The Threepenny Festival Association is a collective of artists, musicians and activists based in the North West of England. Founded in 2013 to explore creative responses to austerity, the Threepenny Festival Association links with community groups interested in similar issues.
Recently, we’ve developed partnerships with London Mining Network and activists on environmental justice, particularly in the energy and extractive industries. We‘ve researched fracking with activists in Preston and at Barton Moss in Salford, producing a performance piece, Shale Lies, which turned their recorded words into songs and cabaret. This was performed in New Mills in 2015 and then extended with an international perspective on energy exploitation, working with the Columbia Solidarity Campaign, at ‘El Sueno Existe’ Festival in Machynlleth in North Wales.
From this collaboration grew the ‘Extract’ project, which links popular education, activism, and artistic interventions in campaigning.
We take an historical, class and anti-colonial perspective as given. We are influenced by climate justice activism of people like Vandana Shiva and Nnimmo Bassey, and by grass roots Latin American movements, like the Moviemente Sim Terra in Brazil. We believe we in the UK can learn from the organisational methods of indigenous movements, and we wish to incorporate these ideas into creative responses.
The original Threepenny Festival included workshops, political cabaret, music and drama. Staged over four days in Manchester, it attracted a total audience of around 20,250, for both live events and on social media.
For the full programme of the original Festival see here.