What is Come On Down?
Come On Down festival is our fantastic festival of inspiring performing arts and film run for and by learning disabled people. The event is supported by Headway Arts and is hosted by our resident theatre group, Headway Arts Learning Disabled Theatre Company. It acts as a showcase for creative work across different art forms and also offers a programme of workshops, performances and exhibitions of work from emerging and experienced disabled artists working regionally, nationally and internationally. It all takes place at our beautiful ArtSpace here in Blyth and is attended by various organisations and learning disabled people from across the region.
The festival was started in 2006 as a safe inclusive environment; to network, share ideas, promote friendship and as a platform for learning disabled artists to showcase their work. It has been growing and developing every year since and was attended by over 200 people and 20 organisations last year alone. The event runs over three days and showcases the amazing high quality work done by learning disabled artists in a number of different art forms such as dance, drama and film.
Come on Down is a ‘bring and share’ event, this means people can attend for a full day to perform or show their work and can stay and watch other groups performances as well. It’s a fantastic opportunity to share your creative work with an audience, we also exhibit visual arts, photography and film from those groups working within this area.
Come On Down festival will take place on 6th, 7th and 8th March 2018.
Headway Arts is a charity and professional arts organisation specialising in participatory arts with disadvantaged groups within the community. We are a small charity with a close knit team who run numerous different creative and inspiring arts projects every year.
As we are a small local charity we cannot fund this project on our own, therefore we need your help to raise money to keep this wonderfully unique event going. We want to continue to make this event inclusive and available to all, therefore we want this to remain a free event for learning disabled people.
How can you help?
£5 will help fund a support worker for an hour (the more support workers we have the more accessible the event will be to those within the community.
£10 will help towards supplying food and refreshments for the artists taking part and the individuals who come to watch the performances.
£20 could help towards funding travel costs for those dedicated people and organisations who are coming from a long way or who may have specific needs or requirements.
£50 will help towards publicity for the event, designing and printing of programmes, tickets and posters.
£100 will help towards paying for a videographer to record the 3 day event and the performances.
*If you would like to get involved in this years Come On Down Festival please let us know!*