Mother Tongues Arts Festival Announce 2021 Line-Up

Mother Tongues Arts Festival Announce 2021 Line-Up

With a programme featuring over 40 artists, Mother Tongues today announced its 2021 Mother Tongues Festival line-up, which will take place primarily online, keeping participation at the heart of their programme with the Walk A While initiative.

The Mother Tongues Festival remains the largest Irish Festival celebrating linguistic diversity throughout the arts. Until 2020, the weekend-long Festival took place on the 21st of February to celebrate its founding organisation's first birthday and UNESCO's International Mother Language Day. This year, the programme will take place throughout May 2021 in conjunction with World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development.

"We aim to go beyond ‘inclusion' to create a universal feeling of genuine belonging. We created the Mother Tongues Festival with a dream to connect people through diverse creative experiences and experiencing performances from an extensive range of cultures," says Dr Francesca La Morgia, Founder of Mother Tongues.

The Festival will feature a dynamic programme of art workshops, school visits, film screenings, and a series of events available in 20 different languages.

 Some highlights of the 2021 festival to watch out for includes;

• Walk A While, an invitation to walk your favourite loop with friends/family and share it with people. With your captured images and embedded sounds, a map will be featured on a special Walk A While webpage.
• PAL & Windowpane, a screening of two short-films by Shane O’Reilly originally commissioned by Culture Night 2020 and The Abbey Theatre as part of the Dear Ireland project, respectively.
• Stop Clowning Around: Creative Theatre Workshop,  an adult clowning workshop presented in Spanish and English that challenges the connection between emotion and theatre.
• A Ciorcal Cómhrá with a twist, facilitated by professional comedian Áine Gallagher, this fun, inclusive, bilingual workshop creates a space people can practise speaking Irish or simply listen to Áine as she shares stories and introduces the true levels of ‘fluency’. 
• Together in Harmony A night of creative celebration to mark World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development.

The 2021 Festival is supported by Arts Council, SDCC & Creative Ireland, Ambassade de France en Irlande - French Embassy in Ireland, Draiocht (Blanchardstown), Civic Theatre & Rua Red (Tallaght), Post Primary Language Ireland, and Rather Gather, taking place throughout May 2021. To learn more about the 2021 Mother Tongues Festival and to get your tickets, visit www.mothertonguesfestival.com

Mother Tongues is a not-for-profit organisation founded in 2017 by Linguist and Professor Dr Francesca La Morgia to promote multilingualism and raise awareness of the value of linguistic diversity in Ireland. Since its founding, Mother Tongues has reached thousands of people with their wide range of cultural and educational projects, including the annual Mother Tongues Festival. In 2018, Mother Tongues were awarded the European Language Label Award and the GHP Social Care Award for Best Bilingualism Support Advisory.