Out and About… Royston Arts Festival – Renewal

Out and About… Royston Arts Festival – Renewal

Royston Arts Festival is back this year, with a mix of in person and online events. The Festival takes place between 23rd and 26th September, with additional film events on 19th and 28th.

Everyone is welcome to come along and get involved – outstanding photography, drama, music and film. 

We are delighted to announce the programme for Royston Arts Festival 2021 which you can also find in the centre pages of The Listing Magazine September Edition you can also visit: www.creativeroyston.org 

We are proud to feature this year’s cover art on our front covers again – it’s a mixed media painting named after the Festival theme – Renewal. It features five winning artworks from Creative Royston’s Schools’ Cover Art Competition. The winners were three students from Icknield First School and two from King James Academy Royston. They presented renewal concepts like renovation of an old barn, bees and pollination, turning a new page, mother nature reclaiming the Earth in lush greenery, and old brick walls succumbing to regrowth. The circles represent the cyclical nature of our lives, while the green target alludes to our world’s climate targets. At the centre of it all, an egg represents new life and perhaps new light – enlightenment?

The artwork was compiled and created by Royston’s own contemporary Life Story Artist, Stacey Leigh Ross, whose past local projects include: capturing the story of the Manor House on five canvases for our local Wetherspoon; the Young Artists Awards with Royston Arts Society; and The Life of Roger Britten, a painting about Royston’s first recorded Black man which is currently in Royston & District Museum. When not engaged in community art projects, Stacey Leigh paints commissioned life stories on canvas and lectures at The University of the Arts London. Stacey is currently starting a PhD researching how Caribbean Carnival and art curation can trigger more compassionate behaviour.

Learn more about her work at www.byleigh.com 

www.creativeroyston.org

Strangers at a Festival
Local drama group CADS is planning a show with a difference for this year’s Royston Arts Festival – a unique evening combining drama and film. The first half of the evening consists of the one-act play Strangers on a Film, adapted for the stage by local author Roy Maddox from a radio play by Stephen Wyatt. The play, based on real events, imagines a series of meetings in 1950 between film director Alfred Hitchcock and thriller writer Raymond Chandler. Hitchcock was, at the time, looking for someone to write a screenplay for his next film, which was to be an adaptation of the novel Strangers on a Train, the debut novel of Patricia Highsmith. Strangers on a Film somewhat ambitiously charts the increasingly acrimonious relationship between the two men, told through a mixture of individual meetings and direct addresses to the audience and illustrated with projected film, animation and still images. The play will be followed by a screening of the movie itself – a much loved Hitchcock classic.

Performances will be at King James Academy Royston, Senior Site, on Friday 24th and Saturday 25th September, starting at 7pm. Tickets cost £10 on door (cash only) and audiences are encouraged to bring their own refreshments and find a table.
More information can be found at

www.cadsroystron.org.uk 
www.creativeroyston.org