Back in June we issued an open call for disability-led artworks to be included in DaDaFest International Festival and/or other events in our 2020/21 season. After receiving over 70 applications from around the world, we’re delighted to announce the selected artists, who you’ll be seeing a lot more of once the festival kicks off in November.
All the artists will be responding to the idea of ‘Translations’, the theme of DaDaFest International Festival 2020. Our festival will also be entirely online for the first time ever, so prepare to see plenty of originality and innovation from this fab line-up of D/deaf and disabled artists. As our brand new Digital Producer, Joe, put it:
“When planning DaDaFest 2020, we wanted to make sure that the full potential of a digital arts festival could be reached. This year is a wonderful opportunity to create something new and exciting; something that can reach wider audiences and be experienced wherever and whenever people are able to. Our commissioned artists bring not only a wide breadth of ingenuity and creativity to this year’s festival, but the work they’ll be creating will provide our audiences with a wonderfully diverse range of ways to digitally interact with and experience the arts.”
Festival Commissions
Artists from around the world were invited to pitch their ideas through our four ‘Festival Commissions’, which were open to all professional disabled artists or disability-led companies, with support from The Granada Foundation. Applications came in from countries including Mexico, Australia and Indonesia and our selection panel were impressed at the range and quality of submissions. Of the commissioning process, and all our new commissioned artists, our Festival Producer, Rachel, had this to add:
“We were thrilled with the amazing response from artists to our callouts and want to thank everyone who put time into a proposal. The panel had to make some really difficult decisions and we hope that the final artist list goes some way to demonstrating the range of work, thinking and approaches currently being developed by disabled artists from near and far. We are particularly excited about working with so many artists who are new to DaDaFest and we are confident we will maintain the DaDaFest International brand by offering another high quality, exciting and thought provoking festival”
These are the selected national and international artists/groups who will all be showcased as part of DaDaFest International Festival in November:
Hana Madness with Alexis Maxwell, Tammy Reynolds with Natalia Bedkowska, Deaf Explorer, Helen Seymour
You may also remember our call out for a Libraries Commission open to D/deaf and disabled artists across the world. We are pleased to confirm DaDaFest will now be working with St Helens Borough Council's ‘Arts in Libraries’ team to deliver a St Helens based project. Further details will be announced shortly.
Micro-commissions
With our friends, Unlimited, we awarded 8 commissions for £1,000 to artists based in the North West, and are working together to fund two other emerging North West artists to develop their ideas further. It was great to get to partner with Unlimited on this one, and their Senior Producer, Jo Verrent said of the experience:
‘Partnering with DadaFest on these micro awards has been brilliant for Unlimited - opening up our networks to a wide and diverse pool of disabled talent based in the North West with some exceptionally creative ideas that can be realised on a small budget. We really hope that this helps spread the news about Unlimited and our current main commissions, research and development awards and awards for emerging artists that have a deadline in October - be great to see even more North West disabled artists represented!’
We likewise enjoyed seeing the wealth of talent in our region, and we look forward to sharing these commissioned artists’ work with our audiences across the UK and worldwide.
These are the 8 selected artists/groups from the North West who will be featured in our 2020/21 events:
The Misfits (Clare McNulty and Natalie Amber), Ngozi Ugochukwu, Nicola Smith, Julian Gray, Chanje Kunda, Izzy Kroese, Gold Akanbi, Dominic G
Featured Artist Announcement
DaDaFest International Festival will showcase a number of featured artists, as well as those selected through our Open Call. We are delighted now to be able to share that one the featured artists will be writer and choreographer, Alexandrina Hemsley!
Find out more about Alexandrina Hemsley here, and keep an eye out for further announcements from us about DaDaFest International’s featured artists!
Meet all of our artists so far announced for Translations here.
Stay tuned…
Over the next few months, our team will be preparing for the festival and supporting the commissioned artists to bring their work to life. We’re excited to share it all with you this November!
We’ll be making further announcements in the lead-up to the festival, so stay tuned! Sign up to our mailing list, and make sure to join us this November for DaDaFest International Festival 2020!
