Sixth GBA Arts Festival showcases regional charm on global stage

The sixth Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area Cultural and Arts Festival will open on Oct. 31 with the symphonic suite “The Pearl River”at Bay Opera of Shenzhen, as city landmarks throughout the Greater Bay Area light up to mark the event. It will close on Dec. 3 at Guangzhou's Xinghai Concert Hall with a concert version of Giuseppe Verdi's “La Traviata,” starring renowned baritone Leo Nucci in collaboration with a local orchestra. The festival will span 11 cities of the GBA.

Coinciding with the 2026 APEC China Year and its events in Shenzhen, this art festival serves as a global stage to present the cultural and artistic charm of the Greater Bay Area.

Highlights include 75 featured productions, 148 performances, 25 exhibitions, nearly 100 public programs, arts education events, and multiple original productions by emerging artists.

The Berlin Philharmonic Baroque Soloists will bring “A Mozart Evening”to the Greater Bay Area — the ensemble's only stop in the region. The American Ballet Theatre will make its GBA debut with the ballet “Swan Lake.” On the domestic front, the phenomenal IP “Blossoms Shanghai” trilogy will be staged in its entirety for the first time, with Guangzhou's twin theaters presenting the nine-hour narrative in a relay format.

The festival brings together Peking opera, Kunqu opera, Yue opera, Wu opera, Qinqiang opera, Cantonese opera, and Chao opera, with multiple classic productions rotating onto the stage and over ten Plum Blossom Award — winning performers taking part. Productions with strong regional identity — including the Wu opera “The Monkey King: Subduing the White Bone Demon,” the Cantonese opera “Madame Qiao,” and the Chao opera “Li Shangyin” — will be staged in succession. This year's festival also unveils a fully upgraded "Sunshine Little Theatre" unit, featuring 11 productions that gather diverse small-theatre creative forces. With an emphasis on light-format, new-expression works, the unit promotes experimental theatre, musicals, and immersive productions into new urban performance spaces, bringing art closer to younger audiences and drawing more youth into the theatre.

In addition, the festival has selected a batch of original works for support — including the new wuxia impression theatre “Nie Yinniang,” the contemporary dance poem “The Bridge,” and the dance drama “Love Song 1990”— building a grand stage for young creators in the Bay Area and continuously strengthening the foundation for innovative development of the performing arts in the Greater Bay Area.

More than ten Hong Kong and Macao arts troupes are participating in this year's festival, including the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, the Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra, City Contemporary Dance Company, Macao Dance Association, and Macao Drama Farm. Furthermore, in the "Sunshine Little Theatre" unit, Hong Kong- and Macao-produced works — such as “The Courage to Be Disliked,” “Same Time,” “Next Year,” and “An Hour of Freedom”— account for 60% of the program, realizing diverse integration of performing arts resources across Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macao.

Running concurrently is "Shaanxi Culture Week," a specially curated festival unit featuring six classic Qinqiang operas, a themed exhibition titled "A Century of Shaanxi Oil Painting," and a series of aesthetic education lectures — fostering a dynamic two-way cultural exchange between North and South.