Joe GallopA new festival in Glasgow curated by rock band Mogwai, a multi-arts festival in Ireland and a design-led music festival creatively led by Lucid Creates are among the newly announced events to launch in the summer.
The 6,000-capacity Big City, curated by Glasgow post-rock band Mogwai, will be in collaboration with Scottish independent music promoter Regular Music. The event will take place on 29 June at Glasgow’s Queen’s Park, featuring 12 artists, a big top tent, two stages and a literary tent in partnership with White Rabbit. The lineup will also include artists such as Slowdive Nadine Shah, Beak, Michael Rother and Kathryn Joseph.
The YES Festival is a new multi-arts event, which will take place from 13-16 June and see women artists from across Europe travel to Ireland, to present work in venues and public spaces across Derry-Londonderry and north Donegal. The programme will include theatre, dance, visual arts, installations, film, writing, photography, textiles, circus, music, rap and song.
The YES Festival, inspired by the character Molly Bloom, who features in James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, is the culmination of ULYSSES European Odyssey, an international project supported through Creative Europe, which since 2022 has seen partners in 18 cities in 16 countries across Europe take Joyce’s novel as the starting point to explore contemporary issues.
YES Festival artistic curator Shauna Kelpie said, “Local people and communities as well as visitors will have the chance to connect, share and interact with a diverse range of artforms curated to showcase the exceptional creative talent and distinctive voices of women.”
High Lights
New design-led electronic music festival, High Lights, promoted by Percolate, will take place at London’s Barking Park from 31 May – 2 June, with an initial lineup including Carl Cox, Max Cooper and Actress.
Lucid Creates has been appointed as creative partners for the event and will produce the stage design/installation. The design studio said the show will be “incredibly ambitious and is pushing boundaries in terms of production and design”.
The installation will act as the main stage and arena for the first edition of the event. The creative vision comes from London-based promoters Percolate, part of the team behind Waterworks Festival.
Lucid Creates, which is responsible for the Runway Stage at Creamfields Festivals, described the design as a “huge overhead installation with a brutalist, concrete facade.”
Lucid Creates founder and director Chris Carr said, “When Fred [Letts] and Simon [Denby] came to us they made it clear that the stage design had to be treated as an artistic intervention. We are creating a large-scale art installation rather than a traditional, festival stage design, the key considerations were the overall form of the structure, it had to have an architectural narrative and it had to look beautiful. I think we’ve delivered on that.”