Celebrating community identity and culture, Penzance

Golowan festival procession in full swing

PENZANCE is the main market town in Penwith, in the far west of Cornwall. It's a place where people feel isolated from policymakers in the rest of Cornwall, let alone further 'up country'. A place where the community has traditionally led major events, making its own entertainment. The area is also home to a significant number of creative Cornish people - artists, playwrights, poets, musicians and newcomers who are attracted by the outstanding natural beauty and rugged coastlines, choosing to stay despite the lack of money and conventional jobs.

In the last few decades there have been attempts to revive and renew local traditions, and connect with the wider Celtic community of Brittany, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, the Isle of Man and beyond. Golowan is an outstandingly successful example of a community-led event that helps to give a vibrant identity to a town, supporting a deprived area's renewal in ways that are hard to measure using conventional 'box-ticking' analysis. Community pride is not an easy factor to fit into the evidence base.

Stephen Hall, director of Golowan was one of the founders of the project. 'Since 1985 I had been running a local history research project, the Penwith Community Archive, in Penzance. We discovered references to and descriptions of Gol Jowan, the Feast of John. It was a unique midsummer celebration, which involved the working communities of the town. Recorded in the first history of Penzance over 500 years ago, the feast was suppressed as a rowdy outdated superstition in the closing years of the 19th century.'

How Golowan started

'In 1989 a group of us decided to revive Golowan with an experimental one day event.' says Hall. 'We had little official support and were probably seen by many as a strange assortment of hippies. It coincided with the Penzance chamber of commerce's initiative to start a one day event to put Penzance on the map - a Poldark or Humphrey Davy day were suggested. We got together with them, the town council, Kneehigh [today an internationally respected theatre group] and Alverton primary school, who had already been inspired by an Archive Golowan exhibition to revive a traditional serpent dance.

'Mazey Day took its name from the "mazey dance" described by Valentine le Grice in the 19th century. In Cornish dialect mazed or mazey means confusion, topsy turvy, everything upside down. On our first Mazey Day in June 1991 it poured with rain all morning but by midday the skies cleared. All agreed it was a complete success! We worked with several local schools helping children make their own costumes. We also made banners to decorate the streets, and set up market stalls around the town centre.'

Since then the festival has grown to 10 days with Mazey Day as its highlight. Dozens of professional, paid artists (several of whom are now nationally and internationally recognised) are involved in community and school workshops. Golowan also runs community activities all through the year, working especially closely with schools. This helps to widen children's experience of their own and different cultures. Despite its distinctive Cornish identity, the festival always aims to attract an international feel, with music, dance and performers from across the world.