Cork Midsummer Festival
Registered Charity Number: 20075514
About the Charity
Cork Midsummer Festival is an annual multi-disciplinary arts festival that uses the city as the stage to present exhilarating arts experiences – igniting bold ideas and building bridges that connect arts and audiences, artists and communities, Cork and the world – with a particular focus on participation and engagement through working with diverse communities such as artists with disabilities, the Traveller community, new migrant groups, and more.
What our grant will help to fund
Through this grant, Cork Midsummer Festival will continue our partnership with Suisha Arts collective of theatre-makers with learning or intellectual disabilities, who have undertaken a participatory devising process with neurodivergent writer Jody O’Neill and director Al Bellamy. The process has been augmented by a critical friendship with Birds of Paradise, a world-renowned disability-led theatre company.
Through support of the production of the group’s new play, a new, innovative and publicly shared model of embedded access & inclusion for disability-centred art will be developed. As well as supporting the professionalisation of theatre artists with intellectual and learning disabilities, the model developed and piloted by this project as a result of the Movement for Good grant will have broad impact on disability-led art and access.
“Cork Midsummer Festival is honoured to be one of the recipients of this year’s Movement for Good grant. The festival believes in a fundamental ethos of Arts for All, that all communities deserve access to and engagement with high quality arts and cultural opportunities and engagement. This grant will allow Cork Midsummer Festival to continue our partnership with the inspiring Suisha Inclusive Arts on their mission to establish a new professional disability-led theatre group here in Cork, as well as developing a new leading model in the creation of theatre by and with artists with intellectual and learning disabilities, towards the premiere of an exciting new work by the group in 2024.”
Susan Holland, Head of Participation and Engagement, Cork Midsummer Festival.
