Northern Ireland’s Stendhal Festival will be celebrating their 10th anniversary next year with two events. This year’s event was supposed to take place at Balefully Cottage Farm, but was cancelled because of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
However, the organisers of the festival have said they feel comfortable announcing that events can run in 2021 after the beginning of the roll out of a mass vaccination programme, which they say can be used in conjunction with social distancing plans they have already devised in the summer to ensure that the events can take place in the summer of 2021.
The first of these events will take place on the 9th and 10th of July 2021 and the second will be on August 12th, 13th and 14th. While we don’t have a lineup yet, tickets are now available. There will be a mixture of 1,500 general and family tickets have been made available for the first weekend, organisers have said they hope they can scale up to 3,000 in the coming months. The second event in August will initially only sell 500 tickets, this is to accommodate those who had tickets to the 2020 festival and will be carrying over their ticket to the new dates.
Director of Stendhal Festival, Ross Park Hill spoke about the news in a statement saying; “It’s been a really tough year, we don’t have to tell anybody that because every one has been in somewhat of the same boat. That said, the entertainment and events industry have probably seen the biggest hits brought on by the pandemic, so we are quite simply delighted to have been able to navigate our way through 2020 and still be in a position to run events next year.”
He then went on to say; “I’d like to take the opportunity to again publicly thank those patrons who rolled over their tickets from 2020 to 2021, they are a one of the main reasons we survived 2020 and are in a position to re-launch the festival in 2021.”
“In that vain I’d also like to thank all the organisations that have supported us through the pandemic including Causeway Coast and Glens Borough Council, Help Musicians NI and The Arts Council of Northern Ireland. We are so excited by the prospect of welcoming people back to the farm and we can’t wait to be able to once again deliver all the music, arts and creativity that Stendhal is known for. We guarantee it will be worth the wait.”
Stendhal 10.
August 6th, 7th,8th, 2020.
Gather friends and celebrate.#tenyearsofstendhal#lovestendhal pic.twitter.com/f33lnjR0ME— Stendhal Festival (@Stendhalireland) September 27, 2019
The organisers of Stendhal Festival tried to organise the first ever socially distanced music festival in August called Unlocked, which would have been a series of weekends that would have showcased artists from the island of Ireland, while adhering to the social distancing guidelines. Unfortunately, the event also had to be cancelled because of an rise in cases in Northern Ireland.
Tickets for The Stendhal Festival are available here.
