About the Film

This street theatre documentary film follows Xarxa Theatre‘s outdoor performance through Spennymoor for BRASS, County Durham’s annual festival of brass music and street arts, in 2011. Xarxa are a large-scale European street theatre company, and for BRASS they brought a full carnival-style procession through the town, joined by the local Spennymoor Town Band, building to a finale in Jubilee Park.

A Second Invitation from BRASS

The year before, in 2010, I’d put together a compilation piece covering that year’s BRASS festival as a whole. The following year, the BRASS team got back in touch wanting to work together again. Working with Sally Dixon, we landed on a different approach for 2011, one that’s since become a fairly common way of covering a festival: rather than a single film assembled after the event, we made a series of short edits and uploaded them as the festival happened. I made a lot of pieces that week. This one remained my favourite.

Filming a Carnival Procession Alone

Capturing a European-style street procession through a small town with just myself and two cameras was a genuine challenge. I ran with a camera and tripod under one arm, filming handheld with the other camera as the procession passed, then sprinting ahead to find a new position before it reached me again. The pattern was usually the same: set a wide shot on one camera, then move in close with the second to catch the detail, the costumes, the faces in the crowd, the band.

Why This One Stuck With Me

Looking back, I’m proud to have captured something so unique, a genuine spectacle of marching bands, a local brass band, and a huge finale in the park, in a form unlikely to happen in Spennymoor again in quite that way. It taught me a lot about pace, positioning, and what it takes to shoot something this physical entirely on my own. BRASS continues to bring street bands and free performances to towns across County Durham each summer, Spennymoor included.