Track 69

Track 69.

Hello everybody.

Welcome to this meeting to review this year’s arts festival.

As you know, this is the fourth and biggest festival that we’ve run at the university and it’s clear now that it’s fast becoming a fixture in the calendar of the city and the county, and attracting attention from the rest of the country, as well as from abroad.

First of all, I’d like to review the preparations for the festival, then go on to do an analysis of the festival itself and how well it went.

The plan is then for you to work in teams of three, with one tutor and two students in each team, and for you to discuss the festival in more detail so you can come up with suggestions for the organizing committee to consider for next year’s festival.

Well, as I said, we’re in our fourth year and we’ve added some new events.

The first festival focused mainly on music and the performing arts, as it was felt that those would be the best types of event for both students and the public to take part in.

More forms of art, in particular short films and photography, were added over the next two years and this year we have extended our offer to include painting and crafts, with a particular focus on the students here producing their own work, both for exhibition and competition.

This was largely successful, but I’ll discuss that in detail later.

We also invited professional artists in some of the fields to perform, and that will be something for you to review for the next event.

What was particularly encouraging this year was that we had contributions to the festival from the highest number of students to date, with representatives from every nationality at the university.

As in previous years, we planned to use the spare university accommodation for all the visitors, both students and non-students, but as we expected a greater attendance at this year’s festival, we also arranged accommodation at the city college three miles from here and arranged coach transfers between the college and the university campus.

Unfortunately, that proved problematic and we won’t repeat those arrangements next year.

We also arranged the catering both here and at the city college, and one of the new ideas we tried was to experiment with dishes based on different regional themes over the five days.

This allowed our international studentsو well, the keen cooks among them anywayو to create the menus and work with the catering company to produce breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Of course, one of the main aims of this festival, apart from the obvious ones of extending the university’s reputation and giving our students the chance to take part in a wonderful event, was to help develop our young people’s organisational skills and give them some experience of real work, mostly as volunteers.

Of course, we had to pay for professional organizers to make sure the festival ran well, but as our money was limited and we wanted to give as many opportunities to our students as possible, we made sure that they ran all of the events themselves under the direction of the professionals and, of course, alongside the tutors.