Organising a festival

This leads me to believe that it's not actually a "festival" in the traditional sense you want to organise but a gathering of like minded indivduals who come to participate in the exploration of a specific idea. More like a workshop weekend rather than a festival. This is a familiar concept in the dancing world where you go to "training" days/weekends and explore concepts through workshops, games and talks. There are hugely beneficial to those who attend and want to learn.

I'll be following this thread. And as always Guy, you know where to find me if you want to pick my brains.

Lazy Angel, I applaud you for your ideas. I myself would like to see a closer relationship between the circus arts and the martial arts. I am doing Wu Shu and Poi and Rope Dart and your festival attracts me greatly. So hopefully that helps with trying to figure out whether or not your advertising to the right demographic. Gayle has some very good points though and you need to make sure that you define your target audience and really go after them effectively. This can be done in some of the following ways:

depict your advertising material clearly and effectively.
contact people already interested in the field and MAKE SURE they are coming.
have some workshops already planned that you can put on your advertising. here it would be good to minimize your martial styles... there are so many and while you can make it clear that everyone is welcome it would be better to have some specific ones ready so that you can appeal to those specific groups otherwise your stuck with a vague festival with no direction.

I also have some experience with organizing events and festivals. I have organized plenty of things as Activities Officer for Melbourne University and it has taught me that it doesn't matter how small or cheap your event is it can still fail if you don't advertise it properly and appeal to the right groups in the right way. I had a 400 person break even snow party fail with tickets @ $15 p/p, just because the timing was off and the groups we were appealing to said they would support it and then didn't.

I also have an idea that might help with waste management. In Aus we have easily knocked up raised wooden toilet blocks at festivals and you crap into a wheelie bin and throw sawdust over the top. the waste is then used as fertilizer to regrow the festival site (possibly not a problem in UK) but it is an efficient and easily manageable system, mostly self cleaning and requires few staff to maintain.

Please feel free to keep in touch as I would love to help with this event if I can... I am likely to be in either continental Europe or the UK in July 2010 so I should be around if you need any help. would love to be a major organizer but there is no way i can commit to that so we'll just have to see what the future brings.

Thanks for the input people

I'm holding off posting more until we get a site confirmed..

well one possibility has come up - we'd need to change the date to the first weekend in september, but we would have an area in a larger festival (lodestar). I'm not sure exactly how it would work out (subject to meetings/discussions with the parties concerned) but they suggested that we could sell the tickets to cover our costs - any thoughts/ experiences of this?

I do.
I have bought tickets for events in the past.



Shame I don't have a time machine so I could actually get entry to the event, rather than being a few years too late.

well I asked for that one - thanks Jon