Luton Carnival

UK Centre for Carnival Arts

The UK Centre for Carnival Arts (UKCCA) is a unique, state of the art, £7M creative hub currently under construction in the centre of Luton and due to open in December 2008.

It is unique in that it will provide a dedicated arts centre to promote and serve the interests of Carnival arts and carnival communities both nationally and internationally.

As well as providing a large space and technical facilities for the communities of Luton to prepare their costumes and floats for their own Carnival, this major new cultural resource is set to attract thousands of people each year including Carnival artists, schools, course attendees, conference visitors, creative industry start ups, archive users, the local community and a wealth of outreach activity.

The UKCCA will be run by the Luton Carnival Arts Development Trust (LCADT), the Carnival arts development agency which exists to provide training, education and outreach activities that promote the value and powerful impact of Carnival arts.

The Executive Director is Paul Anderson. He's been working on the project for over five years now and is understandably excited that it's all now set to come to fruition. We went to meet him to find out more!

What's the aim of the centre?

Paul: The aim is to extend the Carnival activities that have been developed in Luton over the last 30 or so years. Luton has got an incredible history around Carnival and it has a very interesting way in which it goes about constructing its Carnival every year.

The way that everybody from all different communities come together in one central making space to create the spectacle is unique, so what we've been able to do is talk about the values of those people coming together and how that lends itself to various cultural interpretations, cultural integration and community cohesion. And that's been a very unique selling point for the rationale for why we should have a centre for Carnival arts here in Luton.

So it's not just for people in Luton to prepare for Carnival but for people from all over the country to come and learn about Carnival arts?

Paul: Absolutely - because there isn't a resource like this in the country. One of the things that we're responding to generally is that Carnival has been doing an awful lot of good things over the past 40 years since it has been imported back from the Carribean. We felt that there was a need for a resource which actually celebrates all that history and all that development. And, more importantly, gives a chance for people to explore and engage in Carnival in many forms, such as an archive, educational programmes and community work. It will actually show how art of this type can lend itself to all these wonderful agendas and how it can also attract grants in order to develop communities and produce wonderful work that people would like to see and never forget.

Carnival is such a celebration isn't it?

Paul: It is, and that's exactly what we need. Our challenge is very much to ensure that Carnival becomes what Luton is known for. If you look through history, Luton has been known for many things - you can go back to when it was known for riots and as a hat town and that evolved into Vauxhall car plants. I think the next evolution of all of that is actually Carnival. I think we should make sure that Luton becomes recognised as the main town for Carnival in the minds of people around the country and beyond.

When will it be ready and open for use?

Paul: We had a timeline established for around summer this year and subsequently we've had some slippage around the building works because of the particular type
of building we're putting up. It's a very strange weird and wonderful building in many ways! But we have a date now for the early stages of December 2008 and I think that will be it! 

How big is it?

Paul: It's 1,402 square metres! Carnival needs a big place for things to be made but one of the unique things about the building is that it will actually have a range of uses.

We will have a very large central space which will accommodate all the communities making costumes in the usual way, but also that big space can be converted into a performance venue for music based or more theatrical events or other things like weddings etc.

It's multi-purpose then - there's a big space for preparing for Carnival but it can be used for other things too that aren't necessarily to do with Carnival?

Paul: Absolutely. Around that central space we have things like teaching spaces. A lot of our work is focused around education so we do need classroom type workshops and we will also have technical spaces.

UK Centre for Carnival Arts

Carnival lends itself to carpentry and various craft skills and as a result of that we've accommodated the equipment needed for the different making processes to be held in a technical area. So we've got a wet and dry area. We've got a dry area for cutting, shaping and bending and then we've got an area for modelling and spraying and for gluing.

We've also got a bar and a cafe and a child care facility and what's know as an incubation space which will accommodate some of the growing and developing businesses surrounding Carnival. This is central to the centre's aim and mission. It's not just about developing the standards of Carnival, such as its performance and its costume, but also the people who make that event a spectacle.

It [Carnival] is not just a visual spectacle it's also an audible festival and it's also an edible one where food is sold. We want to work with those people and develop them into businesses because we think they are viable, we think they should grow out of Carnival and extend themselves way beyond Luton.

So people who just do things at Carnival could turn it into a business for the whole year round?

Paul: Absolutely. We're connected to Carnivals all round the country and we're establishing ourselves as a sort of portal for development of other Carnivals so the idea is that they will accommodate some of the people that we've grown as businesses. For example, food sold on the street has particular licensing regulations and it will be our role to support those people and allow them to generate more business.

This is really a central place where people can learn, share resources and knowledge and make the costumes and all the things that make Carnival so great?

Paul: Yes and not only that we want to do music based stuff too. Samba is a huge element of Luton Carnival so there'll be the development of a samba group and that group will open up sessions for people to come in and it will be the same with steel pan and urban youngsters who like to rap and DJ and sing. We want to make sure that the centre accommodates all those different types of inputs into Carnival. So there will be traditional Carnival stuff such as costuming and steel pan and some of the less traditional stuff and more modern involvement in Carnival. We want to develop young people through sound system work and digitised music. 

So it will be Carnival all year round in Luton?!

Paul: Absolutely - that's the aim, to make sure that Carnival rings the whole year round so that when people come to Luton they'll be able to engage in something Carnival related, whether it's our educational programme, using the archive or coming to see a whole range of shows and performances that showcase costumes and dance and music from all round the globe. That's the ambition, to really position the centre as a one stop shop for Carnival all year round.

And there's a history archive too isn't there?

Paul: Yes - we've actually built an archive of Luton and we've got somewhere in the region of 8,000 pictures and 20 oral histories of people talking about their experience of Carnival - what gave it life and what grew it. People who have been around for many years have contributed to that. We'd like to make that all available to people and we think that lends itself very much to educational work. We feel it will help people to take pride in it and more importantly actually start to preserve Carnival because Carnival arts aren't often preserved. The costumes are sometimes thrown away and we want to find a way of keeping that information, because that will help to inform the development of Carnival over the long term.

The building is divided into two halves - one half is the arts aide and the other is the administration side. In the middle part of it there's courtyard which will enable us to run a street market and we want to develop some of the small businesses so that we can offer them a stall within that courtyard, to start attracting people to the centre all year round. So we're not just giving them the frameworks, we'll actually give them the space to develop themselves, not just at Carnival but all through the year.

You must be excited that it's finally happening?

Paul: Absolutely - and we've got a huge staff team here that we've developed and all of these people have helped to inform that vision. We're really excited to see the building going up. I had sleepless nights in the early days and thought all this work wouldn't come off but we've stayed on it and I've literally lived, slept and breathed Carnival in the last few years and this is a very successful outcome!

How long has it been planned?

Paul: The Trust was formed out of the Luton Carnival - that's the Luton Carnival Arts Development Trust. When I inherited that five and a half years ago, it was sitting somewhere between the community and the Borough Council. We had to take it out of that and re-form it, re-structure it and give it a vision and that's what I've been doing for the past five years. I started here with just an administrator and at the moment there's 12 of us - 7 full time. That will grow to about 16 over the next few months.

Carnival is in a very unique position as it's also the art form that's been adopted by the Olympic Committee and we're working very closely with them to ensure that the building and the work within it have a very close connection with the Olympic celebration in 2012.

It's your baby really then?

Paul: Oh yes! It's been something which has integrated my passions for working with young people and using interesting ways of engaging them and taking them through a programme of development where they get something out of it and possibly take a different pathway to improving their own lives, pretty much like I did.

I was one of those young people who got into trouble a lot with the police. I didn't sit my exams at school and ended up getting kicked out. It was only getting involved in arts and creative stuff that actually steered me down a more progressive path which was more in line with me as a person. And I think the arts has a wonderful way of doing that. It's a very equal ground - it's not about 'I can do maths' or 'I can do this' - it's about getting in and working with people and producing stuff and I think I was always good at doing that. I think the arts play that sort of role and I think Carnival does that - not just for people interested in art, but people who want to participate and do something for their community.

Everyone can do something in arts really can't they?

Paul: Yes - anyone can produce a Carnival costume but it will vary in production quality. Our ambition is to ensure that the quality grows but the main emphasis in our work is actually bringing people together - the production values of it are the next thing but the process is really about people coming together, people experiencing, people engaging and hopefully taking that attitude into their own lives. I think that's what makes a stable community and builds a more dynamic social environment and that's what we really want to do.