Birmingham will benefit from “the great gift of the mega-event”, said the creative officer of the Commonwealth Games at the launch of a concurrent six-month-long cultural festival.
Birmingham 2022 festival will include more than 200 events from March to September across the West Midlands and will involve more than 100,000 participants, making it one of the largest cultural programmes to ever surround the games.
“The great gift of the mega-event is that it comes and it gives an opportunity for everybody to work towards the same goal,” said Martin Green, the festival’s chief creative officer and former head of ceremonies at the London 2012 Olympics.
“Sport is codified by its very nature, it is the same everywhere in the world. So it’s the cultural activity, the festival, the opening and closing ceremonies, that give you the sense of place, and we have a great opportunity to celebrate this extraordinary creative place we’ve got here in Birmingham.”
The programme includes On Record, an album featuring 11 original songs about Birmingham by local artists including UB40, and Time Travel Tram, which will transform windows in a West Midlands Metro tram service between Wolverhampton and Birmingham into the world’s first immersive digital art installation powered by 5G.
A number of events will merge the worlds of culture and sport. Outside the Box is a play that will be performed on squash courts at the University of Birmingham, while Come Bowl with Me will take a comedic look at the world of lawn bowls.
The £12m festival opens on 17 March with a large-scale open-air performance in Centenary Square that combines dance, acrobatics and aerial displays with a cast of hundreds.
“I really love the fact that for many years now, great sporting events also have great cultural events alongside them,” said Green. “It’s a great way to reach even more people than you would just through sport, and to see sport audiences cross over to culture.”
More than 100 creative community projects have been given grants as part of the programme. They include a large-scale mural in Druids Heath and a theatre production created by Muslim teenagers in Small Heath who will gather stories from their family histories.
Green added that he hoped the festival would help pioneer post-Covid cultural recovery in the country. “Our strapline for the whole festival is Let’s Go Out, we don’t want to be unclear about this,” he said. “It’s a great opportunity for people to get back to culture and back into venues, although a lot of our work is going to be outside where we know people are a bit more comfortable.
“We very much want to be part of the recovery for the region, and the whole UK, because we’re a great big festival right in the heart of the UK that we know people will travel to.”
The programme will also feature a number of events that tackle issues relating to the Commonwealth, which largely consists of former territories of the British empire.
“We’ve got projects which explore the difficult history of the Commonwealth,” said Raidene Carter, the festival’s executive producer. “What we’ve been really keen on from day one is making sure we express all of those opinions and views, because it’s not for us to censor any artist’s view or opinion. We just knew we needed to present all sides of that feeling.”
