Arts Development Case Study: Poole Family Arts Festival
Highlights
a day for the people of Poole to experience high quality arts activities, exciting performances and exhibitions in a beautiful natural setting.
The Poole Family Arts Festival was organised by the Arts Development Unit, Borough of Poole and included:
- Seven participatory arts activities including musical instrument making, early years arts, willow sculpture and environmental arts
- One commissioned visual arts exhibition
- Two newly commissioned pieces of work; one digital and one sculptural
- live music stage with 6 performances from acts including Signdance Collective ; Tumbao; Swing Unlimited
- Street theatre by Jellicoe Theatre; and a Balinese Warrior Dance performance by Gill Roberts
- Storytelling with Cassandra Wye with BSL interpretation
- 25 artists employed; up to 264 hours of work generated
- 34 musicians employed
- Three artist mentoring opportunities
Around 1500 local people attended, 90% of whom were from the targeted areas of Hamworthy, Old Town and Alderney.
Introduction
We wished to organise a high quality family arts festival for local people of Poole who would not normally access arts activities, whilst also programming a flag-ship showcase event for the work of the unit in an unusual natural setting.
The original location proposed for the event was Brownsea Island in Poole Harbour. Due to accessibility restrictions we relocated the event to Upton Country Park. This decision will be examined further in this evaluation.
The event ran from 10.30am to 5pm on Sunday 24th September 2006 at Upton Country Park, and is the first of am programme of annual arts festival for local people in Poole.
The festival was funded by ourselves, including Wave (Arts Education Agency for Bournemouth and Poole) and Soundstorm (Dorset Music Service) and by a grant from Arts Council England South West.
The family festival was a great day out for all of my family. My kids had fun making wooden fish and helping with the wicker model. Would just like you to know what a brilliant day we unexpectedly wandered into yesterday Sunday at Upton House.
Visitor
About the Evaluation
This evaluation examines how far the festival met the aims that we set for ourselves, plus an evaluation of the programme and based on those findings and raises some questions about how to approach developing the festival in the future.
The evaluation is based on the following tools:
- independent feedback from people who attended the event
- feedback forms completed by people who participated in activities
- interviews of artists, volunteers, partners and the public conducted in the Big Brother Style diary room
- from a structured evaluation meeting from the festival team.
Meeting the Festivals Aims
The aims of the Poole Family Arts Festival were a day for the people of Poole to experience high quality arts activities, exciting performances and exhibitions in a beautiful natural setting such as Brownsea Island.
The original proposal detailed our plans for hosting the event on Brownsea Island. When we had exhausted every possibility for transporting wheelchair users over to the island, we decided to relocate the event to a fully accessible site, with similar environmental characteristics to Brownsea, which was Upton Country Park. We reported this to Arts Council England and went ahead.
We evaluated this change in location by conducting a comprehensive accessibility audit for the Island and carried out extensive research into finding ways of resolving the access issues – including working with BP and the Royal Marines who are also based in Poole Harbour, and despite having the approval of the Harbour Commissioner to disembark passengers to the festival from Poole Quay, we could not find an appropriate way of transporting wheelchair users over to the island.
Although we failed in our aim to hold the event on Brownsea Island, we worked quickly to find an alternative site and programmed a highly successful range of activities in the beautiful and accessible grounds at Upton Country Park. Upton Country Park has the environmental characteristics this festival was originally programmed for, so in this sense, we succeeded in meeting this aim.
I just wanted to say that my family and I had a wonderful day at Poole's Family Arts Festival. My son is 3 and my daughter is 20 months and they both found lots to stimulate them - particularly the plate spinning and the sculpture made from berries, leaves etc. Thank you very much to the organisers and the performers and I hope that there will be more of these events in the future.
Visitor
A successful grant application to Arts Council England, plus funding from the Arts Development Unit, Wave and Soundstorm, plus in-kind support from Leisure Services, enabled us to programme some fantastic high quality performances, artwork and participatory arts activities.
Unexpected outcomes included :
- one artist Linn O Carroll received 20 offers of work throughout the day as a result of the success and popularity of her workshop
- artists running out of materials due to the overwhelming popularity of the participatory activities – which encouraged participants to be more creative with the materials they had left
- The Fire Brigade turning up to support the event!
- We also initiated new collaborations between artists and BSL interpreters, which not only supported deaf participants, it als gave the artists new experiences of interpreting their arts practice in different accessible ways.
“Yes I LOVED working with Wendy - she embraced my approach with gusto and her commitment produced at times a really cohesive collaborate performance that truly demonstrated the benefits of being bilingual.”
Cassandra Wye, Storyteller
“As materials started to run out, people got more and more creative with the things they had – it was brilliant”
Heidi Steller, Artist
The event is also intended to increase new audiences for the work of the Arts Development Unit across the Borough and also bring new audiences to Upton Country Park.
This is the first large scale showcase event the Arts Development Unit have organised, and all the people who attended the event were effectively new audiences for our work. Although we work with families in other contexts throughout the Borough, this was the first time families were able to access the full extent of our arts programming.
Tell the Arts Dept, from this member of the public, what a good job they did with the organisation of Upton. The music gave it a wonderful uplifting spirit. The local public are very lucky to have such an enthusiastic team on the job. I bet you don’t see jobs advertised in that department very often!!
Visitor
Disabled and deaf communities were also targeted prior to the event and on the day, by our staff giving talks at centres, and by mailing – and we integrated their needs into the planning and programming of the event. This gave us a new audience for our work, and enabled them to participate fully in the high quality arts on offer.
But the following morning it is sunny and hot once more, and we head to Upton country park - a mile or so away - for an arts festival run by Poole Council. This is very well-attended, with a band playing cheerfully on the stage while a number of small marquees host participatory family arts activities. Disability arts are well integrated into the whole, with performances by the Signdance Collective, an exhibition by Fresh Talent, whose members all have learning difficulties, and British Sign Language (BSL) interpretation available for the story telling sessions and the workshops. I meet the organisers, the arts team from Poole, and we agree to meet with Tony to talk about NDACA later in the autumn.
Dr Ju Gosling – artist consultant, Holton Lee
The festival also strengthened the working relationship between the Arts Development Unit at the organisations and services based at Upton – including Leisure Services, the Friends of Upton Country Park and The Peacock Tea Rooms. The Friends took over £1000 on their kiosk and the tea rooms were packed all day. Not only was the festival good for business, it also introduced them to the high quality work of the Arts Development Unit, and introduced a range of new possibilities for the sites use.
I would like to say a big thank you on behalf of Leisure Services to you and all your colleagues for doing such a good job. I for one appreciated all the work you put in before, on the day and after the event. You are a true event organiser and look forward to working with you in the not too distant future.
Steven Booth (Visitor Services Officer)
Just a note to congratulate you and the team for a very friendly, well organised and managed event today. It was a pleasure to work with everyone, performers and staff alike, who we found friendly and helpful, a credit to you. I hope it will not be too long before we can be involved with you again for a joint venture in the Park.
John Baggs Honourary Secretary - The Friends of Upton Country Park
A full marketing strategy including press releases, flyers, posters, community talks, banners, website coverage and internal mailings ensured we reached our target audiences, and more besides. However, Upton Country Park is still a place people have to travel to, and we would look into embedding this event in our target communities further for next year. This will better enable the people from areas of deprivation to participate in the arts more.
Outcomes
A short film has been produced from the festival which will help to widen awareness about the Arts Development Unit’s work and also an excellent resource for sourcing sponsorship and funding for future festivals.
The festival also highlighted the need for events like this to continue in Poole, to sustain the audiences for the arts, and the momentum from local people engaging in high quality participatory arts programmes.
The event also highlighted the standards of the Arts Development Unit as being synonymous with high quality programming and partnership working, which has already generated interest from new partners wanting to work with us. This will not only increase provision for local people at grassroots level, it will generate strong working practices across service units and organisations at a strategic level.
Congratulations- the day was a great success - the longboat on the back lawn is great and has caused lots of interest which is really good.
Justine Hawkes, Senior Ranger, Upton Country Park
Conclusions
The Poole Family Arts Festival was a success despite early problems surrounding its relocation from Brownsea Island. Local people and professional partners alike responded with enthusiasm to the programming and development of the event, and highlighted a strong case for another event next year.
Feedback from some of the performers highlighted the need for performance based workshops to assist the audience interpretations of some of the more contemporary pieces of dance. With this in mind, we aim to develop the programme much deeper in the future, also ensuring a range of culturally diverse art forms and workshops are represented to further enrich the audiences experiences of the arts in Poole.
Next Steps
To sustain the momentum from the festival, an exhibition of some of the best photographs and a short film made on the day will be installed in the Central Library in Poole, to celebrate the success of this years event, and to begin raising the profile of the Unit for next year’s event. This will also be used as a volunteer recruitment resource.
New sites will be considered for another festival at locations much closer to our target communities – possibilities include Baiter Park, Rockley Park, and Poole Park.
I would like to say that it was really lovely to be a part of the event at Upton Park. Heidi and myself were busy all day, I don't think we could have worked with many more people but it was a lovely setting to work in with a good team of organisers and workers and the participants were enthusiastic and creative and this all made the day special. I only regret that I wasn't able to see more of what else was going on at the event. I would recommend the event to friends and look forward to next years event.
Rose Perry, Artist
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