International Youth Arts Festival (IYAF) is an annual youth arts festival held in the

Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames The Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames is a borough in southwest London. The main town is Kingston upon Thames and it includes Surbiton, Chessington, Malden Rushett, New Malden and Tolworth. It is the oldest of the four royal boroughs in Eng ...

every July. The festival was founded in 2009 by Robin Hutchinson MBE and more than 25,000 young people have delivered the festival as participants and volunteers since its inception. IYAF is an open-access performing arts festival and the festival programme includes a range of art forms including theatre, dance, music, comedy, visual arts and children's shows. International Youth Arts Festival 2018 will take place from 6–15 July 2018.

Open access

International Youth Arts Festival is an open-access mixed arts festival: it does not book performers and anyone may participate, with any type of performance. The official programme categorises shows into sections for

theatre Theatre or theater is a collaborative form of performing art that uses live performers, usually actors or actresses, to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place, often a stage. The perform ...

comedy Comedy is a genre of fiction that consists of discourses or works intended to be humorous or amusing by inducing laughter, especially in theatre, film, stand-up comedy, television, radio, books, or any other entertainment medium. The term o ...

, children and family shows,

music Music is generally defined as the art of arranging sound to create some combination of form, harmony, melody, rhythm or otherwise expressive content. Exact definitions of music vary considerably around the world, though it is an aspe ...

and

circus A circus is a company of performers who put on diverse entertainment shows that may include clowns, acrobats, trained animals, trapeze acts, musicians, dancers, hoopers, tightrope walkers, jugglers, magicians, ventriloquists, and unicyclis ...

Venues

Since the first International Youth Arts Festival, venues across the

have been supporting artists by transforming their venues into performance spaces. The festival includes over 200 events staged in venues including Rose Theatre, Arthur Cotterell Theatre, Kingston Library, Fairfield Recreation Ground, Eagle Brewery Wharf and The Library club.

People

Artistic Directors

2016 - Andy Currums 2015 - Trevor Blackman 2009 - 2014 Aniela Zaba

Patrons

Festival patrons include Angellica Bell, Michael Underwood, Tom Holland, Tom Chambers, Chike Okonowo, Sheridan Smith and Matt Lucas.

Chairman and founding trustee

Robin Hutchinson MBE

References

{{Reflist Arts festivals in England