Brighton Festival 2024 celebrates community with free events
From 4th-26th May, Brighton Festival 2024 will transform Brighton & Hove into a city-wide celebration of community, working with local arts organisations and groups to offer family-friendly participatory installations, performances and open days.
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With pledged support from Big Give’s Arts for Impact national fundraising initiative, more free and pay-what-you-feel events than ever before will allow everyone to experience the hope and wonder of the arts.
Brighton Festival has been awarded £10,000 Big Give match-funding to help with increased costs of free events. Donations by the public made to Brighton Festival via the Big Give from 19th-26th March will unlock this funding and help raise £20,000 towards the Festival’s high quality, accessible and inclusive free events programme. This includes large-scale installations, street theatre and Our Place, the Festival’s partnership with communities in East Brighton, Hangleton & Knoll and Moulsecoomb & Bevendean. This year, Artists in Residence are collaborating with local communities to create artworks to be showcased in May.
Throughout Brighton Festival, the Royal Pavilion Gardens will be home to free, interactive installation 100 Miles of String (4th-26th May), from local contemporary arts organisation Leap Then Look and sponsored by Southern Housing New Homes. People of all ages can have fun weaving and winding thousands of metres of string, working together to create a temporary, everchanging community landmark.
Outdoor art specialists Without Walls return to Brighton and Crawley with a series of free, pop-up performances, sponsored by Graves Son & Pilcher. Highlights include premieres Anchored in Air (18th-19th May), a groundbreaking, gravity-defying aerial theatre show from disabled and non-disabled company Head over Wheels and a world of fun, stunts and circus in magical arcade Island Storm (25th-26th May), from street theatre experts Bureau of Silly Ideas. Puppetry, dance and martial arts fuse to bring Gods and demons to life in Ancient Giants (25th-26th May), from innovative South Asian-led arts collective Inspirate, while two unwritten languages meet through the movement of dance in British-Caribbean choreographer Jeanefer-Jean Charles MBE’s Patois (18th-19th May). The Journey (18th-19th May), from award-winning brass band Perhaps Contraption in collaboration with Deaf & BSL poet Zoe McWinney, is a promenade piece featuring a unique blend of physical theatre, signed poetry and mime, while Birdie (25th-26th May), from leading learning disability performance and live arts company Mind the Gap, tells a powerful story about climate change through intricate choreography and original music.
Award-winning community-based group Brighton Table Tennis Club make the sport accessible for all ages and abilities in an AllStars Extravaganza at Brighton Dome’s newly-refurbished Corn Exchange on 27th May. The Corn Exchange has a proud history of hosting international table tennis events and its recent refurbishment enables larger and more diverse community events. This free open day will re-create the venue’s ping pong past with a modern twist. Expect attempts to break Guinness World Records, mass participation table tennis and matches with international superstars, such as the UK’s Paralympic gold medallist Will Bayley.
Free art exhibitions and installations at this year’s Festival include socially engaged soundscape Neolithic Cannibals: Deep Listening to the Unheard, from 4th-19th May. Commissioned by Brighton Festival, artists and campaigners Class Divide have worked with young people in Whitehawk and East Brighton to create a sound art piece, inspired by the history of Neolithic East Brighton, giving a platform to voices and stories often excluded from the art world. Multi-award-winning visual artist and quantum physicist, Dr Libby Heaney’s exhibition Ooze Machines (4th May-30th June), uses the motif of slime to explore both the microscopic quantum world and big tech and audiences can take centre stage in An Elevated Platform (4th-26th May), an interactive critique of social media that cheers or jeers your every move, from dance and digital company Flexer & Sandiland.
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Elsewhere, community group Brighton People’s Theatre’s latest production Born & Bread (17th-19th May) features a diverse cast of people from the local community, aged 21 to 80 years old and more than 80% of whom have never performed on stage before. Inspired by conversations with over 100 Brighton residents about what it means to call the city home, the play is set in a community kitchen and explores themes of migration, friendship and loneliness. The production includes live cookery from food waste organisation The Real Junk Food Project Brighton, who will make soup to serve to the audience, which is included in the pay-what-you-feel ticket price.
On 20th May, As We Really Are marks the start of an ongoing project for Brighton Dome & Brighton Festival and Brighton artists. Inspired by 1930s films from the GPO Film Unit that celebrated day-to-day life in the UK, Brighton Festival has commissioned new films with the same mission – to see ourselves as we really are, at work and at play. A cinema screening will bring together vintage gems from the GPO Film Unit alongside new work from Brighton artists that celebrate the extraordinary in the ordinary. The screening will conclude with a panel discussion featuring Brighton Festival 2024 Guest Director Frank Cottrell-Boyce and former Guest Director David Shrigley.
Brighton-based youth dance company Project Female present a triple bill of work on 11th May. Triptych showcases Project Female’s fusion of contemporary dance with Hip Hop and commercial styles, integrating multimedia, spoken word and innovative digital dance technology to amplify the voices of the dancers and their call to make the world a better place. The production is a collaboration with celebrated Hip Hop dance theatre company Boy Blue’s Young Artists, who will also perform.
In partnership with South East Dance, Brighton Festival brings colour and movement to young children with two family dance shows. In The Sticky Dance (17th May), three dancers shimmy through the audience weaving a tapestry of sticky tape, inviting children to explore and groove alongside them. The Rainbow Butterfly (18th May) blends aerial circus and dynamic contemporary dance with storytelling to celebrate imagination, ourselves and Mother Earth.
Established in 1967, Brighton Festival is the largest annual curated multi-arts festival in England. This year’s Guest Director, award-winning author and screenwriter Frank Cottrell-Boyce, invites everyone to imagine a better world through a vibrant and colourful celebration of Hope, Magic and Wonder, with a sense of fun and play for adults and children alike.
To donate to Brighton Festival’s free events programme via the Big Give’s Arts for Impact initiative, visit https://bit.ly/3TgL3dD
Additional Highlights
The Children’s Parade, 4th MayThe spectacular annual Children’s Parade once again kicks off Brighton Festival with a fiesta of colour, costume and live music around Frank Cottrell-Boyce’s chosen theme of Dream Again. Artists from community arts experts Same Sky have come together with teachers, students and volunteers from schools across Brighton & Hove to make magnificent sculptures, choreograph dance routines and compose parade chants to unleash on the day. Supported by Brighton Girls.
TV Dinners, 4th-6th, 10th-11th May
UK artist, performer, writer and actor, Susannah Hewlett serves up a platter of her finest work from the last two decades in this free exhibition. Fixated on popular culture, Hewlett’s work charms and disarms audiences, mixing live comedic performance, subtle interventions, sound and video. Featuring two free live performances; Dinner for Two (6th May) and The Great British Cack Off (5th May).
Children's Illustration Exhibition, 4th–26th May
In celebration of the wealth of talented children's book illustrators in Brighton, Hove and close by, children’s bookshop The Book Nook will be displaying a selection of their work in a free exhibition throughout Brighton Festival.
Days of Wonder, 4th May to 1st September
Inspired by the remarkable film and media collections held at Hove Museum of Creativity and Screen Archive South East, this free exhibition is a celebration of early cinema and film making. Arts organisation Corridor and film agency videoclub have commissioned artists to work with the collections, creating new work installed as interventions in the permanent exhibition galleries at Hove Museum of Creativity.
Festival of Ideas: Bird Bath Dawn Chorus Breakfast, 5th May
Bird Bath transforms beautiful buildings into restorative spaces by inviting you to pause, rest and ‘bathe’ in the sound of local birdsong. A collaboration with the School of Media, Arts and Humanities, University of Sussex, the Festival of Ideas harnesses the transformative power of the arts and humanities to fashion new ways of thinking about the past, present and future.
• Visit brightonfestival.org
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