Bristol

Bristol Harbour Festival

The harbour is alive with the sound of music as Bristol Harbour Festival returns.

Written by Hannah Hodsman / 16 Jul 2012

Taking over two miles of Bristol’s harbourside, this three day extravaganza last year welcomed over 250,000 guests, all keen to celebrate summer in style as Bristol knows best, with all things music, theatre, circus, food and dance related and entertainment round every corner.

Castle Park will play host to the Cirque Bijou Circus Stage and Children’s Area, featuring internationally acclaimed circus acts as well as a diverse mix of music and continental markets.

Millenium Square features the Dance Stage courtesy of Swindon Dance and the Amphitheatre the green living zone, complete with the Happy City Stage, a live illustration event and a selection of ships and boats for the public to explore. This low cost, community valuing glimpse of the future will be celebrating crowd sourcing and Bristol’s infamously enterprising community scene. Cascade Steps features the Jelli Records Stage with acoustic acts and slam poetry in a perfectly natural arena.

Other venues include the Arnolfini. Here you can get involved with a high impact and accessible dance production, where you can really ‘see’ your aura using the latest visual danceroom spectroscopy technology, where dancers are transformed into energy fields. Part video game, part art installation, part immersive scientific visualisation and part social experiment, this 3D interactive event is definitely one not to miss. Have a go yourself for a fiver!

As always, Bristol Harbour Festival is free. Hooray! However it cannot be stressed enough that events like this cannot happen without a little help. We have seen other Bristol events go down the swanny due to lack of financial support and donations from the general public, so let’s save ourselves the heartache. Buy yourself a guide for £2 (which let’s face it, you’re going to want anyway and doesn’t exactly break the bank) and make sure Bristol can continue living it up on the water front as we have the past 40 years. Guides are available pretty much everywhere so get on it!