This year’s Dearne Community Arts’ Festival will be on Friday 31st August and Saturday 1st September from 11 a.m. until 4 p.m. at Dearne ALC. Last summer’s festival was a great success, but the Dearne Playhouse is fully booked on Saturdays throughout 2018, hence the change of venue. The school has more rooms and indoor and outdoor space on offer, so we are hoping that this year’s festival will be even bigger and better.

The festival is aimed at championing creativity and celebrating community in our local area, and we are so glad that local people are taking the opportunity to be involved in the festival through exhibiting their creativity (paintings, photographs, creative writing, crafts, sewing, embroidery, hardanger, woodwork and so on) and through the performing arts (dance, music and drama). We already have many people booked in, including Garry’s Grumpy Old Men and highlights from last year returning (the Pins & Needles Fashion Show, Thurnscoe Harmonic Male Voice Choir and Julia Arts Face Painting & Body Art, as well as art exhibited from local art classes and local artists Lily Dorritt and David Noble.) However, if you would like to be involved in the festival in any way, now is the time to let us know!

In addition to exhibitions and performances, this year we are also running a variety of workshops, including the opportunity to learn to play the ukelele, take part in a variety of crafts and much more. Some of these workshops depend on funding (e.g. the Art of Mining’s amazing virtual reality shows about our coal-mining heritage, featuring Pit Mouse for the children, and a circus skills workshop), but quite a few workshops for children are already booked in (e.g. pirate crafts run by the WEA and making jewellery, bath bombs and origami-based crafts, led by Zoe Green), and we are pleased to announce that Ian McMillan, Barnsley Bard, will be returning to run a creative writing workshop for adults on the Friday. (Photo courtesy of Bob Dickinson).

A range of refreshments will be available at the festival; for further details, please see the DearneCommunityArtsFestival Facebook page.

Prior to the festival, we will be running two competitions in photography and creative writing, both with the theme ‘Loving Your Local Environment.‘ Entries are invited in 3 age categories (under 11s, 12-18s and adult) and can be emailed to julie@gpcchurch.co.uk. The creative writing can be in prose or poetry, with a word limit of 500 words. Digital photographs can be emailed. If you’d prefer to hand in hard copies or printed photographs, just see Julie. The deadline for the competitions is 12 noon on Wednesday 11th July… which may seem a long way away, but there’s no reason to delay!

Our creative God has blessed us all with the capacity for creativity, and this festival is an ideal opportunity to show the world how blessed we are in God!