A proposal to celebrate the Chinese New Year by holding an Asian art and crafts market in Keswick was greeted enthusiastically by members of the town council.
Carol Rennie, co-owner of the Alhambra cinema and one of the organisers, attended the December meeting of the council and outlined what was planned over the weekend starting Saturday February 22.
She said that the event would tie in with the third MINT Chinese film festival which attracts dozens of Asian visitors to the town every year showing niche women films.
Carol said that on the Sunday there will be stalls in the town’s Market Square which would look as Chinese as possible and there may also be Japanese and Indian stalls as the plan is to make the event multi-ethnic.
There would be gazebos and up to 20 market stalls, a Chinese orchestra performance and “a proper lion dance troupe”.
Carol said there would be input from the Confucius Institute at Lancaster University and students at Edinburgh University who have just pulled together a successful Asian arts festival in the Scottish city.
Events would also be happening at Keswick Museum, who provided a dragon for a procession through Fitz Park last year, and Theatre by the Lake.
She said that organisers had applied for £2,000 of funding from Cumberland Council’s arts and cultural fund although much of that would be taken up by paying for a gazebo and traffic regulation order. Carol asked if the town council would be willing to contribute but was told that the deadline for grants had been at the end of October, although members did not rule out giving a donation.
The meeting was told that last year the film festival contributed at least 300 person nights to the town’s visitor economy and businesses had begun to notice that during this one weekend of the year dozens of Chinese people were coming into the town.
Carol said the plan was to subsidise the cost to stallholders, but if the money was not forthcoming then the event would still go ahead. She said that they may have to charge stallholders some more but as many were coming down from Scotland it would not be ideal as the plan was to try and subsidise their costs.
“It’s quite short notice but we always planned to do something big,” said Carol, who spent many years studying and working in Asia and has a PhD in Chinese literature. “But we did not think we would get something so big.”
