Folk Festival impacts on Shrewsbury school

Press release - 18 June 2007

Folk Festival brings arts and music project to Shrewsbury school

Children at a Shrewsbury school are to take part in the first ever school project to learn traditional folk music, dance and drama skills as part of the Shrewsbury Folk Festival.

The event at Oxon CE Primary School - from 26 June to 29 June - will see the students taking part in instrumental workshops, ceilidhs, rapper sword dancing, clog dancing, playing tin whistles and performing a Mum & Tuk play combining a traditional English Mummers play with Caribbean Tuk dance.

The inaugural schools festival has been funded thanks to a £8,100 grant from Awards for All, bid for by the festival organisers. The week will be led by 422, a traditional folk band and past winners of the BBC Young Folk Award, and Shropshire-based Sunshine Arts.

The project will culminate with an outdoor performance of the Mum & Tuk play to parents on Friday 29 June. As part of the school project, a £250 bursary to buy an instrument will be awarded to a pupil who shows the talent and enthusiasm for learning an instrument.

Shrewsbury Folk Festival (formerly the Bridgnorth Folk Festival) is the biggest folk event in the Midlands and has rapidly established itself in the festival calendar. More than 5,000 people are expected to come to the festival at the town’s West Midland Showground from 24 August to 27 August, and bring tens of thousands of pounds worth of business to the area.

Neil Pearson, one of the festival organisers, said: “The Shrewsbury Folk Festival is very much an event for all ages and launching this project enabled us to work with the community in Shrewsbury.

“We chose Oxon as it is working towards Artsmark status, and the school was hugely enthusiastic about the project and the benefits it will bring to pupils.”

He added: “We hope this project will become an annual event, working with schools or community groups in Shrewsbury. We see the festival very much as a community event and the schools projects is allowing us to put something back into the area that supports us.”

Headteacher Mark Rogers said: “This is a superb opportunitity to allow pupils access to arts from different cultures and in forms that they would not normally be exposed to.

“The week will be fantastic and will lead onto to more creative work in school.”

ENDS

Background information about the workshops, the Awards for All bid and 422 is available from Neil Pearson on (01743) 231522 or 07986 630496.

For media contact, call Jo Cunningham, Communications Unit, on (01743) 252829.