Henley Festival is a not-for-profit organisation and via our charitable arm, we're able to help many groups where music and performance can be of therapeutic, developmental or transformative value.
The Festival profoundly believes that the arts have the power to inspire lives at every level by:
- Unlocking talent
- Raising aspirations
- Improving self-esteem and confidence
- Developing intellectual, social and emotional skills
- Developing physical skills
- Encouraging creativity, experimentation and fun
- Changing behaviour and attitudes to learning
Under the banner of 'Arts Inspiring Lives', Henley Festival promotes year round projects in the community with the aim of providing opportunites and experiences via the arts to groups that may not otherwise have access, the young, talented and under privileged of all ages.
Major projects in recent years have included a long term relationship with Headway/Nordoff Robbins providing music therapy for brain injury sufferers and the festival's own youth orchestra, the Henley Festival Orchestra now in its 6th year with an associated music tuition scheme. In 2012, the Festival was jointly responsible for delivering a large scale community spectacular for the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad called 'The Tree of Light', involving over 1000 participants from Henley and the wider Thames Valley.
THE WALL
The Wall is the latest in a series of innovative arts projects devised by the Henley Festival. We are delighted to be partnering up with the Spinal Injuries Unit of Stoke Mandeville Hospital and the Gutman Trust to create a series of large scale pieces of art in a project that will also involve teenage and special needs groups from schools in Reading, Henley and Aylesbury. Running between Easter and the summer, groups from Stoke Mandeville, the John Madejski Academy, Chiltern Edge School and Aylesbury College will be working with urban artists 'Gab' and 'Inky' to create substantial 'walls' of 'graffiti art'. During that time the participants will learn all about spray painting techniques – outlining, shades, fades, shadows, flops and throw-ups – and come up with the themes they will then recreate for their respective walls. The walls will be presented at a special event at Stoke Mandeville on 26th June whilst Gab and Inky will also be resident at the Henley Festival. For more information contact Mandy Beard (mandy@henley-festival.co.uk)