We are establishing a Blyth Festival Busing Fund - a fund to provide schools with support for travel costs related to educational activities hosted at the Blyth Festival. Transportation is a major obstacle to rural arts participation; we hope to remove it and provide students with access to new and creative opportunities and social connection. Blyth Festival’s youth engagement strategy is many-fold.
In the school year, Blyth Festival hosts the Crossroads Theatre Festival, a growing student-first high school theatre festival and workshop series. Crossroads connects students to workshops and resources that will give them the tools they need to create their own theatre. It also provides them with the opportunity to work together, across school boundaries. Instead of competition, enthusiasm, support and community emerge between schools.
Schools are invited to attend professional theatre performances and follow-up artist chats and workshops. The Blyth Festival Young Company meets twice-monthly during the school year to hone their creative skills and engage with industry professionals in workshops. And for over 50 years, teens from across the county, country, and even the world, meeting in Blyth for 4-6 weeks every summer to collectively create theatre together and perform an annual Young Company production. Working with and alongside industry professionals, these young people experience a summer of theatre-intensive workshops while staging scripted theatre or writing/devising their own - all offered FREE to participants. For so many young creative people, this time is invaluable to helping them to create or identify their sense of self.
All this is to say, at Blyth Festival, we believe in our young people. When young theatre kids get together, they make really cool things happen, and we have the space and the ability to facilitate this in Blyth.The challenge is getting them here. Blyth is located in rural Huron County, 70km from the nearest urban centre.
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Providing access to Blyth Festival for all children enhances the creative storytelling they love. Live theatre provides connection to new cultures and art forms
Love the Blyth Festival. Always willing to help out in any way.
Our rural school use to choose the Blyth Festival as a learning opportunity. The increase in bussing costs have eliminated this as an option for our students.
These are great opportunites for our students and with the decrease in bus costs they become much more equitable for all our families!
I think it enormously important for creative people to meet kindred spirits in their formative years. People say, “I’ll never forget x,y, and z. Thank you.”
The Blyth Festival offers students rich learning experiences. Our students have loved participating in drama workshops and festivals at Blyth.