Brick Box at 41/42 Brixton Village Market is part cafe and part experimental performance venue, described by the organisers, Eleanor Barratt and Andrea Salazar, as “a group of artists, dreamers, hopers and no hopers…[who] welcome anyone who would like to experiment and develop creative ideas.”
‘The Brick Box creates participatory arts projects and events that put community involvement right at the heart of the experience. We develop models that support, encourage and empower people with little or no experience in the arts and ‘outsider’, ‘visionary’ and ‘marginal’ artists to collaborate with experienced and skilled practitioners in order to create new hybrid artistic experiments.’ Eleanor Barratt
Both Barratt and Salazar used to work at Shunt, the live art venue deep under London Bridge, and Barratt has spent the past year rejuvenating Bradford Playhouse into a public participatory arts venue focussing on building links between artists and the people of Bradford. Brixton Village Market is the location for the new venture as “it’s all about using the spaces in our city centres imaginatively and rethinking what we think is possible in them –why not have bands in museums, live art in markets and libraries, films in town squares…?”
On 29and 30 October 2010 they hosted a festival with public involvement to celebrate Halloween through the colourful symbolism of the Mexican Day of the Dead. The opportunity to celebrate life as well as death in order to live life to the full turned the public space of Brixton Village Market into a canvas for multi-disciplinary artwork. The DJ segued the Nolan Sisters with Michael Jackson and interactive performances involved stop-motion animation; and one window of Brick Box was filled with a video screen broadcasting images from Mexico.
A Four Day Festive Food Festival promises sleigh rides with a Snow Queen, belly dancing, a guerrilla string quartet, opera, films, dance, aerial performances, a real life blizzard, and a giant interactive snow globe.
AAJ Press 
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