This exciting week-long programme of live arts events, fringe activities and happenings around town is an opportunity to showcase creativity and arts in the local area, through unique and exclusive experiences.

What’s on?

There will be interactive street theatre and dance performances in Park Mall, all to interact with the community and provide events and an atmosphere in Ashford town centre. Bootworks Theatre will perform We’re Gonna Need A Bigger Boat, which is a show for small-town communities, about small-town communities. You’ll see Comedy Cavemen, a posse of Palaeolithic cavemen characters causing mischief and spreading an environmental message.

You’ll be able to see street art created by great local artists. Create your own art with The Open Air Drawing-Room a drawing group offering some landscape painting. Each artist (audience member) also makes a Cyanotype portrait which will be exhibited as a mirror image to the final painting – A Sea of Faces – embracing JMW Turner’s pioneering interest in photography and his desire to find new ways to embrace art. This project invites the public to engage in setting the world record for a painting that has been created by the largest number of artists – which is pretty exciting!

Circus will come to the streets, you can see performance poets in pubs, and there will even be a spoof version of JAWS outside the Picturehouse cinema. Frantic features spectacular acrobatics and dance-theatre, choreographed around a wheel, with a hidden water system for a joyous finale danced in pouring rain. CONFiCo present JOiNT, a playful and curious piece exploring the interplay between individuality, commonality and the body’s facility. Acrobatics, globe walking, dead celebrities, French finesse, trumpeting and mime mayhem make L’Hotel an enchanting show to delight the audience. For kids there’s Tutu Trouble, an exciting original new physical theatre show for children.

At Revelation Ashford, there will be live DJ sets by Huey Morgan from Fun Lovin’ Criminals and BBC 6 Music and Terry Hall of The Specials, warming up festival goers with their music and sounds.

Mr Harper’s Birthday Party

In December 1911 George Harper made an anonymous offer to present the Hubert Fountain to Victoria Park. So as well as all the above, there will be a Victorian-themed Mr. Harper’s Birthday Partyfamily fun day on Sunday 21 July, which acknowledges and celebrates his gift, with games, arts, workshops and music – and the traditional birthday cake races.

Why host Create Platform?

It’s all part of an effort to make Ashford a creative place to be beyond just the Create weekend. “It is really important for the growth of Create, as well as Ashford’s cultural offer, to extend beyond the one big day in the park,” says Chris Dixon, Arts & Cultural Industries Manager at Ashford Borough Council.  “The introduction of Create Platform three years ago has allowed for more opportunities for local artists, as well as generated broader engagement from audiences, venues, and sponsors.”

Originally published on the Create Festival blog.

Hollie McNish is a couple of minutes late to the Folkestone Quarterhouse stage. She keeps peering through the curtains throughout the hour long show. Like she’s not quite fully focused on the audience.

Which of course she’s not. Because she’s a mum. And since she unexpectedly became pregnant at the age of 26, her life has changed. Becoming a mother (her daughter, now 6, sits backstage watching Harry Potter) has been the best, hardest, most tumultuous, bizarre, emotional experience of her life, and is the subject of Nobody Told Me, a book of poetry and parenthood. It’s a collection of extracts from the diaries she kept from learning she was pregnant to her daughter’s third birthday, written in a mix of prose and poetry.

The reading is part of the Quarterhouse’s International Women’s Day Festival, and listening to McNish it’s clear that feminism and raising awareness of these issues is still needed. The book and show connect her own experience of motherhood with the political, society, race, relationships, commercialism and gender. Whilst occasionally admonishing herself for not being practical enough in delivering change, she knows that ‘creativity really is one of the best parts of humanity. It often brings out the structural and political issues I think and makes them easy to engage with in so many different ways. I’ve definitely felt before like I’m not being practical enough by doing poetry – my last job was working in planning and youth work. But actually, it is. It doesn’t have to be, but it can be. Hearing midwives say they’ve snuck my poems into hospital wards is probably the current highlight!’

You can see why they do. McNish is startlingly honest. Her writing and reading is conversational and real. Gritty and explicit. And this openness is needed in a world where pressures on new mothers are unrealistic and stressful and the practical aspects of such a dramatic life change aren’t discussed and the difficult elements side-stepped. She tells us about poo, sick and bleeding. About how alone she felt. The anxiety that comes from not knowing what you should be doing. How you’ll feel like a kid yourself, but have to get on with it. How she would find herself breastfeeding on toilets because after waiting ‘eight weeks to get the confidence to go into town / Now, the comments around me cut like a knife / As I rush into toilet cubicles / feeling nothing like nice.’

She admits feeling guilty because she doesn’t want sex again when her baby and boyfriend paw at her and ‘I just wish sometimes no one needed me / and I don’t want to feel guilty and tired all the time / I just want a body that’s mine.’ As celebrities pop back into shape in a few weeks her ‘stomach bulges like a water balloon / Her hollowed-out body lies like a carcass consumed.’ And she catalogues the scathing looks resulting from a toddler tantrum that comes out of nowhere, being judged on how fit she is to be a mother on that one moment and feeling like a ‘wretched human’ as a result.

But there’s also the beauty of what a child can teach you, and one of the first pieces she reads is about her year-old daughter looking in the full length mirror she has just reinstalled in the house, too disgusted by her own body to use it. Her daughter is in awe ‘hands clapping in applause to it / naked, bold and proud / her mouth open wide and round like / wow / my body is amazing.’

Spoken word has recently become fashionable, and rightly so. A new generation of poets including McNish, Kate Tempest and other contemporaries are on the national curriculum and McNish herself runs a company focusing on poetry in education. The entry of 11 April where she writes how she ‘wrapped my lips around my baby’s nose and sucked the snot from it’ is taught in schools (‘probably as contraception,’ she deadpans).

Perhaps young people connect with her. Dressed in laidback trainers, hoops, shirt over t-shirt, bright eyes and blonde hair in a ponytail McNish doesn’t look to be in her thirties. She’s friendly, warming the audience with her vulnerability, and invites us all to have a birthday drink with her in the bar. She has always written, ‘all my days, love it.’ But ‘Nobody Told Me’ was meant to be just another diary, like her teenage ones, a way of articulating herself and dealing with the emotion of pregnancy and motherhood, not a book. After an evening of entertainment and wisdom, I’m so glad that she was persuaded, that ‘Nobody Told Me’ is out there in the world and Hollie McNish’s bold voice is being heard by men, women, old and young.

Hollie McNish’s play Offside, which she co-wrote with Sabrina Mahfouz, comes to the Marlowe Studio, Canterbury  on 10 & 11 April 2017.

There are numerous speaking events these days, where famous and high profile people tell of their adventures and exploits. But even lowly individuals have stories to tell. So, This is What Happened offers an opportunity for all of us to tell those tales, and the audience to appreciate just what we all have to offer.

The format is simple. On the last Thursday of every month at the Omnibus space in Clapham, six people have ten minutes each to tell their story. The only rule is that they must be true and it must be from their own lives. These people look like you and I. And they are. Their stories are life affirming and poignant, and show how in ordinary lives extraordinary things happen. Started by Laurel Lefkow in 2014, after she was inspired by similar events, it’s an opportunity for connection, celebration and participation. An actress herself, she says that she finds many of the stories ‘more memorable than a lot of theatre that I see. Human beings are endlessly fascinating, and the sense of wonder, inspiration, and community that these evenings have are inspiring.’ Creating something so powerful at the same time as being laidback and intimate is no small feat, but one that Laurel has succeeded in.

Sudeshna Choudhury told an inspiring and heart-warming tale of how simple feedback to the manager of a call centre employee who sold her a mobile phone went on to change his life. She describes her greatest joy as “helping and mentoring others to make a difference in their lives”, and her ten minutes showed just how simple that can be. This really was a case of the magical happening in the every day.

Some stories were a little bit more epic. Travelling the world with three children is quite an undertaking, especially when the time between a throwaway comment and the first train journey was only six months. Juliette Grassby-Lewis and her husband took their children around the world and gave them a real education in the process. She has been Buddhist for 27 years, and believes that putting your vision out there will help the universe bring it to reality.

It was not always about things that people have done, but also how they’ve felt. Yaron Engler, an ‘out-of-the-box coach, musician and speaker’ has lived all around the world, and explained in a tear-stained speech how love, hope, and tenacity rescued him from depression. A candid explanation of the ferocity of mental illness and the resilience of human beings to triumph over it, his vulnerability on the stage warmed the audience. It’s this type of story that continues to wow Laurel and who she believes are the “most memorable because they are so entirely themselves”.

Another tale of love came from Frederik van der Zeeuq, who has been in London for three years after following his heart here. Roddy Gye has done apparently everything, and continues to do it. A volunteer and consultant at Omnibus, he’s a storyteller who embodies what the venue is about. Thomas Quinton explained what keeps him coming back to the bar and how it feels to defend the truth in the name of justice—and just how hazy the truth can be.

It seemed such an apt location, in this old library that resembled a cosy living room in a large house. The intention of the Omnibus is to bring the literary canon alive to a contemporary audience, and it’s the perfect place for So, This Is What Happened. The locals saved the library from being converted into commercial premises just three years ago. Aiming to celebrate its historical roots and everything they do is intimately linked with the spoken word. We all have a voice. We’re all the stars of our own stories.