Project Description

Barnaby Homemade Parade Becca with Flag

21st June 2020

Homemade Parade

As part of Barnaby Festival

After the famous Macclesfield Barnaby Parade was cancelled due to Covid-19, IDST! (led by Becca Smith and Neil Puttick) helped mobilise hundreds of local people, groups, schools, and communities to make a “Homemade Parade from the comfort of people’s home” to celebrate our town’s incredible creative vision. The result was thousands of people getting involved taking part or celebrating in a wonderful watch party to raise the spirits and mark the Barnaby tradition.

Partners

Location

Online

On Saturday 21 June, almost 2,000 people took part the Barnaby Homemade Parade via an online watch party, joining the 500 parade makers on the facebook group creating performances, designing and building floats and decorations for a virtual celebration. The theme was VISION 2020 and it was fantastic to see how local people, schools, groups, faith groups, organisations rose to the occasion.

From the comfort of your own home


Instead of meeting in person, participants were encouraged to take part from the comfort of their own home, and using their front gardens, windows and balconies to showcase their creativity.

There were speeches, choreographed dances, the Sambamba samba band and plenty of exciting home video creations and creative artworks. Many people followed instructions and guides to make costumes and props, but other mavericks ran with the theme and made it their own! Musicians worked together to compose and coordinate performances. This is easier said than done with organising sound levels and timing over Zoom – particular respect goes out to the musical organisers like Phil Hill (who organised the Chinese Marbles) and the Macclesfield Music Centre. 

The Show must go on!

When the lockdown was first called, IDST! members had been planning for the live parade with the Barnaby Festival team. We had been preparing: putting together work tables, unfolding metres of materials, setting up our production line at Macclesfield Community ArtSpace. Of course we were disappointed (we had just excavated in the ArtSpace stores and gone through years of parade materials, even clearing space for a new room to work in).

Inspirations

We were really inspired by the Whitley Bay Carnival by Salto Arts production which took place a few weeks before us, and were one of the first cultural organisations to attempt an online town Carnival experience when so many others were cancelling. We were also blown away by how the public got together to show its appreciation of the NHS – by clapping outside every week – and marked VE (Victory in Europe) Day with low-level socially-distanced street parties. 
 

 

When it became clear that there could be no face-to-face parade, we put our heads together to try to find as many ways to make an alternative as we could. Becca Smith and Neil Puttick pitched the idea of the #HomemadeParade amongst several other ideas (including a giant Macclesfield Wave!). The Barnaby Festival organisers chose the way which would be most accessible and appeal to the most people to take part. Of course, in order to make this happen, we also needed to create a very solid and secure Covid safety preparations. The Barnaby producers were fantastic in helping us develop secure methods to provide materials and information to people with them minimum contact. All in all it was fantastic to help come up with a way to ensure that the “show must go on”.

Preparations for 2021?

One way or another, we are all hoping that we can parade in 2021!  Save the date 19-21 June 2021 in your diaries
We will continue to offer making activities and challenges for Macclesfield’s wonderfully creative communities to work together. Giving people fun and engaging ways to get involved in the process of building and preparation.  We are also working with Macclesfield Community ArtSpace to setup a workshop studio to produce our Make-Along videos, and planning how we distribute materials and instructions out across the town during lockdown.
 

 

When it became clear that there could be no face-to-face parade, we put our heads together to try to find as many ways to make an alternative as we could. Becca Smith and Neil Puttick pitched the idea of the #HomemadeParade amongst several other ideas (including a giant Macclesfield Wave!). The Barnaby Festival organisers chose the way which would be most accessible and appeal to the most people to take part. Of course, in order to make this happen, we also needed to create a very solid and secure Covid safety preparations. The Barnaby producers were fantastic in helping us develop secure methods to provide materials and information to people with them minimum contact. All in all it was fantastic to help come up with a way to ensure that the “show must go on”.

Make-Along Workshops

So many brilliant of Macclesfield’s makers lent us their experience and expertise to create “Make-along” videos (several who regularly work on IDST! projects with us). We loved how they came up with simple easy to create things to celebrate.

Follow the workshop activities here and listen and watch again all the video content from the Barnaby Festival events so far this year from the website. We have also attached some of the accompanying instruction sheets to go with it!

Homemade Parade Gallery

Make-Along Materials

Our crew

We are IDST!

About us

IDST! are a group of makers, artists, techies and experimenters working together to make community artworks.

Creating artworks, performances, games and events that are playful, purposeful and people powered and celebrate community strength.

Collaborating with others, training and running experiments, workshops, and projects so people can learn and get involved and communities can own their ideas.