Each month we will be giving you the opportunity to learn more about the faces of our community, in a regular feature sharing the positive work of individuals, charities and organisations.
Faces of our Community will be released at the end of each month, with the Cathedral’s monthly E-Newsletter.
The first face in our new series is Barry Smith, Co-ordinator and founding member of the Festival of Chichester, an annual celebration of arts and culture in the city. He has previously worked in education, as a theatre director, and as a critic. He is also Director of the South Downs Poetry Festival, a published poet and a member of the Cathedral congregation.
Barry’s newly published poetry collection, Performance Rites (Waterloo Press), features on its cover an image taken from a painting within the Cathedral which inspired one of the key poems: Graham Sutherland’s Noli Me Tangere.
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The song that has been running round my head this summer is one familiar to many people - Lennon and McCartney’s The Long and Winding Road. There’s something simple yet profound about the lyrics which inspire us on our journey: ‘The long and winding road that leads to your door/Will never disappear, I’ve seen that road before/It always leads me here/Leads me to your door.’ For the Festival of Chichester, 2021 has certainly been a difficult, unpredictable ride with twists and turns forced on us by the unfolding pandemic as we planned a return to live events celebrating the arts and culture of our city.
As the co-ordinator, I’ve worked alongside my colleagues on the festival committee, including Canon Daniel Inman, Chancellor of the Cathedral, to piece together an exciting mix of live and virtual, indoor and outdoor events to provide a breathing space, fresh air after all the restrictions imposed on our social and communal lives. The feedback from performers and audience members alike has been very positive – a welcoming of the chance to be together again with a shared, uplifting experience of music, art, theatre, poetry and the spoken word, guided tours, dance, comedy, workshops and all the other ingredients that go into the heady festival brew.
The Cathedral has always been at the heart of the city’s summer arts festival. The Festivities were founded in 1975 to help celebrate the nine hundredth anniversary of the Cathedral and many inspirational events have been held there over the years. I particularly remember Iona Brown leading the Academy of St Martin in the Fields and, on one memorable occasion, helping out the front of house staff for a Joan Baez concert which had, as one of its highlights, a soaring rendition of Amazing Grace.
The Festival of Chichester took over the reins of the summer arts celebrations in 2012 and has continued the tradition of holding top quality events in the Cathedral – this year, we welcomed international pianist Young-Choon Park and the award-winning actress, Dame Penelope Keith, star of the much loved TV sitcoms, The Good Life and To the Manor Born.
As we put together each year’s festival, we turn for inspiration to the credo that we formulated to guide us for our first venture: to be eclectic, diverse, inclusive, rooted in the community, with open-access yet always reaching for the stars. We bring together the talents of many people of all ages and backgrounds in a mutual expression of our commonality. Each event has its own organising team, coming together in a shared celebration of imagination, entertainment and culture. We value that generosity of spirit that allows people to give the best of their talent, their experience and knowledge in a transformative way. At the end of this year’s special concert, held in the Assembly Room in the presence of the city mayor and mayoress, the deputy chair of the district council, the editor of the city newspaper and sponsors and festival supporters, Pavlos Carvalho, the cellist in Ensemble Reza, spoke directly to the audience of how much it meant to him and the other players to be able to participate in that unique communion that occurs when wonderful music transports us to a new and better shared place.
Bringing the community together is a key aim for the festival, as it is for the Cathedral.
Barry Smith
Bringing the community together is a key aim for the festival, as it is for the Cathedral. This year, we’ve been delighted to showcase the musical talents of young people through the concert series produced by the University of Chichester. This involved a wide range of styles and participants, from the music of the Sleepy Lagoon by Eric Coates and the James Bond theme songs to the mentoring excellence of performers from the Hanover Band. New this year was the Chichester Free Fringe, which livestreamed a huge variety of events from the Vicars Hall. Some of the highlights were comedy sketches, dance and memorably a young poet, Lily Barkes, reading her poem written during the pandemic. The festival welcomes voices from many different cultures. An outstanding contribution this year came from the toe-tapping music of Cuban band, The Latin Bridge, at a sell-out open-air picnic event at Halnaker.
And so we hope that, like the mission of the Cathedral itself, our city festival reaches out across the generations and diverse backgrounds to bring people together in a celebration of the richness, or as John has it in the gospel (John, 10.10), the fullness of life.
Barry Smith