After much deliberation, we have taken the decision to change the date and location of this season’s annual Lantern Carnival. The event, usually staged on Halloween in Sefton Park, will move in a new direction for its 11th year. We plan to expand the event into a three-night event at a new location over the February half term 2016. But this is not the end of the Halloween event for ever, we aim to bring it back to it’s usual October date next year… We have spent many months planning and believe the changes will allow our audiences the chance to experience something brand new, exciting and unknown.
We are very grateful for the unique support from the local community and continued support and funding from Liverpool City Council’s Culture Liverpool and Arts Council England. However, we haven’t had much luck in finding sponsorship for the additional funds needed to deliver the event both artistically and safely.
This has led us to the difficult decision to postpone the Lantern Carnival till early next year. This will allow more time for some new sponsors to step forward, and for us to launch a crowd funding campaign.
Jo Pocock, artistic director of the Lantern Company:
“Every year presents new artistic challenges and as the audience has increased year on year we feel the time is right to make some changes, in order to stay true to the spirit of the event and retain the intimacy and magic of the Lantern Festival for our family-based audience. The challenge is that as the event and audience grows, it requires added infrastructure to keep it running safely.”
The new festival will feature a strong environmental theme and on each of the three nights our audience will experience a luminous, otherworldly journey through a secret woodland and waterway route, revealing pockets of illuminated magic, giant insects, live music and other astonishing sights.
The popular lantern-making workshops will remain at the heart of the event, taking place throughout February and during the spring half term. Community lantern participants will then become a part of the visual spectacle as they carry their hand held lanterns, to light their path at the event.
We really hope to keep all the community participants and performance partners on board with us, to take part in just as big a way as in previous years’ Lantern Festivals.
It is our intention to build on this event and bring Halloween Lantern Carnival back to its October date in 2016. In fact, we would like to see this extend to a week long activity across locations in the Liverpool City region in 2016.
We will be putting updates on here, so keep your eyes peeled for news, and please do join our mailing list, https://lanterncompany.co.uk/contact/, in order to keep up to date with all our exciting new developments and so we can stay in touch and let you know when we launch our crowd funding campaign……watch this space!
We need time to set up a proper crowdfunding campaign, but in the meantime donations towards the Lantern Festival fund would still be massively appreciated.
You can donate via this link: https://lanterncompany.co.uk/support-us/
Your support will help us on our way to delivering a high quality event for the community. It will enable us to allocate time and resources to seek the sponsorship and additional funding we need in order to keep this long-standing community event going, whilst keeping the ticket prices affordable for everyone.
