Camp Bestival

Client: Josie da Bank, festival organiser

Audience: Festival-going families

Narrative: Various narratives/themes/areas

The brief:

Animate festival favourite area Caravanserai with popup circus performances throughout the weekend, and create standalone large scale finale shows for the festival. As the festival has grown and now has two iterations (Dorset and Shropshire), so has our creative brief to include parades, programming stages and animating areas as well as working closely with Josie on development of her creative ideas for the festival.

Challenges:

Finale shows for festivals need to include elements that audiences have never seen before, to give them the feeling of ‘you had to be there’. A festival site is unusual because you need to make sure you bring everything you need with you. There’s no nipping off to pick up some extra rigging bits…! The show needs to go on, whatever the weather. We create new props, work with diverse casts, within strict budgets, and with limited rehearsal time to achieve something technically complicated.

We love working at Camp Bestival and our partnership with the festival and with Josie has developed over the years as she expands her festival world. We were winners of Festival Supplier Award winners 2019 for our high wire spectacle show ‘Sleepwalkers’.