Paisley Halloween Festival

Client: Renfrewshire Council

Audience: Up to 40,000 live each year over 3-5 days

Narrative: Previous themes include Dark Circus, Gothic, 'Heroes, Myths and Legends'

The brief:

Since 2019 we have been tasked to design, curate and produce the artistic elements of this well-loved town centre-wide festival, including light installations, street theatre, parade, aerial shows, fire shows, walkabouts and participatory elements. The brief is to continue to celebrate Paisley as a place to live and as a destination, creating high quality performance for the festival and providing hundreds of authentic opportunities for local communities and groups to be involved in making work themselves.

Challenges:

Paisley Halloween Festival is one of the highlights of our year, and each time we set ourselves the challenge of outdoing the success of the previous festival and, in partnership with Renfrewshire Council we strive to offer a whole programme of new and engaging content each year. One of the ways we do this together is by changing the format slightly each year. Sometimes there is a huge parade, sometimes the festival is more street theatre show-based. In 2021 the festival was largely based on theatrical and light installations, to ensure covid safety. Fair to say, the Scottish weather sometimes proves to be a challenge!

The festival has grown year on year, attracting over 50,000 people and we’ve built up some incredible relationships with dozens of groups who engage with us to make brilliant performances and art works as part of the festival.