening as Chinese President Hu Jintao sent in a congratulatory message urging the artists to "cater to the taste of the people" and "eulogize the spirit of our times".

At a grand opening ceremony in the Huanglong Sports Center Gymnasium of Hangzhou, the picturesque capital city of east China's booming coastal province Zhejiang, two local common folks, a white-haired and white-bearded old man in his 90's and a cute, naughty five-year-old girl, sounded a giant gong to signal the start of the 16-day arts festival, the seventh of its kind since 1987.

"The China Arts Festival is not only an occasion for our cultural and artistic workers to display their talent and excellent works, but also a time for festivities and celebrations of our people," said President Hu in his message, which was read out by Liu Yunshan, publicity chief of the ruling Communist Party of China (CPC), at Friday's opening ceremony.

Cultural and artistic works have the power to "inspire the people and influence the society", said Hu, also general secretary of the CPC Central Committee. "Our cultural and artistic workers shoulder the glorious responsibility of eulogizing the spirit of our times and shaping beautiful souls of our people," he added.

The president called on all Chinese artists to "go deep into the vibrant life" and create more "artistic classics in rich and colorful forms that cater to the taste of the people".

"Just like the previous ones, we will make this arts festival in Hangzhou 'a feast of arts' and also 'a festival for the people'", said an official with the Ministry of Culture, the festival's organizer.

In the following half a month, audience in the five host cities of Zhejiang, which also include Ningbo, Shaoxing, Jiaxing and Wenzhou, will have the opportunity to enjoy more than 100 dramas, musicals and traditional operas presented by artists from all over the country, including Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan. Meanwhile, 24 arts exhibitions and seminars involving painting, photography, Chinese calligraphy and fashion design will also be held during the festival.

For the first time in the arts festival's history, 73 "representatives of the audience" were selected to form a panel to vote for the "most popular plays" and "most popular performers" with the audience.

And as usual, eight foreign performance groups, including the prestigious Berlin Philharmonic and the Hungarian national ballet troupe, were invited to stage concerts, dance dramas and musicals to add an international touch to the domestic arts event.

Media reports said that the Broadway musical classic "The Sound of the Music", to be staged in the port city of Ningbo between Sept. 10 and 16, was quite likely to gain a huge market success as tickets for the total eight shows "were selling very well". The American musical has come to China on the first leg of its Asian tour to mark the 45th anniversary of its Broadway debut in 1959. Earlier it grabbed some 2 million US dollars in box office in China's largest city Shanghai and was also a big hit in the Beijing theater.

In a display of the organizers' attempt to make the arts festival enjoyable to everyone, the 1.5-hour entertainment show at Friday's opening ceremony, which was broadcast live nationwide via China Central Television, featured the combination of a host of arts forms including both Chinese and western, traditional and modern, as well as those typical of China's ethnic minority groups. According to the directors of the show, the performance involved more than 800 performers from 40-strong troupes and arts schools across the country.

What impressed the audience most was the introduction of a 54m-long, 9m-wide and 1m-deep "artificial river" on the stage, while at one time there were 20 small boats floating on the water. The idea of keeping 350 tons of water in a 9,000-seat gymnasium reminded many of the opening ceremonies of the latest two Olympic Games in Sydney 2000 and Athens 2004, where the Australian and Greek artists also employed a lot of water to amaze the global audience.

"It was fantastic that they designed this on-stage river. It was just like the real countryside life I saw in my childhood," hailed an elder man in the audience.

For centuries, farmers living in the waterway-abundant Zhejiang had developed a hobby of watching river-side performance of traditional operas on their boats, something similar to the drive-in show in modern western countries.

To make room for the river setting, the gymnasium had to sacrifice nearly half of its seating capacity and therefore only some 5,000 people watched the opening ceremony Friday on the scene.However, sources said that since Aug. 31 the organizers had been holding full-length dress rehearsals every evening to "satisfy allwho wanted to see it".

The Seventh China Arts Festival is scheduled to conclude on Sept. 26 but the venue for its closing ceremony will be moved to Shaoxing, a city with a long history and rich cultural heritage which is about one hour of bus ride away from Hangzhou.

(Xinhua News Agency September 13, 2004)