Midsummer Festival
Ikon is excited to be taking part in Midsummer Festival, a free one-day festival celebrating arts and culture in the West Midlands on Saturday 20 June.
Featuring a collection of many West Midlands theatre, dance, music, artists and venues Midsummer Festival will mark the Summer Solstice with a wide range of live, archived and pre-recorded cultural activity available online including performances which have never been seen before from companies including the Royal Shakespeare Company, ACE Dance and Music and Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. See the full schedule.
Midsummer Festival is the first event organised by the West Midlands Culture Response Unit (WMCRU), which has been created to co-ordinate, develop and deliver an action-orientated, response by over 100 arts organisations in the West Midlands to the Covid-19 crisis in the short, medium and long term. Led by Culture Central, WMCRU’s purpose is to ensure the visibility, viability and recovery of the Cultural Sector in the West Midlands.
As well as the Summer Solstice, the festival programme will also take inspiration from Refugee Week (15th – 21st June), with Midsummer Festival taking place on World Refugee Day 2020. Refugee Week is the UK’s largest festival celebrating the contribution of refugees and promoting understanding of why people seek sanctuary.
To celebrate Midsummer Festival and World Refugee Day, Ikon and Celebrating Sanctuary Birmingham have compiled 20 quick-fire, home-produced, soapbox videos on the theme of Refugee Week 2020: “To ‘imagine’ means to picture something you can’t currently see. To step beyond the current moment, and perceive something different.” More information.