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.

Not that long ago street art was considered a synonym for vandalism. Tags scrawled by young louts hanging from railway bridges when they ought to have been home at night and who didn’t respect the value of people’s property. Or at least that was one mindset. But things have changed (partly to Mr Banksy’s fame) and now the whole spectrum of street art, right from the scorned tag, through typography, paste ups, and murals can be seen on the streets of the world’s most celebrated cities.

On a street art walking tour through parts of Old Street, Shoreditch, and Hackney, with Emilie from Alternative London, I was shown an array of styles and forms, some playful and aesthetic, some a demonstration of identity, and others part of a social conversation and making challenge statements. And try as they might, the authorities can’t stamp it down. Just like Christiaan Nagel’s brightly coloured mushrooms made from expanding foam and popping up around the east, it keeps on growing.

Street artists are nothing if not innovative. Take Ben Wilson. You’re unlikely to notice his work. In fact, you’ll step all over it. Also known as the chewing gum artist, he creates works on discarded and dried up bits of gum, putting the view in front of him down on the sticky pavement. Some of the simplest work is deep in meaning, like ‘Stik’, the man who is a comment on the vulnerability of the disenfranchised homeless community.

Street art is no longer underground, displayed in galleries and selling for hundreds of thousands of pounds. We see pieces by Banksy, Thierry Noir (the first man to paint on the Berlin Wall), Connor Harrington, and a secret pop star who goes by the name of Bambi. Having soaked up inspiration from all the above and more, we wandered back to the studios (via a beautiful and intricate paste up mural from Lily Mixe) to create our own.

Emilie guided us through designing and cutting out multi layered stencils, and bravely trusted us to wield spray paint as we cast it on the walls, paper and bags to take away. Struggling to create the perfect A4 stencil, I’m in awe of the large and intricate pieces like that of French stencilist Tian.

But this form of art isn’t about competition. Instead it’s creative and expressive. Rocking my new bag and proud of my skills, as well as encouraged to look up, down, and really see what’s around me, I’ve got a whole new appreciation for art—wherever it happens to be.