Last week as part of the aforementioned day job, I attended the Opening Event for World Event Young Artists 2012 at Nottingham Trent University.
The event will be taking place around Nottingham in early September and promises to be an exciting and multifaceted festival bringing together a 1000 young artists from across the globe.
The event has been several years in the making and whilst organised by UKYA, The Arts Council, Nottingham Trent University and Nottingham City Council it is also widely supported by local business and an army of local volunteers.
I had the opportunity last year to be involved with Derby Quad and the Format11 Photography festival. These events are an excellent way of creating symbiotic relationships between business, education & local government all providing much needed platforms for young creative individuals and a presenting our local communities with diversity of art forms that might otherwise struggle to get noticed.
WEYA will include visual arts, poetry, dance, music and gastronomy. The launch event included a new piece by local writer and director Micheal Pinchbeck as well as a sample of 2D & 3D art and an excellent piece of contemporary poetry from the leader of a local youth poetry group.
The event will be the finale of the East Midlands Cultural Olympiad 2012 which will also see a wide range of new performances & exhibitions on show around the city and the region during August.
On Monday evening I had to stand on a stage at Nottingham Contemporary in front of 400 University of Nottingham architecture students and presented a gift to the winner and runners up of our sponsored Photography Prize. Nottingham Contemporary is another amazing venue in the City and has hosted some unique and engaging exhibitions since it opened. It’s also a wonderful building and gallery space.
Nottingham has done incredibly well over the last few years in attracting some major exhibitions, exciting premiers and developing the facilities open to local students and arts practitioners. I’m very pleased that the day job allows me to be a part of some of these and to provide various levels of support and sponsorship where we practically can.
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WEYA Mandala
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Sunday night saw the Mela / Mandala Event come to the Market Square. One the bigger events making up the WEYA2012 Festival we had a full day of music & performance by artists from around the world.
Earlier in the afternoon performances by South African Medu and the Usuthu Group bought the sun out. Medu (from Pretoria) performed acapella songs including traditional African, eighties pop ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’ (this probably from before any of them were born) and the Bob Marley classic ‘Redemption Song’. This I managed to film and I hope they don’t mind it being shown here.
The Usuthu Group bought dance, song & performance from traditional South Africa and did well not to bruise or break themselves on the stone slabs of the Market Square.
Later in the afternoon the main stage saw a number of international performers. One of the ones I particularly enjoyed was the Sabar Soundsystem from Nottingham (obviously international if you come from somewhere other than Nottingham, ….and the UK). Big pounding rhythmic & hypnotic!
And as a big closing piece and part of the impressive Mandala sound light & dance performance, renowned tabla musician was Talvin Singh lighting up the evening sky and the frontage of the Council House. An amazing collaborative effort by NAE, SAMPAD, WEYA and the City Council came to a close for a very impressed audience. With another seven days of events across the city, WEYA has certainly had an impact.
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Filed under Comment, Hipstamatic, Music, Photography, Uncategorized, Video
Tagged as Bob Marley, Mandala, Medu, Mela, Pretoria, Redemption Song, South Africa, Talvin Singh, Usuthu, WEYA