GREENSBORO Music, theater and art fans: Get out those 2008 calendars. Now block off the week of April 27-May 4. The Eastern Music Festival and Piedmont Blues Preservation Society will stage the annual Piedmont Jazz and Blues Festival. The Greensboro Symphony Orchestra will premiere a work based on O. Henry s short story “The Gift of the Magi.” Triad Stage will present “From the Mississippi Delta.” And local galleries will host special art shows.

Those events and more will be part of a new annual festival designed to showcase the city s active arts scene and encourage people to sample more of it. Organizers hope it will boost ticket sales for arts groups shows not only that week, but also year-round. “We see this as a way to engage new audiences and to raise awareness that Greensboro has some high-quality existing arts organizations,” said the festival s coordinator, Dabney Sanders. For now, organizers are calling the event Mayfest.

They plan to announce its official name in January. Mayfest is the brainchild of Kathy Manning, an attorney known for supporting the arts. She was inspired by a theater festival in Stratford, Ontario, near the Detroit suburb where she grew up. The town expanded it from weeks to months. She wondered whether Greensboro could pull together to create something similar. “We have a great central location, we have a lot better weather, and we have lots of arts,” Manning said.

Starting two years ago, she gathered the largest nonprofit arts groups EMF, the symphony and Triad Stage to discuss how they could bring more attention to the arts. So Mayfest was born. It coincides with events celebrating the city s bicentennial. “It speaks to what the bicentennial is all about looking at us as a community and what we have to celebrate,” said Sanders, whom Mayfest organizers hired this year.