We know it will not have escaped your notice that we have less than a year now to go until Macclesfield Barnaby Festival 2020 – the 10th birthday festival! We hope you are enjoying this year’s quieter summer in Macclesfield and we hope many of you are looking forward to getting stuck in to making the festival happen next year, as ever, your time, energy and skills will be invaluable to creating the Barnaby magic!

So it’s a timely opportunity to offer you an update on where we are at with festival planning and we have some asks for volunteer support too!

A number of you made it along to our open public programming meetings from March through to June. We also had programming discussions with young people at Tytherington School and with the 3rd Macc Scouts. We had a lot of fun and serious discussion of our 2020 theme of ‘Vision’ and the many creative ways we can bring this to life in Macclesfield next summer.

We will be sharing more details from these discussions when we have our open call for events, projects and exhibitions in September, in summary based on these discussions we will be programming three main strands:

  1. Vision: what do we see?
  2. Vision: how do we see?
  3. 10 years of Barnaby: reflections

We are delighted that we are working with the Silk Heritage Trust to animate one of the town’s much-loved spaces – the West Park museum starting at the end of July. An opportunity for the town to have some family-friendly Barnaby fun this summer. We need a number of volunteers to support this work and there is more information here on what, when and how that looks like.

In addition, we are about to launch our Outreach and Engagement programme. As well as consolidating our schools network this will focus on developing a group of Young Producers who will programme a strand throughout the festival in 2020.  There will also be a range of capacity building workshops open to young people and other artists and creatives in the town starting in autumn 2019. All of this is alongside the usual and very necessary fundraising activities to make the festival happen.

If you’re raring to get going with supporting Barnaby we have some specific areas we need volunteer support and skills now https://barnabyfestival.org.uk/summer-volunteering/