Our 2024 Blog!
Welcome to our 2024 blog roundup! What a busy year it’s been – Catch up on everything we have been up to this year, and let’s get ready for 2025!
We Moved
2024 began with a major change for Kala Sangam – we closed St Peter’s House to the public and moved to temporary offices in the City Centre, ready for building work to start on transforming our home in to a bigger, more accessible venue. We spent several weeks clearing, sorting and packing everything up – donating as much furniture, tech equipment and stationery as we could to other local charities and working with a specialist clearance company to ensure that as much waste as possible was recycled rather than being sent to landfill.
Our temporary space at 41 Bank Street was a very lucky find as it includes two beautiful, light filled studios that have allowed us to continue to offer space for artists to develop work as well as running our classes and hosting a wide range of conference and events. Most of the spaces have step free access and we were also able to provide office space for our tenants Dance United Yorkshire. Certain members of the team have also really enjoyed being so close to Greggs…
You can read more about the work that has been happening on the building below and we can’t wait to welcome you all to the new Bradford Arts Centre in summer 2025!
Off Site Performances
We had our first off site performance at the end of January, kicking things off with our sold-out performances of Kailey at Keighley Creative. This year, we have had 16 different events, including partnering with Yorkshire Dance for ‘No Dress Code’ and Ilkley Literature Festival for ‘Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa: Cane, Corn & Gully.’ We have had a fantastic response to our off site programme, we held performances at some incredible venues across Bradford, including Mind The Gap, Pictureville Cinema and Cartwright Hall. We will be continuing on with our amazing off site programme in 2025 until we move back into our home back at St Peter’s House. We are so excited to share our 2025 line up of performances with you, so make sure to keep an eye on our socials for these announcements. You can also sign up to our mailing list to be the first to hear about tickets going on sale.
Building Work Started
In April, after years of planning, work began on our home at St Peter’s House. The project will see the creation of a new theatre, five new dance studios, a new central staircase and a permanent home for volunteer-led community radio station Bradford Community Broadcasting (BCB). The introduction of a new entrance, two new lifts and a dedicated Changing Places facility will ensure the building is accessible. We have a designated section of our blog for Capital Updates, so you can keep up to date on what’s happening inside the building. Most recently, our new central staircase has been installed, with an amazing view of Bradford Cathedral as you come up through the building. We can’t wait for you to visit and see them for yourself!
Arts and Heritage Project Started
In April, we started our Arts and Heritage Project, working across the Bradford district at four hubs – Kala Sangam, Keighley Creating, Bloomin Buds Theatre Company and South Square Centre. Each hub is working with different community groups to engage with different artistic projects to explore their own heritage. Each hub has a designated Arts and Heritage Officer working with them, and we have asked them to share their 2024 highlights from the project so far, so check out what they have been up to:
Claire at Kala Sangam
I have loved my time working with the Kala Sangam Hub groups so far, meeting and working with so many amazing and diverse people. There have been so many highlights for me, with loads of creativity, fun and laughter being shared whilst exploring the heritage of each group, but have I particularly enjoyed: WomenZone’s trip to the Qawwali, u3a’s rapping session and hearing the Roma community’s beautiful music and songs. I’m really excited to see what they will all create next year!
Grace and Ellie at Bloomin’ Buds
There have been so many moments throughout the past 3 months that have been a real standout for us at the Rockwell centre. A main highlight is the sharing and connection to our participants past that we have been able to explore creatively. The sock monkeys were a childhood favourite, and the garden boxes let us delve into our gardening group’s past exploring their memories of their first green space (extra points if you can spot the outdoor loo). We have also enjoyed making new friends with local organisations including BCB radio and Cartwright Hall. Keep your eyes peeled for fun trips coming up in the new year.
Gemma at South Square Centre
The highlight for this year was our ‘Thornton’s Crown‘ Summer School where young people spent 6 days at South Square exploring public art. During the week, they met people in Thornton, visited the Yorkshire Sculpture Park for inspiration, composed their own musical score and created wearable sculptures that were paraded across the viaduct. The summer school has led to the creation of a new youth group, in partnership with Bradford Youth Service.
Lauren at Keighley Creative
The highlight of my year has to be the creation and development of ‘The K-Town Cart’- the mobile art cart designed to travel around Keighley and engage with groups and local residents across the district! It was such a fun way to kick off delivery in Keighley, and I’m excited to continue to develop the workshop programme and continue bringing access to arts and culture to people’s doorstep!
Schools Engagement
We started our year by partnering with Carlton Bolling (a local secondary school) who are working on achieving their Artsmark platinum. Throughout the year this meant visits to St Peter’s House, they met our staff, visits to school and support from their students whilst at Carlton Bolling for the first week of our school’s takeover.
Other highlights from our year include Feversham Girls Academy Nasheed Choir performing as part of our Arts Iftar, a visit from level 1 & entry level 3 students from Bradford College who took part in a workshop led by local artist Jess Swift, our 4th annual school’s takeover with over 700 key stage 2 children taking part in a range of art activities. And finally, in November we had the performance of Superchefs take place at Marshfield Primary School where over 300 children got to experience a live theatre performance from their school hall.
Artist Advisory Group
As we look towards opening as Bradford Arts Centre, we appointed nine artists, all of different artistic background, to form our Artist Advisory Group. This group will meet twice a year and provide feedback and input on our programming for Bradford Arts Centre. We had our first meeting with them in September and spent the day getting to know each other and talking about plans for the future, and even having a peek at the plans for how BDAC will look like once we reopen. We will be meeting up again early in 2025, and we are looking forward to sharing more of the process with you all!
Commissions
In 2024, we announced 3 commissions to partner with artists to develop new pieces of work which will be included in our programme in 2025 and featured inside of Bradford Arts Centre once we move back in.
Kala Sangam Commission
Akshay Sharma and Meera Patel were this year’s recipients of The Kala Sangam Commission. Each artist has received £10,000 towards development of new dance pieces, which we are excited to share next year at Bradford Arts Centre.
Samānatā Commission
Kala Sangam and Jaivant Patel Company teamed up once again for the Samānatā South Asian Queer Performance Seed Commission, which was awarded to Raimu Itfum, which sees him receive £2800 along with studio time at Kala Sangam and mentoring with Jaivant Patel to support the development of his project exploring the duality of hypersexuality through a Modern South Asian Queer lens.
Heritage Commission
As part of our multi-million pound redevelopment of Kala Sangam, we have commissioned 3 artists to create work to be displayed in our redeveloped building at St Peter’s House. The three commissions have been awarded to Razwan Ul-Haq, who will be making a calligraphy piece that uses ink made from bricks from the building, Turbynes, who will be creating a soundscape looking through our incredible 30 year long archive, and a final year Bradford College student on the Level 6 BA (Hons) Art and Design course, which will be their first professional commission.
Our Blog Started
In April, our Marketing Officer Jess started our monthly Kala Sangam blogs. We thought it would be a great chance to round up all the amazing work our team does every month, and have a designated space to share building updates, Arts and Heritage news, call out’s and more! We are excited to carry these on into 2025, and even more excited to start writing blogs for Bradford Arts Centre when we move back to St Peter’s House! You can catch up on all our monthly blogs here.
Archivist Announcement
As we are sure you can imagine, we have plenty of history from our 30 years as Kala Sangam, so in September, we appointed Memory Dance LTD aka Alex Wilson to be our Archivist. He has already got stuck into our printed media, tapes, CD’s, sound recordings and more. To work alongside him in this exciting project, we have appointed four archive assistants, Ella Barrett, Emma Illingworth, Farhana Khan Pushpa and Nathan McGill. Between them, they will be exploring our archive and sharing their findings with us all, some of which you may even see on our socials very soon…
Annual Review
Earlier in the year we shared our 2023/24 annual review.
It was a year of celebration and change for Kala Sangam as we looked back on our 30th year history and embarked on exciting plans for the future. Despite uncertainty over when St Peter’s House would close for redevelopment and the upheaval of moving to our temporary offices, we presented 53 performances (including 7 premieres of new work), gave over 140 days of free studio time to artists and hosted dozens of conferences, workshops and events with commercial bookers. More than 3000 people saw our performances and we worked with over 2400 children from schools across the district.
You can read the 2023/24 Annual Review and our previous ones here.
Staff Highlights
Somewhat unexpectedly, in May Jez and Alex Croft were invited to attend a summer Garden Party at Buckingham Palace. The day was a celebration of the creative industries, and they were invited as recipients of Cultural Development Funding from the Arts Council and Department for Culture Media and Sport. It was a beautiful sunny day, and they joined a delegation of Bradford based organisations including Bloomin’ Buds and Tranquil Productions. With a bit of help from Nadia Iftkar from Company of Others (one of our Associate Companies) they were perfectly positioned to meet the King, who was interested to hear about our plans for 2025 and beyond. They also enjoyed a bit of celebrity spotting, including Lenny Henry and Louis Theroux and some delicious food while taking in the impressive gardens. It was a really memorable experience, and Jez and Alex were very happy to be there as representatives of Kala Sangam and as a mark of the success and hard work of the whole KS team.
Mo has been super busy this year working with our facilities team! Between moving out of St Peter’s House and into our temporary space at Bank House, and helping make sure all our commercial bookings run smoothly, he also made time to attend some of our amazing off site events. Mo’s highlight would absolutely have to be our Arts Iftar in March. We had a fantastic performance of Nasheeds from the Feversham Girls School Choir and some beautiful stories and poetry readings from Nabeela Ahmed. We broke our fast together and all shared an incredible meal. Keep an eye out for our Arts Iftar 2025 announcement!
The highlight for Sidra this year was our Qawwali performance by the Qaisar Mahmood Qawwal. The group were amazing, had a fantastic vibe going and really got the audience engaged. It was an amazing experience to attend the event.
Alex Corwin loved Kerry Wright’s new play Kailey. The performances were our first off-site events and it was great to be working with our friends at Keighley Creative to host them. We turned their Stockroom Cinema in to a tiny theatre for the week and had a full run of sell out performances. Kailey is such an important show, based around Kerry’s own teenage experiences, tackling the overlooked issue of children with parents in prison. It was powerful, informative (She had never thought about how children might have to regularly travel hundreds of miles to visit a parent in prison) and very very funny. Kerry is a talented writer and we are excited to support her in developing her next piece of work.
Classes in 2025
In January, we have our Bollywood and Kathak classes starting again.
There will be a free Bollywood taster session on the 11th of January, with sessions starting on Saturday the 18th of January to the 22nd of March, every Saturday, 11am – 12pm for participants aged 16+ at Bank House.
Kathak Classes start on Saturday the 11th of January, 10am – 11am at Bank House for participants aged 5+.
