Happy Birthday to the Arts Centre!
We built it, and wow, did you come! In your droves, from every corner of the earth (although I don’t think we’ve cracked Antarctica yet)!
Notes From Xanadu – the online arts centre – is one year old today! We opened with a bang, featuring 21 pieces of new work over the May bank holiday weekend, and established a global audience right from the start, hitting six of the seven continents during the four days of our launch. Born in the early days of the Covid 19 pandemic, we reached out to the growing online community with something unique, and we have continued to do so and to grow as one lockdown led to another.
To celebrate our birthday, we’re doing something similar to that launch weekend, over three days. We will be releasing new work at intervals over the weekend. We have photography, knitting, writing, comedy, music and more. Links to each piece will be provided via our Twitter and Facebook accounts as they happen. If you are reading this, and you have friends who you think might also be interested, please share the link with them in whichever way suits you. We will be delighted to get shares of any kind to any or all of the work featured during the birthday celebrations.
Going forward, the plan for the arts centre is to release work as an when suitable submissions are received, and to share news about what’s going on in the theatre, rather than having a regular slot each week. There will be posts in Twitter and Facebook when this happens, but alongside that a mailing list will be set up, so that anyone who wants to can be notified whenever new stuff is released. We will let you know when that is in place.
This will allow me, as artistic director, to concentrate more of my energies on the theatre: our regular events such as Stitch ‘n’ Bitch and Canadh agus Caint, alongside new plays and concerts (there’s a brilliant one of those coming up later this month, more details during the weekend).
Although we have a large team of contributors, actors, backstage helpers and so on, Notes From Xanadu is basically run by one person – a person who is chronically ill and disabled (would you be surprised to hear that the arts centre and theatre both operate out of a bungalow in the west of Ireland?) – so a regular PR campaign is unsustainable. But for this birthday weekend at least, we can pull out all the stops!
Enjoy the weekend! Let the party begin!
Mary Tynan
Everyone who works on Notes From Xanadu and Xanadu Online Theatre is a volunteer. If you would like to join us in any capacity, please send me an email on notesfromxanadu@hotmail.com.