The Awakening: Step into the light and help create a new Hull tradition

‘IT FEELS LIKE AN OPTIMISTIC MOMENT’: Mikey Martins

The Awakening, an exciting new two-night international arts festival, starts in Hull this evening. Simon Bristow spoke to artistic director Mikey Martins, CEO of Freedom Festival Arts Trust

The people of Hull are being invited to help create a new tradition tonight when The Awakening, the city’s new international arts festival, unleashes its magic for the first time.

The event, which features stunning new shows never seen in Hull before, is being staged at outdoor and indoor locations across the city centre and Old Town over two consecutive nights between 5pm and 10.30pm.

A mixture of fire, light, performance and music, The Awakening is the first large-scale public arts event to be staged in Hull since the Covid pandemic, with thousands of people expected, and invited, to attend.

As well as marking the city’s emergence from the pandemic, the festival celebrates the seasonal change from winter to spring, and features multi-layered themes drawing on Hull’s maritime heritage and identity, folkore and mythology, as well as our relationship with the environment.

The Awakening is being delivered by Freedom Festival Arts Trust and Hull City Council, and is supported by the Welcome Back Fund, the England European Regional Development Fund, the Arts Council and the Global Streets network.

Audiences are invited to become part of the artwork by making and donning Freedom Fox masks - bespoke headwear created by Wintercroft Design - which they can individually decorate.

Mikey Martins, artistic director and CEO of Freedom Festival Arts Trust, said: “I think there’s a really exciting opportunity for Hull to do a winter-type of event that’s different from anything else, that has more interesting layers to it than just another light festival.

“It’s an opportunity to create a new tradition for the city in a folkloric kind of way and entice the interest and senses.

“I hope it’s a great success this weekend and people ask are you going to do it again? It feels like a bit of an optimistic moment, and because there was this funding around [the Welcome Back Fund] which is particularly there to have people back in city centres, we are able to do it.

“Success would be lots of people on the streets, lots of families really enjoying it and wandering in between the outdoor stuff and indoor stuff. Success might be lots of emails saying how can we support you to do it again?”

He added: “With all due respect to other light festivals there’s an opportunity here to do something unique which is of Hull, and making it meaningful to people.

“That’s the intention and this very much feels like a pilot with a view to it being an annual event. The aspiration is to make it an annual event.”

There are 18 different events taking place in the action-packed programme, and a rare night-time opening of Ferens Art Gallery, which will be one of the venues running mask-making workshops between 6pm and 8pm.

The opening event is Illumaphonium’s Halo in Zebedee’s Yard, which starts at 5pm, and is a “family-friendly, interactive, magical, multi-sensory experience”, featuring columns of colour and light inviting people to play them and create their own unique sound.

One of the most visually spectacular happenings is expected to be Dan Acher’s Borealis in the Rose Bowl outside Queens Gardens between 6pm and 10pm.

This invites audiences to look at the sky and witness a “mesmerising” installation of the Aurora Borealis (Northern Lights), evoking the city’s historic links to Scandinavia.

“Borealis is a beautiful light installation,” said Mikey. “For me it makes sense tying in the heritage of our relationship with Scandinavia and our maritime theme.

“In most areas of the programme there are elements of time and nature, light and dark, and the sense of coming out of the pandemic as much as coming out of winter into spring.”

Equally enticing is the prospect of Deblozay by Rara Woulib. Its name means chaos in Haitian Creole, and its audience joins the group as it takes them on an “epic theatrical musical journey processing through the streets of Hull into the heart of the night”.

There will be a heady blend of cultures, with 60 local singers working with Rara Woulib, and songs sung in Creole.

“There’s a lovely moment at the end and you question how they did that, did that really happen?” said Mikey. “It’s all about life and death.”

It takes place throughout the city centre between 9pm and 10.30pm.

Just next to Borealis will be Fire in the Park - a “magical trail of bright and blazing fire and light” delivered by Out There Arts and taking place in Queens Gardens between 6pm and 10pm.

This also has limited capacity, and if necessary audiences will be asked to queue at the entrance, which is near the Solar Gate in the gardens.

Deblozay has limited capacity and is the only ticketed event, although they are free.

Music plays a big part in The Awakening, and there is a Trinity Live Special in association with Sesh Events, with bands playing in Trinity Market from 6pm to 9pm.

Tonight’s programme features Fire (The Unstoppable Force), Ruth Scott and James Wood, and Esther Fletcher. Pearl’s Cab Ride, JT, and Sarge play on Saturday.

On both nights in High Street there will be an outdoor cinema experience in RESCORE, featuring footage supplied by Yorkshire Film Archive, and showcasing a collective of musical artists including Low Hummer, Katie Spencer, Wai Wan, and Hull’s The Broken Orchestra, who have scored original compositions especially for the project.

For Mikey, the festival is about inviting people to reimagine public spaces in the city, with acts chosen to fit with the themes as well as the environment they are working in.

He cited the example of an artwork he saw in Bristol, where a truck had been turned on its side as though it had crashed and had flowers pouring out of it down the street. “I’ve never been able to walk down that street since without seeing that image,” he said.

He said: “Great artists and great ideas can transform the space you’re used to and also have that impact on your mind. Hull’s got really brilliant locations and spaces in the city centre we can do really interesting things with.”

• Freedom Fox masks can be made using any reclaimed or recycled materials. Free Fox Den workshops showing how to make them are taking place over the festival weekend, or they can be made at home using a digital pack downloaded from www.theawakeninghull.co.uk.