Cultural Olympiad:

For a week in June 2012, West Berkshire went giant crazy with 100s of local people involved in creative making, music, dance and other related activity and thousands more watching the story of ‘The Berkshire Giant’ unfold.

‘The Berkshire Giant’ was a dramatic large-scale outdoor performance project featuring giant puppetry, carnival parade, music, installations, performance and widespread participation. Over seven days and seven nights, in locations across West Berkshire the local community was involved in re-telling the legend of John Ever Afraid; a gentle giant who made an unfortunate mistake.

Presented by Newbury Corn Exchange, the ambition was to create a major outdoor performance, rooted in its local community and to push the boundaries of outdoor arts and puppetry practice. They hoped to develop the interest and skills of local people and to advance the working practices of the UK artists involved in the project.

There was wide-scale involvement and buy-in from local primary schools, in total 1,100 primary school children were involved with a further 180 young people taking part in film and poetry workshops and craft events. An estimated 4,600 attended the performance events across the week.

96 local volunteers worked on the project as puppeteers, technicians, makers, stewards and performers and the Corn Exchange are continuing to work with all of them. What’s more, they have already seen a 50% increase in the number of applications to volunteer to support their work since the project