Party time as art centre marks decade – plus one
ATHEATRE and community venue is set to celebrate its belated 10th anniversary as it reopens for the first time since lockdown began.
The Civic Arts Centre and Theatre, on Union Road in Oswaldtwistle, will celebrate its ‘10 + 1 birthday’ on Saturday, August 28, after the original celebration was postponed from last August due to the pandemic.
The day will also act as an Open Day for residents to get a flavour of the sessions and activities on offer at the Centre before it fully reopens in September.
Sessions on offer during the day include free taster sessions for musical theatre, hip-hop and drama as well as arts and crafts sessions – like bath bomb making, character visits and live theatre performances.
Creative director, Gayle
Knight, said: “We’ve had a soft reopening over the last few months with the odd few events, but we are going full steam ahead from Saturday.
“They’re taster sessions that people can dip into or even just watch, and people can just talk to us about what we’ve got going on. Hopefully we’ll get our community back involved.
“We’ve had a lot of redecorating and refurbishment work done over the last 18 months – we haven’t wasted the time. We’re welcoming people back and having a bit of a celebration.”
Gayle added that the Centre had to close in March 2020 and attempts to reopen in September last year were scuppered when Hyndburn was placed into Tier 4.
“It would have been our 10th anniversary in August last year so we missed it,” said Gayle.
“We’d planned lots of activities and events so this is our 10 plus one birthday party.
“Since April we’ve allowed some sessions to start and some people to come back in for sociallydistanced sessions.
“We’re ready now from the beginning of September to get full steam ahead as normal.”
Gayle said it was exciting to be able to look forward to a full schedule which includes the Christmas production of Aladdin, and stressed the Centre’s important community function.
She said: “We don’t see ourselves necessarily as being purely a theatre or purely an arts centre. We’re a community facility that has a community around it that gets involved and comes to things.
“We know that people’s health and wellbeing suffered over the last 18 months and the arts can help so much with lifting people’s spirits, so it’s important to us and important to the community to get people back socialising.”
More information on the Open Day can be found at www.civicartscentre.co.uk/ openday.