Craigmillar Festival Society

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

You have new messages (last change).

The Craigmillar Festival Society (CFS) was a Community Arts organisation that existed in the Craigmillar area (near Edinburgh, Scotland) from 1962 to 2002. It is regarded as important contributor to the Community Arts Movement. Starting in 1967 many of its productions involved Craigmillar Castle.

Contents

[edit] Inception

The Craigmillar Festival Committee was born in 1962, when a mothers group at Peffermill Primary School, south-east side of Edinburgh, created a Festival to celebrate local talent.

By 1962, Craigmillar was suffering from all the social ills of 20th century urban living and decay. The crunch came when the school’s reply to a request for music lessons was ... “it takes us all our time to teach these children the 3Rs far less music.” Biting their tongues the frustrated mothers in Peffermill School Mothers Club responded by knocking on doors, pulling out local talent and staging a People’s Festival of music, drama, and the arts. The Festival was an instant success which brought joy, colour and fun to a drab and grey environment.

Given opportunities to develop their potential, people grew in stature, gained self-worth and confidence to question the deficiencies and potential of their surroundings. Finding their social amenities and environment wanting, they decided to do something themselves to improve their conditions. Marrying the fun of the festival with the passion of intensive political action, led to politicians at all levels working not just for, but WITH the local people. Combining culture with satirical criticism, the people wrote and produced their own community musicals and historical productions, basing them on the area’s multitude of social concerns and issues.

[edit] Growth and development

By 1976 the Society was employing 600 people and involving 1500 volunteers. That year, 17000 people either took part or attended the annual festival. By this time, it had received a major anti-poverty research grant from The European Community.

One example is the Bingham neighbourhood worker Claire Elder. In 1970, by persuading her neighbours to go dressed as a gypsy tribe to the Mediaeval Fayre, later calling themselves the Bingham Belles, they formed a drama and music group and became stars of the Festival's Old Tyme Musical Hall. Entertaining in and beyond Craigmillar, they successfully campaigned to obtain much needed amenities for Bingham, including their own community centre and youth facilities.

The CFS created and developed many concepts including Communiversity, Arts As The Catalyst, Creative Shared Government, Neighbourhood Workers Scheme and the hugely influential planning document "The Comprehensive Plan for Action" where Art and culture were the catalyst in all aspects of regeneration.

One of the CFS founders, Dr Helen Crummy MBE, produced a book called "Let The People Sing" that provides an account of the background and development of the CFS.

[edit] Achievements

Many artists, politicians and researchers came to Craigmillar, either to see or become involved in the community activities. Each of these have taken the seed and rooted it worldwide, from The Easterhouse Festival Society, Notting Hill Carnival and also in the work of Neil Cameron and Reg Bolton in Australia. Craigmillar Festival Society helped create many things, amongst them; The Mermaid Sculpture by Pedro Silva; The Gentle Giant Sculpture by Jimmy Boyle; The Bill Douglas Trilogy, in particular "My Childhood" (funded by British Film Institute).

The Craigmillar Festival Society was a recognised leader in the production of The Community Musical theater. Since 1962 the local artists have produced well over 100 productions, including such Musicals as "Time and Motion Man", "Castle, Cooncil and Curse", "Willie Wynn" and "Oh Gentle Giant" and more recently "Grease Niddrie Style". Such songs as "Craigmillar Now", "When People Play Their Part", "Arled Bairn" and "He Promised Me" are still sung to this day.

It also has links with Professor Eric Trist and The Tavistock Institute, Billy Connelly, Richard Demarco, Anne Lorne Gillies, Joan Bakewell, Michael Marra, Silly Wizard and Bill Paterson.

[edit] Quotes

The effectiveness of the Society’s work began to be noticed from both near and far with distinguished commentators making reference to it.

"Poverty is not only lack of an adequate income to live on, it is being classed as of little or no value to society"
Quote from Helen Crummy’s ‘Let the People Sing’, used by The Social Impact of Participation in the Arts Seminar, 1997 at The House of the Art Lover, Glasgow, organised by Scottish Arts Council, chaired by Seona Reid, Director.
" The story of how the craigmillar festival began is the stuff of which legends are made."
Donald Campbell (Cities of the imagination/Edinburgh, 2003, Signal Books)
"The creation of art in any its forms is perhaps the most profound and powerful affirmation of life against death that we humans can make, of harnessing the constructive and destructve forces. The cultivation of the imagination develops a resourcefulness which enables reality, however grim, to be contended with more innovatively. The Craigmillar folk had not much else than their imagination to fall back on. Their imagination was their road to greater self reliance".
Eric Trist (New directions of hope, 1979)
'the Craigmillar Festival Society had pioneered a stragegy that did in effect offer a "new direction of hope" for the urban poor in"advanced" Western countries".
Rafael Ramirez (The Beauty of Social Organization, Accedo, Munich, 1991)
"All of these activities provided not only socially valeable employment, but also cohesion and meaning to community life."
Alan Barnett (Community Murals, The Peoples Art, 1984, Associated University Press)
"By its pioneering example the Craigmillar Festival Society may do more for Edinburgh’s social balance sheet than all the millions the Edinburgh International Festival has earned in the last 20 years."
Malcolm McEwen (‘The Other Edinburgh’, New Statesman, 18 August, 1972.)
"Copies of the plan (CPA) have been dirtributed to China, the USA, Russia, Israel, Canada and India and throughout Europe - the imagination, vivacity and local creativity that has blossomed from a community arts festival in 1962 is seen as an example with worldwide signifinance."
George McRobie (Small Is Possible, London: Jonathan Cape, 1981 — this is part of the E. F. Schumacher Small Is Beautiful trilogy)
"I have known the developments in Craigmillar for almost 20 years. They serve as a source of inspiration to communities around the country, and indeed around the world"
Kenneth Calman (Arts The Catalyst, Craigmillar Communiversity Press, 2004)
"The (Craigmillar) community is at the leading edge of post industrial innovation and has greatly influenced my search for alternatives."
Eric Trist (QWL Quality of Working Life and the 80’s (The Closing Address to the International Conference on QWL and the 80’s, Harbour Castle Hilton, Toronto, August 30 - September 3rd, 1981)
"It is in the visionary work of the musicals, play sculptures, murals and other arts that the Festival Society does intuitive-creative planning, revealing not only present realities and future scenarios, but also its profound, creative share in the transformation that our world is undergoing.
from ‘A GIANT STEP’ An Appraisal of The Craigmillar Festival Society’s Approach to Community Development, Relative to the Craigmillar (European Economic Community Programme of Pilot Schemes and Studies to Combat Poverty, Abstract, p. 6. By M Stephen Burgess in consultation with Eric Trist November, 1980.)
"I was most impressed by what I learned I am quite sure that this organisation (Craigmillar Festival Society) represents a most useful model for the containment, if not the solution, of many of the social problems that crowd upon us. I believe that a thousand such associations throughout Britain would not only relieve the so-called public sector of a great deal of its social work (broadly defined), but also enlist communities in the containment of deviance as well as of other problems. Furthermore, it would give much meaning to the notion of grassroots democracy."
Professor Albert Cherns of Loughborough University (in a letter to the Michael Young Rt. Hon. Lord Young of Dartington, 2nd August, 1982)
"It is perhaps no co-incidence that the model of the Craigmillar society has become a legend and inspiration to other community groups seeking ways of resisting social dereliction.
Dr. Helen Wood (‘Festivity and Social Change’, Leisure in the 80’s Research Unit, Department of Social Sciences, Polytechnic of the South Bank, London Road, London SE1, December, 1982)
"This approach to community initiative and development, of leading from the expressive creativity of people did indeed spread in smaller and larger ways, but most notably to Easterhouse in Glasgow and Bootle in Liverpool." (Wood, 1982)
"The Craigmillar Festival Society, founded in 1964 on an Edinburgh housing estate, has become a model of community empowerment for many other initiatives like Easterhouse and Cranhill Arts Projects or the Pilton Video Project in Glasgow."
Charles Landry and Franois Matarasso (Art of Regeneration, Comedia, 1996)
"Craigmillar Festival Society, founded and run by local people since 1962, is still regarded as a model for the use of the arts in cultural and social action in this country and abroad."
David Harding, Head of Environmental Art and Sculpture (1985 – 2001), Glasgow School of Art. Art with People, AN Publications, 1994.
"What is astonishing about the Craigmillar story is that, while incisive, creative thinkers like Augusto Boal, Paulo Freire and Ivan Illich, among others, were publishing their ideas on approaches to the issues of the poor and excluded, intuitively the Festival Society was actually carrying them out."
David Harding (Arts The Catalysts, Craigmillar Communiversity Press, 2004)

It has also been compared to The Peckham Experiment and Bromley by Bow Centre and The Healthy Living Centre concept. In recent years The Bromley By bow Centre has taken up The Communiversity concept to develop its education programme.

[edit] Decline and demise

By 2002 funding was cut-off and the remaining CFS projects were made independent organizations. Although the original CFS organization is now defunct, it continues to attract attention through The Arts The Catalyst Exhibition at The City Arts Centre, Edinburgh in 2004 and an award winning documentary, which won The Saltire Award at The Edinburgh International Film Festival in 2005. The arts side of The CFS today continues with The Craigmillar Arts.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../c/r/a/Craigmillar_Festival_Society_208e.html"