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Dear Fun Palaceer,
Welcome to the year of the Fun Palaces! Just ten months to go …
As some of you already know, the Fun Palaces website (beautifully made for and with us by Rachel Coldicutt of Caper, and Studio Baum) went live just before Christmas : www.funpalaces-legacy.dev
Do take some time to have a look around, we’re noting below some specific pages you might want to check out sooner rather than later.
If you want to make a Fun Palace, however big or small, wherever you are, have a look at the How to Make a Fun Palace page.
Hundreds of you, in our conversations over the past 6 months, have told us you definitely want to make Fun Palaces, so we’ve turned your expressions of interest into some lovely graphs.
Fun Palaces co-creators
But we don’t want to make any assumptions about ‘interested’ necessarily meaning commitment, so won’t add you to the map until you actually sign up to the guidelines and confirm that you’re in.
The guidelines are deliberately light and should mean everyone can join in, but they do matter, they’ve been arrived at after a lot of thinking and discussing how best we can ALL make this together, both as a brand new thing, and in recognition of the original idea.
We now have 18 confirmed Fun Palaces marked on the map, 7 of them joined since we went live on 23rd December (including one from Canada – woo hoo!)
As you’ll see, not everyone knows exactly what they’re doing yet – we don’t expect you to, and we know that much of that input will need to come from your local communities anyway, but if you want to get on the map at this stage, however specific (or unspecific) your plans, you’re very welcome. We’ll be happy to add your updates as we progress.
So, if you are a venue, or a company or individual working with a venue, and you know you are making a Fun Palace on 4th/5th October 2014*, we’d love you to sign up here, and then we can add you to the map.
Companies and individuals without venues** (as yet) are also welcome to officially sign up, and we’ll keep your details until you can tell us where your Fun Palace will be sited. If you’re not attached to a venue, why not contact your nearest arts centre, scout hut, village hall, library (etc) and suggest a partnership? You really can make a Fun Palace anywhere, among the 18 already on the map we have a gallery/shop, a museum, a National Trust property, a city-wide group of libraries, several theatres, a university, a primary school, and a radio/internet company. The wider the range of locations and venues, the more likely we are to create the kind of public engagement we’re all aiming for, something that truly includes and welcomes everyone.
You’ll also see that there are two consortium Fun Palaces on the map – the Deptford Fun Palace and the Ormesby Hall Fun Palace. Some of you will want to work specifically as your already-established companies or venues, and we welcome that. Some (especially those of you who work independently) might find it useful to join up with others in your area. We welcome that too.
Talk to each other. Twitter has been great for facilitating some of these relationships, if you include @funpalaces and/or #funpalaces when you tweet we can share it widely for you. Consider those you already work with – or have always wanted to work with! –and find out how best to make the possibilities work for you. These are YOUR Fun Palaces, you’ll know much better than we do what is right for your locality.
If you want to use any of the Fun Palaces images, let us know and we’ll link you to a Dropbox with Emily Medley’s gorgeous illustration and the logos. We’re planning to have these downloadable from the website soon.
There’s also a Discussion Forum on the website where you can continue the conversations about how and what and where – and yes, why as well. (Also why not?)
Meanwhile, we have plenty of other plans in progress, some of them dependent on funding (which we’re working VERY hard on!), some of them happening regardless. Things like initial conversations about creating the Digital/Online Fun Palace, investigating sponsorship opportunities, applying for funding, meeting with some very exciting and unexpected Fun Palace possibilities, and beginning to work out how we’ll actually hold it all together as it consolidates from a dream into reality.https://funpalaces.co.uk/wp-admin/edit.php?post_type=inspire_me
This time last year Stella hadn’t even called the Devoted & Disgruntled session that brought this idea into being. This time next year we’ll all know how it worked. What was brilliant, what was less brilliant, what changes we’ll make, and how we’ll do it better next time. We think this is more than a one-off, the interest and enthusiasm already suggests that Fun Palaces could be an annual festival of nationwide public engagement in all*** the arts and culture, technologies and sciences. But we can’t do this without you. It doesn’t exist without you.
Check out the website, have a good read, ask any questions you want to, and sign yourselves up. (And then bear with us, we’re still only working on it – officially – one day a week, so getting you all on the map may take a day or two, but we will get there!)
We wish you a very happy new year, and a splendid next ten months of dreaming, scheming, creating and making Fun Palaces.
Stella & Sarah-Jane
hello@funpalaces-legacy.dev
* no one has to make a Fun Palace for the whole weekend! A day is fine, two days, two evenings, a morning, an afternoon – or indeed the whole 48 hours, whatever is right for you and your community.
** a ‘venue’ might also be a village green, a tent, a field, that patch of green outside your block of flats. It doesn’t have to be a building.
*** the list is a bit theatre-heavy at the moment, no doubt to do with Joan & who we know best, please share the idea with dance, music, fine art – all arts! And sciences. We could do with some more sciences.