Roll Up, Roll Up, for the first ever

Big Top Festival!

As a celebration of our first four years with specialist status in the Arts we hosted the first ever Big Top Festival. Our school, which boasts an excellent professional theatre on site, has been putting on an annual Summer Arts Festival for at least the last twenty years. This year we decided to ramp up the festivities by hiring a big top tent to erect on the school playground.

The event was held over five days and included over 1000 performers. Four local primary schools performed their end of year productions (Ashton Keynes, Brook Field, St Mary’s and St Sampson’s); Swindon Young Actors showcased their latest devised piece; Shout Out Productions, a new theatre company formed at a local college, contributed their latest play as well as a performance for the Celebration of Dance; Swindon Dance also entered some highly impressive dance for the same show; Danny Schlesinger from Circo Ridiculoso entertained the crowds with his adorable and very amusing ‘balloon taming’ show; and Circomedia, the world famous circus school, headlined on the Saturday night with a variety show that included jugglers, acrobats, an escape artist and an arial performance created especially for the Big Top Festival!

As well as all this, Bradon Forest students put on six different productions, plus Annie Jnr, plus audiences were treated to several different short scenes throughout the long weekend by our Key Stage 3 Commedia troupe! Young musicians auditioned over a four month period for the chance to participate in the Celebration of Music evening which saw the finals of the instrumental, vocal and battle of the bands competitions. There were guest judges from The Ocelot magazine and The Dacoits, a local professional band who also rounded of the night with a special set.

"We had a great time, was amazed by all the talent but also by the scale of the thing. I can't imagine anything like that ever happening at the school I went to! You guys did a great job of putting it all together and the acts that stood out for me were Jo Stroud (young singer/songwriter) and Plastic Fiction." Lawrence Wakefield, guest judge from The Ocelot.

We wanted the celebrations to involve as many different local groups as possible and the art exhibition included pieces from the community ceramics class, held at the school by Art Technician Sally Cooke. There were also workshops throughout the festival including Garba Dance ran by Sangita Kapadia (the resulting performance was shown in the Celebration of Dance) and a sculpture class open to the public, ran by local artist Ron Holmes. The finale of the whole weekend was a twenty20 cricket match on the field between a school team (including staff and students) and the local village. The school concert band and choirs, including guests from Commonweal School, entertained the crowd while the PTA ran a very successful BBQ and cream tea bar. It was the perfect relaxing way to end a jam-packed eventful festival!

The festival was planned over the course of a year by David Calder and his team, including Arts Manager Jennifer Purcell. Although the festival was obviously a very hectic time, with many different events, rehearsals and ‘get-in’s’ and ‘strikes’ all going on at once, it managed to all go to plan.

Jennifer Purcell said: “The whole festival was a huge success. We were so pleased that the year of hard work and planning really paid off. There are just too many highlights to mention them all. The quality of performance from all the participants was just out of this world and we were so pleased to see everyone pull out all the stops for this amazing event.

“The festival went off without a hitch thanks to the help and support from the staff and students at Bradon Forest, but also from the public and other performers. Everyone seemed to be willing to help out and muck in whenever and wherever was needed and it really helped to contribute to the sense of community at the festival.

The primary schools really blew us away and we're very much looking forward to working with the young performers when they come up to Bradon Forest next year!”

During the planning stages we found out that we had successfully been redesignated our arts status for the next four years.

"Thank you so much for the organisation that went into Friday night. The children and parents had the BEST time, and thoroughly enjoyed performing in the tent!" Jo Cook, Brook Field School.

"My cheeks hurt from smiling! I just haven't stopped smiling all weekend!" Jackie Newton, audience member.

This ambitious cultural and sporting festival was supported by RELAYS, a £3.1million project to inspire a generation of young people throughout South West England to get involved in events in their communities and learn new skills. RELAYS provided funding for a local filmmaker to work with a group of young people from the school on a short film  to capture and document the ‘best of the fest’ for posterity.

The annual summer festival usually sees current GCSE ‘works in progress’, but has also been the background for some exciting projects. In 2006 the drama department flew over a professional flamenco dancer from Spain to work with a group of students on a two week workshop. The resulting performance was the highlight of that year’s festival and the video has had over 85,000 views on Youtube.

Last year saw the progression of Wiltshire Dreams, a 20 year work-in-progress, which is the brain child of David Calder and Stephen Lewis-Gilmore, a local artist. Students performed a piece of dance drama to a specially composed piece of Stephen’s music. The piece was inspired by one of his paintings from the Wiltshire Dreams series in which Stephen uses photographs of past productions at Bradon Forest to build the story.

The 2010 festival will revolve around the whole school musical, directed by Helen Clements, Head of Music and Alison McCallum, Head of Key Stage 3 Drama. We have successfully been awarded the Inspire Mark for the 2012 Cultural Olympiad and will celebrate with an even bigger festival… watch this space!