The European Festivals Association (EFA) invites to the launch of the 2013 Edinburgh International Festival in Brussels with Festival Director Jonathan Mills who will present the programme. It takes place on Wednesday, 20 March 2013, from 6pm to 8pm, at the Flagey (Place Sainte Croix, 1050 Brussels) and includes a drinks reception. The launch is kindly hosted by the Flagey vzw/asbl. Edinburgh International Festival Director Jonathan Mills will present the 2013 edition of the festival. Taking place from 9 August until 1 September 2013, it will bring three spellbinding weeks of the very best in international opera, dance, music, theatre and the visual arts to Edinburgh. In 2012, the festival presented over 3000 artists from 47 nations to an audience from over 70 nations. The festival also helped to host the first Edinburgh International Culture Summit, which brought more than 30 culture ministers from around the world to discuss the theme of culture as a bridge that promotes dialogue between nations. EFA President Darko Brlek underlines: “The European Festivals Association is proud to count the Edinburgh International Festival as one of its most longstanding and active of its 106 members. Just as EFA, the EIF has been committed to the European integration process for more than 65 years now. Since many years, Festival Director Jonathan Mills has been engaging actively in the activities set up by EFA: He acted as presenter in the Atelier for Young Festival Managers and will host the seventh edition of the Atelier in Edinburgh (2014). Furthermore, the EIF was one of the 18 festivals that only recently endorsed a statement entitled “Culture Combat Cuts” calling for the acknowledgement of culture through maintaining budgets at European and national levels. Underlining the importance of the collaboration with the EIF, I am delighted to see the festival’s Brussels launch as an annual event also in the years to come.” “The Edinburgh International Festival didn’t hold launch events outside Edinburgh until 2007 when I arrived from Australia and said ‘you are too modest, you’re hiding an exciting opportunity that needs to be celebrated.’ Every year, our statistics demonstrate both in terms of artists and audiences that we have a duty to bring our launches to different cities. This doesn’t work if you need to think up a reason to be somewhere. It works if there is a powerful narrative, if there’s an emotional, artistic and intellectual reason for being somewhere. I would like to think that the people who established the Edinburgh Festival in 1946 would be delighted that we were gathering here, at the centre of a unified Europe in the European House for Culture,” said Jonathan Mills during his inspiring presentation at the 2012 Brussels launch of the Edinburgh International Festival. Preceding the Brussels events, the 2013 festival programme will be unveiled on 12 March in Edinburgh. Furthermore, programme presentations will take place in the UK in London and Glasgow, and internationally in Paris, Dublin and Taipei, amongst others. RSVP as soon as possible to the European Festivals Association at info@efa-aef.eu or +32 9 241 8080.