August 2024
Anniversary Milestone Marked By Future Plans Announcement
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Surtal Arts celebrates its 30th anniversary this year with an announcement of exciting plans to further embed itself into the city and county’s cultural landscape.
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Derby Season of Light is Surtal Art’s flagship annual festival and, to coincide with announcing the dazzling 2024 programme, Surtal Arts has unveiled its longer-term vision.
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The focus is to nurture the next generation of South Asian creatives and cultural leaders and to engage even more people across all cultures in Derby and Derbyshire.
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Surtal Arts has embarked on its year-long programme entitled ‘Vibrant Visions’ thanks to funding secured from Arts Council England and National Lottery.
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‘Vibrant Visions’ will expand Surtal Arts’ capacity – building a sustainable team of paid employees and Youth Ambassadors, deepening existing partnerships, forging new ones and developing exciting new ways of engaging with local communities.
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During the Derby Season of Light 2023, 77 artists, including nine emerging talents under 35 and 30 bilingual volunteers, worked for the organisation – reaching more than 350,000 people through workshops, performances and the Derby Lantern Parade.
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This year’s Derby Season of Light and the ongoing programme of arts and cultural activity will reach 514,000 people and actively engage 19,000 participants through 13 commissions, seven performances and 33 workshops led by 86 artists.
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Surtal Arts’ chair and celebrated South Asian dancer Nisha Nath explained that the Vibrant Visions programme would develop alongside Derby’s on-going bid to secure UK Capital of Culture.
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She said: “From the seed of an idea in 1994 and programming occasional events, we have grown into a key cultural partner in Derby – respected for our delivery, programming, commissions an advocacy of diverse arts.
“Surtal Arts is unique in Derby and surrounding area as being multi-artform and led by South Asian people. We are at the forefront of South Asian arts in Derby and we collaborate with strategic partners to support them to programme culturally-appropriate work.
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“To date, our work has focused on the Derby Season of Light programme which runs between August and December each year.
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“Our goal is to run consistently throughout the year and we are grateful to our funders for their support to make this happen. – delivering relevant, community-led cultural regeneration that is representative of the communities we serve.
“In the past 30 years, Derby has grown and changed immeasurable and now, with 145 nationalities and 157 languages spoken, Derby City Council’s cultural strategy has recognised the need for more diverse cultural activities.
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“We were regularly funded client of Arts Council until 2011 when all our funding was cut 100%, Vibrant Visions will dynamically grow Surtal Arts again and enable us to expand and enrich our programme – focusing on key themes such as cultural heritage, traditional & cross cultural artforms and climate change.
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“It will enable us to meet the increasing demand of our partners, participants and audiences for accessible activities and performances that reflect the multi-cultural community of Derbyshire and inspire cross cultural creativity and social cohesion.”
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Nisha continued that a key part of Vibrant Visions was to develop and support the next generation of artists and cultural leaders.
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“Children and young people from South Asian backgrounds – which represent 15.6% of Derby’s population and England’s third largest ethnic group - face significant barriers to accessing the arts.
“They rarely seen themselves on stage and screen. Neither are they able to regularly access opportunities that enable them to explore their modern cross-cultural identities.
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“Culturally within our communities, the arts are not seen as a secure career options, compounded by the lack of clear pathways to careers in the arts.
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“Currently emerging artists turn to the bigger cities such as Leicester or London for their creative development because the infrastructure is stronger there to support them.
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“However, Derby has a particularly strong Bhangra scene which has a distinct ‘Derby’ sound and we want to ensure more artistic development like this happens to ensure our talent does not leave the area to thrive.
“As a British South Asian-led organisation we bring lived experience of growing up in Derby and developing our cultural practice.
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“Our ambition is to create an ecology for South Asian arts in Derby and Derbyshire that allows talent to flex their creative muscles. Through Vibrant Visions we will build creative pathways to grow grassroots talent.”
She concluded: “Over the past 30 years, we have earned a reputation for uniting a diverse range of multicultural and intergenerational audiences – enabling participants and audiences to experience a vibrant range of often unseen or new South Asian art forms.
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“With Vibrant Vision, our goal moving forwards from this anniversary milestone is to secure our future so that we can offer this diverse service to all of our local communities and nurture South Asian emerging artists to develop their skills for the benefit of the cultural offering in the city and county for future generations.”