Kaleidoscopic was born out of a collaboration between Glyndŵr University and The Festivals Company that started nearly two years ago – along the way the festival managed to secure the support of numerous organisations including Wrexham Library, the British Film Institute, Bafta Cymru, Academi, and the National Assembly for Wales Commission.
Glyndŵr (then NEWI) approached The Festivals Company to design a new arts event that would celebrate the institution obtaining university status and showcase its range of new facilities including the £3m state-of-the-art Conference and Performance centre – named after the celebrated harpist Catrin Finch – which opened its doors in March 2009. In response, Berwyn and James at The Festivals Company created Kaleidoscopic – the first festival in the UK to focus solely on adaptations across the arts.
“We took a long look at the existing arts festivals in the UK to identify an area that was not already covered by what is already a very busy cultural calendar” said Berwyn. “After numerous long discussions we kept on coming back to the subject of adaptations and how interesting it would be to examine the process and history of adapting ideas and stories across all the arts forms.”
“When creating a new event, the one question we constantly ask ourselves is ‘would we pay to go to it?” adds James. “The idea of a festival dedicated solely to the process of adapting one art form to another seemed so rich and interesting, we knew it was the kind of thing that would instantly spark our attention. The next stage was coming up with a name and logo – for the later we turned to a North Wales based design company called Green Land Design who had successfully created the identity for one of our flagship events: The Iris Prize – Cardiff’s Gay and Lesbian Short Film Prize.”
“When it came to the logo, despite the incredible complexity of kaleidoscopic images, their origins are beautifully simple: two mirrors and some coloured beads. Despite the incredible complexity of many creative adaptations, their origins are often similarly simple: a great idea and some determination” said Simon from Green Land. “There’s slightly more to it than that, of course, but we’re boiling things down to their essence for dramatic effect. So it was clear to us that the logo for the festival shouldn’t get too bogged down in detail, should remain elegant and simple in form, and true to the spirit of kaleidoscopic’s Greek etymology: as an observer of beautiful shapes.”
“We wanted to give a human touch to the image, because after all, what are festivals without participants?” added Kara, Simon’s partner in crime at Green Land who also happens to his long suffering wife, oh, and Canadian as well. “So the 8 overlapping forms (potentially the result of a 2-mirror 45-degree kaleidoscope) suggest this. They can be viewed as reflections, multiplications or adaptations of the same person – charting a character’s development or multi-faceted nature – or they can be viewed as different people, various individuals coming together to work collectively or to simply be sociable.”
Tags: Green Land Design, Kaleidoscopic, The Festivals Company
