London: Sydenham Arts Announces 2016 Summer Festival

 

Poetry TakeawaySydenham Arts has announced its 2016 multi-disciplinary Summer Festival is scheduled to take place July 1-10 in various locations across South East London. 

This year’s Summer Festival line-up will include “Poetry Town”, a program that began in 2015 with a weekly poem posted at Kirkdale Bookshop. Now more popular, it has grown into a partnership with Sydenham Arts. During the event, weekly poems will be displayed in various doctor’s offices, cafés, banks, bus stops and at the train station. Works by local and national poets, both past and present, will be presented. There will also be a children’s Poetry Treasure Hunt, encouraging people of all ages to participate. 

Sydenham Arts Summer Festival will also present theatre events including a comedy festival, as well as a music program with the 7th visit from the group “Balalalaika” and the Devonshire Road Folk Festival. 

There will also be a Great War Classroom program in which visitors will participate in an immersive theater experience in a 1916 school room. The project aims to explore the history of teachers and students living in South East London during World War I to find out how it may have affected their daily activities. 

The Sydenham Artist’s Trail will take place over two weekends (July 2-3; 9-10), with displays by participating artist Anna Lovely, who trained at Camberwell and the Royal College and opened a local gallery in 2014. Glass artist Pippa Stacy, who trained at Central St Martins, will also showcase her work, while artist Jacqueline Pennell will present site-specific artworks at Dacres Wood Nature Reserve as part of the trail. 

Additional events will be announced as they join the Summer Festival line-up. 

The Sydenham Arts Summer Festival comes on the heels of the organization’s recent Spring Festival of Music, launched for the first time this year to great success. With a program including Kathryn Williams and Julie Stirman’s soul and jazz music, Sydenham Arts’ online profile visits were up over 38 percent, new followers joined up daily over two months, and Twitter impressions rose by over 200 percent.