Wales Arts Review is excited to announce the launch of a digital arts festival this weekend, March 27th to 29th, to raise emergency funds for artists and freelancers who have had their income impacted by efforts to stem the spread of Covid-19. The Digithon will be an innovative online festival bringing people closer together in a time of social distancing, a rough and ready three day programmed extravaganza of music, literature, performance, and artwork delivered via the Wales Arts Review multimedia platform.
- Wales Arts Review to launch digital arts festival this weekend, Friday March 27th to Sunday 29th, to raise emergency funds for artists and freelancers who have had their income impacted by efforts to stem the spread of Covid-19.
- Innovative online festival bringing people closer together in a time of social distancing.
- Headline acts announced so far include Sarah Waters, Amy Wadge, Georgia Ruth, and Owen Sheers.
- Line-up also to include Wales Book of the Year winner Ailbhe Darcy, Welsh Music Prize winners Adwaith, and Keeping Faith star Eve Myles.
Last week, Wales Arts Review launched a crowdfunder to raise money for a set of bursaries to be paid out to artists and freelancers who have been dramatically affected by the cancellation of work and closure of venues in the efforts to curtail the spread of the Covid-19 Coronavirus. The crowdfunder has been extremely successful, hitting our initial target of £3,000 in a week. But we want to do more, and help as many people as possible, and we know that our reach can go further.
Wales Arts Review is now curating an online fundraising festival, a “digi-thon”, where some of Wales’s top musicians, actors, artists, writers, performers, producers, and arts organisations will provide a wide variety of creative content to help push for donations. We are currently working hard to create a vibrant, positive, irreverent, and hugely creative space where some of Wales’ best-known creative figures can come together and help raise money for those who have been left high and dry by these unprecedented circumstances.
All across Wales, the arts industry is underpinned by an army of freelance and self-employed skilled professionals, and the efforts being made to stem the spread of Covid-19 has had a crushing effect on the income of many of those workers who have seen upcoming projects, festivals, and productions cancelled. Many people are looking at the coming months with no source of income. This emergency fundraiser will help alleviate stress and anxiety while longer-term solutions are confirmed.
The vibe of the Digithon is home-made, guerrilla content – things recorded on phones and written in speed – songs, poems, monologues, animations, readings, artwork, whatever you can think of – we’re not interested in perfect, we’re interested in creativity.
Once we have a bedrock of material confirmed, we can prepare a programme of events, to publish regular contributions across the Wales Arts Review platform, and ushering people toward the crowdfunder donation page. At the moment we envisage doing this over the course of a weekend in the next few weeks, but the shape and scope of the event may change as more people commit. All we know right now is that it will be a fantastic opportunity to help people who need it, and to show the world what Wales can achieve when its artists come together, even from the distances of their own homes.
Wales Arts Review editor, and presenter of BBC Radio Wales’s The Review Show said, “This is all about the artists of Wales coming together to help out those who need help. Artists and freelancers across the country have been thrown into financial turmoil through no fault of their own, and these people are the backbone of Wales’s creative industries. Digithon will be rough and ready, but it will be a lot of fun, and it will show the international audience that come to Wales Arts Review every day just what a fantastic community Wales is.”
