CREATE & SHARE

If ‘all the world’s a stage’, why do we so often find ourselves sitting watching?  Norfolk & Norwich Festival has always put great art in unusual places and offered audience new experiences.  Now, we’re giving more people – especially children and young people – the chance to co-create projects with artists and share them with our festival audiences.

Year round we work in schools and with communities to support extraordinary art projects which enhance the cultural life of the people of East Anglia.  We are particularly interested in socially engaged arts practices – art that is collaborative, often participatory and involves people as the medium or material of the work.  For many artists this social engagement with participants is an important form of creation, as valid as writing a script or painting a picture.

Through our Festival Connect & Create activities we enable children and young people, and their communities to consider the world around us, to tell their stories and to share their dreams.  Our Festival Connect & Create approach is twofold.  Firstly, we invest in and support creative leaders – artists, educators and young people – who are working to have a positive impact on cultural lives.  By enabling creative leaders and drawing on their skills and connection in the community, we multiply our ability to reach into communities, extending our influence and impact much further than we could alone.  Secondly, we work in places and communities most in need – places of social deprivation and where arts and cultural activities are not easy to access.  In these places we seek out partnerships with individuals and organisations, which are already embedded in their place, and we share our skills, networks and resources with them.

We invest in cultural leaders and place-based projects because we see the value of their impact.  We know through our evaluation that we help to improve the cultural lives of children, young people and their communities.  We know participants develop their creative skills, build their confidence and aspiration, and improved their health and wellbeing.

But much of the time this creativity in our communities goes unnoticed and is rarely shared beyond family and friends.  This may be because working with community is all too often either the sole purpose or the sideline of a cultural organisation and there are not opportunities or will to bring this work into the public eye as part of the ‘main programme’.  At Norfolk & Norwich Festival, our vision is to ensure this work is an important element of our Festival and therefore at the heart of our offer for audiences.

The Norfolk & Norwich Festival mission is to lead and support celebration, creativity and curiosity in our community to make our part of the world a great place to live, learn, work and play.  Our Festival celebrated its 250^th anniversary in 2022 and while the world we live in and artistic practices have changed over time, we hold true to the central commitment of the first events: to celebrate, to share cultural experiences and to bring our community together.  Increasingly we understand that we can achieve this not only by putting on a great cultural event but also by ensuring more people can take part.

In this year’s festival we’re doing more to bring these co-created projects to more people.  High Voltage, Norwich Nine, MONSTERS, and Rebel Resistors Radio Club are some of the highlights of this year’s festival which have been created by artists with people from Norfolk.  All offer audiences fantastic experiences which match the rich engagement and reflect the creativity of the participants and are rightly at home in the heart of the Festival.

Over the coming years we will continue to bring together our high-profile festival with our depth of community engagement to create a uniquely rich celebration in and of our community.  This does not mean a lessening of our festival which is rightly known for its rich mix of artistic practice, unique audience experiences, and its cultural focus for the community, rather this is an addition which will enrich our event.

One reason the broad range of our activity sits comfortably together is that all of our artistic programme is united by our ‘programme principles’, our guide to ensure our work remains creatively rich and relevant. Our expectation is that all of our work – festival events and participation projects – are guided by one set of principes.  Our principles help us embed art relevant to today, embrace our ‘festival spirit’ and guide our commitment to social responsibility.  These principles are our starting point as we explore the boundaries between artform and between art and everyday life; celebrate, share cultural experiences and bring our community together; and ask questions and take actions about a changing world, with a focus on equality, diversity and inclusion; placemaking; and environmental sustainability.

At Norfolk & Norwich Festival engagement is not ‘other’, rather it is an important enquiry in how we can improve cultural life, especially of those who have not always engaged with our Festival.  Our vision is for this enquiry to be integrated and valued in the Festival.  Not only valued by participants but by all of our audiences.  As we embed more and more of our engagement work in the Festival, audiences see and understand the creative, social, health and wellbeing, and economic benefits to the whole community.  And as audiences see the benefit to the whole community, they cry out for more.