Our Siren Song will be based on the Ards Peninsula coast offering creative programmes that engage local artists, performers and communities in meaningful activities to highlight the beauty, heritage and ecology concerns of our coastline.
Our siren will call people to the coastline, enticing them with beauty, heritage, warning and promise. Her song will be the song of the people who have made their lives on the coast and will represent voices of those whose stories are yet to be told. It will be a love song for our coastline and a call to action, to preserve this precious resource for future generations.
The project will culminate with a community arts event at Millisle Beach on 17th May 2025 during the UK Beach of Dreams Festival.
Beat Carnival is aiming to build funds and collaborations to extend the programme in other areas of Northern Ireland’s coastline, from South Down to the North Coast.
We want to work with individuals, groups and coastal communities to create something spectacular to celebrate our coastline.
Programme activities on offer include:
Beach of Dreams will be produced by Kinetika in partnership with Rosa Productions with a programme of national activity working with eight regional partners, five in England, 1 in each, Scotland, Wales and Ireland who will co-commission 8 artists to produce new works.
Small organisations and members of the public will be encouraged to put on their own beach activity, any day in May on any stretch of coastline.
Kinetika is an internationally renowned female-led company with a 25-year track record of combining world-class bespoke designs on large-scale hand-painted silks with community projects to produce spectacular outdoor events that engage diverse audiences wherever they work.
Founded by artist Ali Pretty in 1997, inspired by her training in carnival arts in Trinidad and India, Kinetika now has an unrivalled reputation for working with local communities on projects that change the way people feel about where they live. Based in Purfleet since 2014, Kinetika delivers activity both at ‘home’ in Thurrock and ‘away’ across the UK and abroad.
Since 2012 Ali’s practice has been to develop transformational walking arts projects with diverse communities, these bring people together by walking, talking and making and painting large-scale silk creations. Ali has led walking projects in Wiltshire, Isle of Wight, Lincolnshire, Essex and Thurrock, where she has developed an annual walking, talking and making festival T100. This pioneering place-making model has been replicated internationally in various forms in Ethiopia, Chile and India. Beach of Dreams is a development of this model, Ali first delivered the pilot in 2021 walking 500 miles from Lowestoft to Tilbury and has been working on scaling it up to a national festival ever since.
Rosa Productions is based in Kendal, Cumbria, with associate producers around the UK. We are a team of creative festival, broadcast, media and arts producers, directors and consultants led by MD and Creative Producer Rosemary Richards. We have extensive national experience of broadcast media, festivals, arts, outdoor events, and community engagement and work with festivals, national cultural projects, arts organisations, universities, and public sector clients.
Rosa Productions was a close collaborator with Kinetika on the 2021 and 2023 Beach of Dreams, from the planning stages to production, and was responsible for managing and producing the media, film and digital content. Rosemary is also a film-maker with awards for TV documentary and programme making.
Beat Carnival is committed to protecting the environment. We try to produce carnival events and run artistic activities with as little impact on the environment as possible.
Beat Carnival Centre
11-47 Boyd Street
Belfast BT13 2GU
Beat Carnival is a company limited by guarantee (NI27789)
registered in Northern Ireland and is a registered charity (NIC103347)
Beat Trading Ltd is a social enterprise (NI064328)
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