Story
Dream Festival is a city-wide community arts festival for Exeter to celebrate Cygnet Theatre’s 40th Birthday. They want to make storytelling a big part of the festival.
The festival will open on 29 April 2022 with a stunning professional storytelling and music performance of The Ramayana at the Cygnet Theatre. Artemis Storytelling will then be offering six free storytelling workshops, open to all, where the participants have the opportunity to be part of a celebratory public Story Blaze performance at St Nicholas Priory on 30 June in the closing week of the festival. They need your support to fund these events!
If they raise this funding target, all the money will go towards making the workshops happen and paying The Ramayana artists who are travelling across the UK to perform. If they raise more, they will offer further Finding Your Creative Path workshops for specific community groups that are keen to be part of the festival.
John Lewis in Exeter has kindly offered to host a pre-festival fundraising evening on Wed 30 March. If you pledge at least £20, you are invited to join them for a glass of prosecco and an exclusive storytelling performance from Katy Cawkwell of Artemis Storytelling: The Kingdom of the Heart. NB if they don’t hit their target, all pledges are refunded and this event will not take place.
More detail…
The Cygnet was started 40 years ago to create opportunities to bring theatre to young people who would have traditionally struggled to pursue this career. The founders trained young people in the living room of their own home, driven by a belief that we all have a right to pursue our dreams and that anyone can achieve great things with the right help and support. The 1975 Exeter Arts Festival encouraged community organisations to work together to bring creative opportunities to people who, very often, didn’t have the chance to explore their own creative potential.
They are holding this festival again in 2022 to spark creativity, to give something joyful back to the people of Exeter and to celebrate all that the Cygnet Theatre has achieved over the last 40 years. They want art to turn up in the most unexpected of places and make use of empty spaces to showcase talent.
Let’s open up opportunities for people from a diverse array of backgrounds and move theatre away from being open to those ‘comfortable’ enough to walk through a theatre’s doors and bring theatre into the people’s own communities where they are free to engage.
Katy Cawkwell, as Artemis Storytelling, has been working with Cygnet since 2018 bringing the best of UK performance storytelling to Exeter audiences, running regular workshops enabling people to develop their own storytelling skills and hosting Story Blaze events where local storytellers can share their work. She has a proven track record in supporting people who have never told a story before, into their first public performance, and also hosting brilliant professional storytelling shows in the theatre space. She has set up this crowdfunder specifically to support the storytelling element of Dream Festival. www.artemis-storytelling.co.uk
Risks and challenges
Definite dates and venues for all storytelling events are in place. They just need the funding to pay for the artists/workshop leaders to deliver them! Katy Cawkwell has a long track record in organising and running events like this and attracting both participants and audience to make the events a great success.
