16th – 25th September 2022

Rye Arts Festival’s Golden Anniversary Thanks

The 50th anniversary Rye Arts Festival has now ended after a packed programme of around 60 ticketed events.

The organisers would like to thank everyone involved in bringing together, after a year’s enforced absence, the biggest and best Festival ever. We would like to thank everyone who bought tickets as well as our private and corporate sponsors, the advertisers in our brochure and everybody who subscribed to membership of the Festival. Your support and generosity is hugely appreciated.

And we would like to thank all the large team of organisers, stewards, box office staff, technicians and advisers who work so hard all year long to bring the Festival together and then through the fortnight.

Last, but far from least, a big thank you to all the wonderful performers who came to Rye to entertain our audiences!

John Case & Andy Stuart

Joint Festival Directors

FROM A HAPPY PARTICIPANT: Dear Rye Festival Team,
I just wanted to write and thank you for a brilliant day yesterday (Friday 24th). I’ve never been to an event like it. Two concerts by a superb choir in two wonderfully historic churches, with a sunset walk through beautiful countryside in between, on an absolutely glorious evening. Please thank the ever cheerful volunteers who stewarded us so ably through such a complicated event. It would perhaps have been nice to have little more time for refreshment and examination of St Thomas’s before the second concert, but one can’t have everything. I have no idea how you can top that next year, but I’ll be there! Jane H

Our next Festival will be taking place between 16th and 25th September 2022.

All eight films are available to watch now!

The Solid Gold brooch draw has been made and the winner drawn!

Liz Ward is the lucky winner of the solid gold, handmade brooch commissioned to celebrate the golden anniversary of Rye Arts Festival in 2021. And last week Liz came into Rye to collect her prize from Simon Milne, the Rye jeweller who made the stunning piece with the Festival’s Joint Directors John Case and Andy Stuart.

Since this year marks the 50th anniversary of Rye Arts Festival, the Trustees decided to commission a brooch recreating the Festival’s logo, which was devised from a detail within a window in the Clare Chapel in St Mary’s Church Rye. A free prize draw which anyone could enter was run and the winner of this beautiful piece of craftsmanship is Liz, who lives in Tenterden.

Liz says: “I was thrilled to discover that I had won the gorgeous piece that has been beautifully hand-crafted by Simon Milne. My husband and I love coming to Rye for the annual Rye Arts Festival, and to win this historic commemorative brooch is amazing. I will treasure it and wear it on special occasions.”

John Case adds: “Rye is home to so many incredibly talented artists, craftspeople and artisans, as well as musicians, actors and writers. The annual Rye Arts Festival showcases talent not only from the local area but also the wider British Isles and from around the world. In 2021 we had performers from the USA, the Netherlands, Belgium, Malta, Germany, Russia and Israel, but we are delighted that the winner of the gold brooch will find a home just up the road from us in Tenterden with a lovely winner who clearly treasures her prize!”