Eurocultured Street Festival

What is Eurocultured?

Eurocultured is a series of street festivals and linked projects that celebrate the diversity of European Culture in all its forms. Our street festivals only take place in city centre locations that are to easy to access.

We like the idea of people from different cultures coming together in the streets and getting on with each other as artists paint, sing, dance and perform around them. We want to introduce our audience to new things and to fire their imaginations.

We also deliver projects that lead to the creation of brand new content for our festivals. We invite artists to work with young people and with other artists from different countries and different artforms. They work collaboratively and we then showcase the new work they make at our events. This strand is called ‘Eurocollaborations.’

A brief history:

The concept was born out of the enlargement of the EU in May 2004; as 10 new member states joined the Union, Spearfish worked with Manchester City Council and numerous cultural funding bodies to present a free street festival in Manchester City Centre as a means of celebrating the richness and the diversity of European culture via live art, dance, music, performance, food, drink and free workshops. Over 5,000 people came to witness live music and dance performances (from cutting edge to traditional), interactive installations and live mural painting by artists from the UK, Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Spain, France, Italy, Portugal, Austria and Germany.

People seemed to like and so we carried on, Spearfish have since delivered 8 Eurocultured Street Festivals in Manchester. We close off 3 streets underneath Oxford Road Train Station and program content onto the street, on stages and in surrounding venues. The event has grown to also include street theatre, puppetry, cabaret, spoken word, live digital art, installation art, film and showcases by young people who have developed work with a European link specifically for the festival. The Manchester event now attracts over 15,000 each year.

We have also successfully taken the festival concept to different cities. We have delivered 4 festivals in Dublin, 3 festivals in Belfast, 1 festival in Bratislava and last year we will delivered a 2 day festival in Turku, Finland as part of the European Capital of Culture; it went so well that we will be going back in September in 2012.

Collectively over 200,000 people have attended Eurocultured Street Festivals and we have featured over 2000 acts and artists from 26 European countries.

This is just the beginning………