ABOUT US
WHAT IS CHANGE FESTIVAL?
CHANGE Festival is an environmental arts organisation that inspires cultural shifts through stories and gatherings. Created in 2019, we have instigated a range of artistic offerings from festivals to films, to plays, discussions and rituals that propel artists and participants into a regenerative mindset.
WHO IS BEHIND CHANGE FESTIVAL?
CHANGE Festival was originally conceived and created by artist and creative producer Becky Burchell.
BECKY BURCHELL:
Becky’s practice is Hopeism: sharing stories of hope to inspire change. Her work is at the intersection of the arts, environmentalism and community and she takes a holistic response to the multiple challenges we currently face. She launched CHANGE Festival to elevate people, ideas and narratives that celebrate bold new ways of regenerative living, where humanity and the natural world are both able to thrive. Becky is a curator, a storyteller, a collaborator, a writer and a convenor. She lives with her family in a small village in Dorset, where she is co-creating with the land, the community and the ancestors to lay cultural foundations for the future.
Becky has over 20 years experience as a visonary producer and organiser, working within festivals, charities, arts venues and communities. She has a passion for combining different artforms, ideas and people to co-create extraordinary gatherings and experiences.
Becky co-directs CHANGE Festival with artist Sophie Austin.
SOPHIE AUSTIN:
Sophie Austin is a director, writer and producer specialising in creating interactive and immersive theatre, wild audio projects, experimental docs and narrative short films.
She founded and led site specific theatre company Teatro Vivo for fifteen years. She was Creative Director at SHH Productions, a female led film production company and Creative Associate at international arts organisation Dash Arts.
Sophie is currently Writer in Residence at Lesnes Abbey Woods and a 2022 Bio-Leadership Fellow working with the Bio-leadership Project to explore how we tell new stories about our relationship with the natural world.
WHY DOES CHANGE FESTIVAL EXIST?
We stand at a moment in time when we now know for certain that the climate crisis will have a negative impact on our future. We know that many species will become extinct. We know that many human lives will be lost. We are too late to stop this.
And yet, the scale and the breadth of the crisis still remains in our hands. Our actions now will dictate how bad things will get. So what can we do?
We believe that the biggest barrier to positive change is our cultural conditioning. The ways we see, feel and experience the world are based on our cultural context. And art is a direct route to our cultural conditioning. If we change our artforms, we change our worldview.
CHANGE Festival exists to provide a joyful, compelling, collaborative, urgent and enlightening narrative to our cultural perspective. A regenerative future is possible, if only we can imagine it, feel it, love it and live it.
We exist to help you on this journey.
WHO OWNS CHANGE FESTIVAL?
CHANGE Festival is set up as a Community Interest Company (CIC), with Becky Burchell and Sophie Austin as the Directors. Being a CIC means that we have a legal duty to run the organisation to benefit our audiences and co-creators and no one will ‘profit’ financially from our activities (although they will profit culturally). Any income is invested straight back into new work.
WHO ARE THE ICONS?
The friendly faces that greet you at the top of each website page are REAL icons! Geeta, Tony, Gabrielle, Bukumi and Sophie are all inspirational change-makers who we wanted to celebrate. Their stories can be read here.
The image "Bukumi" is a derivative of a photo by Toyin Dawudu.