Three month Festival 2012 announced

In her first pronouncement since becoming director of the Cultural Olympiad in January, Ruth Mackenzie has announced a three month-long festival covering the Olympiad summer in 2012.

Festival 2012, running from Midsummer’s Day in June to September, will be a “once-on-a-lifetime” street event that will be a showcase for British talent, she said.
Meanwhile she and her team of advisers will “shape and edit” events already planned in the run-up to the Olympic summer.

There is now a budget of over £75m, including £3m pledged last week by the British Council. Another new sponsor, adding to the commitment of BT and BP, is Panasonic who will support the Olympic film programme. Most of the money is coming from the Legacy Trust, the Olympic Lottery Distributor, the Arts Council and now the British Council.

Mackenzie also announced that some of the budget has already been committed to ten commissions, which she was announcing for the Unlimited programme of work by disabled artists, launched by Tony Hall last year.

The first commissions, worth £400,000, have been placed in the regions of the four UK arts councils to emphasise the national nature of the Cultural Olympiad, and include the Candoco Dance Company and Graeae Theatre in London; the visual artist Maurice Orr in Northern Ireland; Fittings Multimedia Arts in the north-west; Janice Parker’s piece for disabled dancers, and Ramnesh Meyyappan’s play Snails and Ketchup in Scotland; a storytelling project by Chris Tally Evans, and a collection of monologues for deaf and disabled performers by Kaite O’Reilly and the LLanarth Group in Wales; Jez Colbourne and Mind the Gap with a ‘siren symphony’ called Irresistible, and Bipolar Ringmaster’s Stumble danceCircus in Yorkshire.