Children’s and Youth’s Projects

We’re just putting the finishing touches to our programming for our younger audience – here are some of the details in advance of the official announcement.

Shrewsbury Folk Festival Schools Project
We’re going to spend a week in late June in a local primary school with members of 422 and Sunshine Arts.
422 will be providing instrumental, vocal and dance workshops to all classes – the details will be finalised on Monday but there will be a band performance, ceilidhs and clog dancing, a chance for pupils to play various instruments, a final group ceilidh, and for some of the older group an introduction to rapper sword dancing.
Sunshine Arts will work with the older pupils on a Mum & Tuk’ play which fuses traditional Caribbean Tuk dance and English Mummers plays; there are also opportunities for Caribbean clapping games and percussion workshops. This is an exciting and significant project which we’ll formally announce next week, with full details of the school and a timetable of events.

Youth’s workshops
'The Big Shed' (see post below) will host some superb workshops for youths, amongst those that we’ve already scheduled are a Longsword Dance workshop with Sue Coe and Ryburn Longsword, a Samba percussion workshop with Sam Pirt, and vocal harmony workshops with Matt Price and Stream of Sound

Family Ceilidh
On Sunday afternoon the dance tent will host a family ceilidh with 422.

We’ll officially announce full details of these next week on both the website and blog – thoughts and ideas are very welcome, please feel free to leave a comment on the blog, we read them all!

Youth programme ‘The Big Shed’

Our move to the West Midlands Showground means that we have more room and more opportunities for distinct programming; as a result of this we’re giving young people ‘The Big Shed’, a venue aimed at those aged from 12-25.

‘The Big Shed’ will have workshops from many of the artists performing at the festival – for example there will be individual workshops in songwriting, vocal harmony, melodeon, percussion and Longsword.

There will also be an ‘improvers’ instrumental workshop, aimed at those looking to gain confidence in playing in sessions.

After dark ‘The Big Shed’ will become a dance house or chill out zone exclusively for young people with a folk-DJ mixing both tunes and songs.

Line-up amendments

Sadly, due to unforeseen circumstances we’ve had to make a couple of small alterations to the line-up.

Patrick Street were due to play on Monday afternoon, but are sadly unable to make the festival – we’re currently looking at filling the slot and expect to announce an excellent new act over the next few days.

Bob Harris was scheduled to MC for a few hours on Sunday night but is now unable to be with us on that evening.

We’re all really disappointed that neither Patrick Street nor Bob will be at the 2007 festival, but they will obviously be on our lists for booking in 2008. Please accept our apologies for any disappointment.

We’ll announce new bookings on the blog and festival website as soon as we have them confirmed.

2007 Posters

Ltd Edition, numbered Hatch Show Print Posters

Formed in 1879, Hatch Show Print is one of the oldest letter press printers in America; based in Nashville they have a uniquely identifiable art style, and an unrivalled history in producing posters for country music’s biggest names as well as many multi-national and local companies.

The posters are all hand produced using letters and imagery from their own library – many of the letters, logos and images have been used repeatedly over many decades.

Using the same printing techniques over many years has kept an authentic turn of the century feel to their work – every machine is hand operated and every single poster hand made. No corners are cut and the results are stunning pieces of poster art.

Our posters are printed on uncoated 80lb cover, cream coloured with flecks that look like recycled paper – it’s perfect for framing.

We opted for a three colour design, which means each poster has been individually passed through a press three times (once for each colour); it’s a precise and time consuming process but the results are stunning and distinct from any other printing process (click the image for a much more detailed view).

As each poster is hand made, there are slight differences to every single poster – we had a limited print run of 200 posters and each one is individually numbered.

Dimensions (W x H)32.5cm x 58cm (12.8” x 22.8”)

We’re selling the posters prior to the festival as this will enable to you keep them in the best possible condition (rather than trying to keep one for 4 days over the festival weekend!). If there are any remaining posters then these will be available at the festival merchandise stall.

All orders will be shipped in strong postal tubes to keep the posters in perfect condition.

For more details or to purchase a poster, please visit Fish Records