Arts Action Festival

Arts Action Festival 2025

Saturday 25th October

2 PM - 10.30 PM Rich Mix

A taste of what we have confirmed so far….

🌟 Enter the Dragon's Cave - disabled-led sensory theatre by @joannecoxcello Meet Jo-anne's Dragon Cello a symbol of power and resistance in an ableist world

🌟 MY P*SSY PAID FOR THIS SHOW* - Sexquisite

Live improv music, poetry and dance exploring the use of SW to fund a creative practice.

🌟Mozambican-born MoYah headlines with Afro-fusion Hip Hop. Together with his live band, he delivers a powerful call for freedom and resistance.

🌟Radical Songwriting Workshop, How To Produce Political Theatre Workshop, Movement Mapping, Artivist Speed dating and much, much more…

Are you…

An artist using your work to improve the world?

An activist using creativity to spark change?

A campaign group, educator, or grassroots organiser with a cause that needs to be heard?

An organisation trying to platform new voices but don’t know where to find them?

Hosted by Sibling Arts, the UK’s first ever Arts Action Festival brings together artists, activists, NGOs, educators and arts orgs for a full day of live performances, workshops, talks, stalls and creative interventions. The festival programme is rooted in lived experience and showcasing ownership, representation and best practice at every level.

This is a new space for marginalised-led, brave art to shine, to learn from arts activists different ways to win over hearts and minds and to multiply movement impact.

The arts have the opportunity to drive social change from the grassroots. They can build movements, shift narratives, and connect people in ways that reach deeper than data or debate.

We want to:

• Showcase powerful, community-rooted art.
• Connect artists and campaigns to boost impact.
• Build solidarity across sectors and movements.
• Support institutions to shift toward inclusive models of leadership and access.

Afternoon

• Workshops and talks led by epic grassroots artists, activists, campaigners and organisers at the forefront of political art for years.
• Expect honest conversations about what’s working, what’s failing, what needs rebuilding and what needs burning down. From creative action to community safety, from radical pedagogy to strategic comms. Bring your wins. Bring your mistakes. Bring your questions.
• Artivist speed dating, find the missing link to your project or campaign!
• Discover incredible projects and causes at creative stalls and roaming workshops.

Evening

• Live performance, music and interventions.
• Fierce brave political art rooted in lived experience and social change.
• Powerful arts activists pushing boundaries and building movements, using storytelling to reclaim space and shift culture.
• From protest theatre to live music, from collective poetry to ritual, this evening will bring resistance to the stage and open space for joy, grief, rage, and hope.

Programme will be dropping soon!

All day

• Stalls and creative networking spaces.
• Cross-sector conversations, drop-in mentorship.
• Resources, zines, food and fun!
• Help map the history and present of radical arts and creative activism in the UK.

Who we are

Sibling Arts produces music theatre and film that platforms hidden voices, wins over hearts & minds to justice and transforms relationships across communities, sectors & industries. Our current projects are:

• Forgotten Stories: Trans/non-binary storytelling workshops in schools
• Sex Worker’s Opera: Transforming our award-winning 2.5hr musical into a feature-length film based on sex worker’s stories from around the world.
• Roots Forward: practical mentorship for marginalised artists to work collaboratively and turbo charge their careers
• The Arts Action Festival.

Since 2014 we have toured marginalised-led, lived-experience-based musical theatre to 12 countries to standing ovations every night, with a Guildhall PhD published on our participatory pedagogies.