St Paul’s Artsfest returns to Cambridge for four days of music, drama, poetry and visual art

The St Paul’s Artfest is returning with four days of events and workshops in Cambridge.

St Paul’s Church, on Hills Road, will open its doors from 18 to 21 September for another edition of the community arts festival, with opportunities to enjoy music, drama, poetry and visual arts. Alongside the performances and talks, there will be a series of professionally-led workshops, which include creative writing and figure drawing.

Tim Boniface, from the ArtsFest direction team, said: “St Paul’s ArtsFest is driven by the conviction that art and the imagination are at the heart of our shared humanity and are central to a flourishing community.

“Building on the success of previous festivals, this year’s edition offers a wide range of ways to engage with the arts – whether through participating in one of our many workshops or the community art exhibition, attending performances, enjoying exhibitions, or meeting one another and enjoying food and drink in an artistically rich space.

“We’re very excited that this year’s festival will culminate in a remarkable community production, Seasons, an ambitious and inclusive project that offers us a chance to reflect on our shared life and stories through a well-known biblical text in Ecclesiastes, ‘for everything there is a season’.

“Our hope is that ArtsFest 2024 offers space for us to encounter one another, our world and our own selves afresh, in openness and in hope.”

Highlights this year include a talk on 18 September by the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, who is master of Magdalene College. He will offer an introductory talk on faith in the imagination, followed by readings of his own poetry, alongside poems featured in his recently published anthology, A Century of Poetry, with an opportunity for questions at the end.

On the evening of 19 September, Olivier-Award winning director Guy Masterson-Mastroianni joins forces with writer-performer Justin Butcher to create a performance of Scaramouche Jones. Twenty-three years on from its premiere, starring the late Pete Postlethwaite, Scaramouche Jones has been produced, performed and translated all over the world. The evocative set and sound designs by Ashley Martin-Davis and Adam Cork are enhanced by atmospheric video design from award-winning artist and animator Damian Hale.

The story starts at 11pm on Millennium Eve when centenarian clown, Scaramouche, breaks 50 years’ silence to give his final performance, charting a bizarre odyssey through crumbling empires, comic misadventures and the 20th century’s darkest episodes, revealing the loves, brutalities, ecstasies and tragedies beneath his seven white masks. As Scaramouche unveils his life, he takes us on an epic, poetic, profoundly moving voyage.

The 20th anniversary production of Scaramouche Jones, at the Wilton’s Music Hall, London, was a finalist in the 2022 Off West End Awards, in three categories: Best Production, Best Video Design and Best Lead Performance. Justin Butcher won the 2022 Off West End Award for Best Lead Performance.

Another well-known name, jazz composer and performer Tim Boniface, takes to the stage with his quartet to perform Tim’s latest work Psalter: Themes for Peace on the evening of 20 September. An evocative journey through the theme of peace in the book of Psalms, Psalter moves through hope, rest, protest, lament, joy and a call to action. The performance of Psalter will be followed by the quartet’s exploration of some classic jazz material.

Tim is a multi-instrumental jazz performer, composer and educator who works primarily on saxophones and piano. A leader of his own ensembles and collaborator with many renowned jazz musicians on the UK scene, Tim is also a priest and a theologian, and chaplain at Girton College in Cambridge.

Performing alongside Tim will be a trio of some of the most respected names in British jazz: pianist James Pearson, the artistic director of Ronnie Scotts, London, and musician in residence at Girton College, Malcolm Creese, one of Europe’s best known double bass players, bassist for Johnny Dankworth and Cleo Laine, and founding member of the acclaimed Acoustic Triangle, and Jon Ormston, a drummer whose recording and performing career includes performances with London Jazz Orchestra City of Birmingham Symphony, Guy Barker, Stan Sultzman, Eliot Galvin and many others.

Also on 20 September, internationally celebrated artist Issam Kourbaj will give a talk about his life and artwork. Issam was born in Syria and trained at the Institute of Fine Arts in Damascus, the Repin Institute of Fine Arts & Architecture in Leningrad (St Petersburg) and at Wimbledon School of Art. He has lived in Cambridge since 1990.

Since 2011, Issam’s artwork has been related to the Syrian crisis and reflects on the suffering of his fellow Syrians and the destruction of his cultural heritage. His work has been widely exhibited and collected, and most recently it was featured in several museums and galleries around the world, including Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum, the Museum of Classical Archaeology, Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, the British Museum and V&A, London. Assam’s Dark Water, Burning World is in the permanent collection of the Pergamon Museum and the British Museum.

On 21 September, poet Helen Mort will present two events. In the morning, she hosts a workshop exploring poetry and everyday beauty. She will look at how writers make remarkable things seem perfectly plausible and how poetry can reveal the magic in seemingly unremarkable things. In the afternoon, Helen will give an introduction and reading of her own poetry.

Helen is a poet and novelist from Sheffield. Her poetry collection Division Street was shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize and Costa Prize. Her second collection, No Map Could Show Them, explored the history of women’s mountaineering. Her latest, The Illustrated Woman looks at the power of body modification and the role of the ‘tattooed lady’ in society.

This festival is dedicated to Kip Gresham, the Cambridge-based master printmaker and gifted artist who founded St Paul's ArtsFest in 2016 and who died in May 2024. A selection of Kip’s work can be seen in one of the exhibitions that runs throughout the festival.

Visit stpaulsartsfest.org to view the full programme and book tickets.