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23rd April Spring Friendship Art Festival Opens

Korean Central News Agency of DPRK via Korea News Service (KNS)

    Pyongyang, April 11 (KCNA) -- The 23rd April Spring Friendship Art Festival opened with splendor at the April 25 House of Culture here on Sunday on the threshold of the significant Day of the Sun. Present at the opening ceremony were Vice-President of the Presidium of the DPRK Supreme People's Assembly Yang Hyong Sop, Secretary of the Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea Jong Ha Chol, Chairman of the festival organizing committee Choe Ik Gyu who is minister of Culture, Chairman of the Pyongyang City People's Committee Ryang Man Gil, officials concerned and working people, artistes, foreign diplomatic envoys and embassy officials in Pyongyang, foreign guests and Koreans overseas.
    Also present were cultural delegations, delegates and artistes of different countries, Korean artistes overseas and foreign delegations and delegates visiting Pyongyang to participate in the 8th Aesthetic Symposium on Present Times and National Arts.
    Yang Hyong Sop in his congratulatory speech at the opening ceremony recalled that the festival has contributed to friendship among countries and development of culture and to human civilization and peace and has developed into an international art festival of high authority supported and hailed by men of culture and art of the world for its rich national emotion and content and peculiar style of art.
    Today men of literature and art of the world hope for developing genuine literature and art desired by the popular masses by exchanging successes and experience of national arts and expanding cultural cooperation and exchange through mutual contacts and visits, he said, and stated:
    We will as ever consistently maintain the idea of external policy--independence, peace and friendship--and thus make a sizable contribution to the development of national culture and the building of human culture.
    He was followed on the rostrum by the heads of the Russian Sveshnikov State Academic Chorus and the cultural delegation of the Chinese government and the leader of the Polish Mazovshe Song and Dance Ensemble.
    An art performance was given at the end of the ceremony.