Welcome to Mayfest 2024

Hello and welcome to Mayfest 2024.

We are, as ever, excited and proud to be welcoming this heart-filling gathering of artists from all over the world for what we hope will be a connecting and inspiring time for everyone who chooses to come together over nine days this May.

Mayfest is and has always been a celebration of visionary artists who create visceral experiences that bring us into some sort of feeling contact or conversation with the world we live in. We are nourished and healed by these encounters. We are moved and provoked by these ideas. Festivals are shape-shifting experiences – our invitation is into a temporary community - one that can hold your experiences personally but also in connection and even contrast with other people.

We still believe that art is powerful. As the storyteller of humanity. As a healer. As an awakener. As a hug and a purge. We’ve been thinking a lot this year about how important it feels to keep trying to carve out spaces, however small - for beauty and for joy. And that these aren’t frivolous responses to an ugly world. We can experience them as resistance.

In this year’s programme there is an offer into experiences that might give us permission to ground – to exhale and pay attention. There’s something here about wildness - in the natural world and in our hearts. There’s something here about pain and love; politically and personally.

And in a world where these two are increasingly and complexly entangled, there’s something here about feeling into the mess.

So we hope you’ll join us for some or all of it, and that you might invite a friend or two.

Kate and Matthew
matthewandkate@mayk.org.uk