The vision and thought behind our festival is to provide an event that is fully open and paticipative and that everyone learns and enjoys from it.
The location of the festival is Thurles, with events taking place within both outdoor and indoor venues throughout the town. This is the 6th year of our festival and it is now one of the biggest Halloween festivals in Ireland with a duration of 7 days.
Our festival is a multi disciplinary event that encourages participation in, and enjoyment of the arts. It is fully open to everyone and our range of events reflects this.
The main art forms involved are: Street theatre/acts, indoor family shows, film, literature, music, comedy, street parade, art exhibitions, fireworks, theatre/plays, workshops, street busking and public talks. The main hope of the festival is the growth of the arts in our region to allow people to learn and appreciate what the main art forms have to offer.
The experience that we have taken from the previous five years of the festival is that the people of Thurles are now more aware of what an " Arts Festival " is all about. They have come to appreciate what this type of festival has to offer and people are now looking forward to this years festival with a huge sense of anticipaion and eagerness.
The profile of the arts in Thurles has grown substantially in recent years from both the creation of our festival and the opening of the local Source Arts Centre. Our festival works very closely with the Arts centre to ensure a maximum exposure of the arts during the 7 days of our festival. We have set very high standards for our festival and the quality and professionalism of all our events and acts reflects this.
We are constantly craving for improvements in our programme and as a committee we are constantly touring Ireland attending all of the major art festivals in the country so that we can both learn from them and also book acts that we have seen.
We encourage full participation from the general public in as many of our events as is possible through our wide selection of workshops, public talks, poetry readings and our street parade which is the highlight of our festival.
All our volunteers are put through a small training course in what their roles are, are also given detailed information on every event that they are volunteering for.