A free festival in Rotherham town centre will feature a captivating trail of projection installations. It follows on from last year’s popular Museum of The Moon event.
As part of the yearlong celebration of our borough becoming the world’s first Children’s Capital of Culture, Rotherham will host a free Winter Festival from Friday 24th to Sunday 26th January 2025.
The government-funded programme, Flux Rotherham, which is boosting involvement in creativity and culture in the borough, has announced a unique collaboration with the renowned theatre company, imitating the dog. Chosen by Children’s Capital of Culture’s Youth Programming Panel, who have a key role in helping programme the year-long festival.
The vision is to imagine a place where nothing is quite as it seems; where the imaginations of young people have transformed the town, giving it an otherworldly twist. This is “Otherham,” a magical town where stone walls might open portals to new worlds, where you can order the weather with your coffee, and where kindness is delivered by fluttering butterflies. It’s both familiar and fantastical, a reimagined Rotherham that invites you to see the town through a new lens.
Flux Rotherham Programme Director Helen Jones said: “Last year over 10,000 people visited Rotherham Minster during the Winter Festival to visit The Museum of The Moon, which was amazing. But what people told us was they wanted a wider winter festival with more activity across the town, which is designed especially for Rotherham.
“This festival responds to that wish, and with imitating the dog and Grimm & Co. on board, plus the incredible imaginations of Rotherham’s children and young people, we hope to create a free, world-class cultural experience right in the heart of our town.“
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Simon Wainwright, co-Artistic Director at imitating the dog, added: ”We can’t wait to create Otherham for Rotherham’s Winter Festival. It’s a project we dreamed up after an inspirational visit to the town centre and Grimm & Co’s wonderful storytelling emporium; a visit which truly sparked our imaginations and formed the idea to let the city’s young people dream up a magical, unpredictable and out-of-step world. Who knows what we’ll end up creating but that’s the most exciting part – what stories could these buildings contain?”
Flux Rotherham has also confirmed that it will take over Gallery Town, an ambitious project driven by local businesses in 2012 to create the largest open-air Art Gallery in the UK.
It mainly focussed on sharing reproductions of art on buildings across the town centre by schoolchildren, students, local artists and internationally renowned masters. In more recent years, Gallery Town has created the large-scale Camellia Sculpture in All Saints’ Square with support from Arts Council project funding.
Many of the original artworks are now deteriorating and need a refresh to contribute to the overall regeneration and visitor experience in the town centre.
New artworks are proposed for new sites such as Forge Island, along the riverbank development and around/within the new markets area.
A post from Flux Rotherham said: “We’ll focus on the creation of art locally led by professional high-quality artists- this would involve children and young people and adults in the community.
“The artworks would reflect a broader range of artistic output including words, digital and 3 dimensional. Collectively we’d look at Gallery Town as a curated evolving mix of murals, sculpture, wall based and other playful public artworks.”
Images: imitating the dog