We had an amazing weekend just gone with our new performance festival DISRUPT packed full of the best disruptive work, our first big Club Urania, the building overflowing with artists, audiences and artistic joy. A very fitting climax to an incredible season of theatre, dance, circus and live art. We’re very excited to share our autumn season with you really soon!

You may have heard our exciting news a couple of weeks back, with an award of £461,000 from Arts Council England to make significant improvements to our audio-visual equipment in J1 and J2 and to the accessibility of our building. Massive thanks to Arts Council England for this big vote of confidence in all that we do. One of our first big jobs is to replace the lift in J2 which you may have noticed has given up the ghost. Big apologies to anyone who has been affected by this fault and thank you for your patience while we sort this out. It’ll be a few weeks yet as there are major supply chain issues at the moment as you can imagine.

We’re delighted to share with you A Recipe for a Queen, the film we’ve just made with pupils at Queen Emma Primary School, Heathlands House Care Home, and the Cherry Hinton Baptist Church Friday Friends Group, with support from Cambridgeshire Community Foundation and Arts Council England. Big thanks to all the funders, lottery players, participants, and to artist Yvonne Hercules and filmmaker Peter Harmer, with concept by our associate artist Hannah Jane Walker, for this brilliant and fitting response to the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee.

If you know of young people looking for a new way of exploring their creativity, we have two excellent projects they may be interested.

Our fully inclusive and free Contemporary Youth Choir, also led by the incredibly talented Yvonne Hercules, has only a few places left. Do get in touch if you want to come and sing with a great group of people. No audition, no experience necessary!

After all the restrictions on our in-person activities of the last couple of years, it’s fabulous to see the return of two of our favourite Creative Learning projects.

At the end of the month we’re excited to be working again with our Total Arts young creatives and The Light Cinema to present Big Trouble Little Pictures, the Total Arts Film Festival. This two-day programme will present all the imaginative, high quality, thought provoking and entertaining new films made by young people working with us across the year and co-created with critically acclaimed professional artists and filmmakers.

And in August bringing the noise to J1 we’ve got Big Bang Theory. If you’ve ever wanted to learn how to be a sound engineer and gain skills and experience on a real live and loud gig in J1, get in touch. This week-long course always sells out so don’t hang about…

Matt Burman, Artistic Director, Cambridge Junction