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17
May
The woman who directs Ripon Theatre Festival from her kitchen table
Organising an arts festival – juggling venues, performers, ticketing, staffing, marketing and media – must be a heck of a job, but one person who knows the secret to doing it successfully is Katie Scott.
She is the director of Ripon Theatre Festival, which itself is something of ananomaly in a city that doesn't even have a cinema, never mind a fully-fledged theatre.
The key, she told the Stray Ferret, is:
Brilliant year-round teamwork from an exceptional organising group. And now the Festival is more established and in its fifth year, we can attract more and more excellent performers, pushing the boundaries of what we do just a little bit further.
Victoria Firth and Kathryn Hanke performing in the play Batty!, which will be staged at Ripon Arts Hub on July 9.
This year’s festival takes place from July 5 to 12 and that organising team is currently working hard to ensure that venues and performers are ready, and that tickets are sold.
Everyone working on the Festival is a volunteer, which is almost unbelievable, given the scale of the enterprise. Katie said:
It's a year-round job for around 15 of us – we don’t have offices, but my kitchen table sees a lot of meetings!
The festival is a mix of nearly 150 performances and workshops, featuring productions from puppetry to magic, comedy to dance, theatre to storytelling, and even cabaret.
Ye Birdz will be performing at the festival.
Katie said:
Visitors will see shows in venues that bring out the best in the fantastic spaces we have in Ripon. The list is impressive, including the cathedral, the Spa Gardens, the Market Square, an array of smaller locations and of course the city streets, which provide a wonderful backdrop to theatre.
The festival was started in 2022 by the late Ian Holloway, a friend of Katie's, and immediately differentiated itself from the Ripon International Festival by concentrating on theatre-based events rather than classical music. It was an approach that would appear to go down well with both the people of Ripon and the organisations which run the city.
Desirée Baptiste in Incidents from the Life of an Anglican Slave.
Katie said:
Ripon City Council likes the festival, because we put on so many free events which attract people to all parts of the city. The Ripon BID team also supports us, because we bring in visitors who spend significant amounts of money with local businesses.
Last year’s festival was a huge success, with almost exactly 8,000 attendees at both paid and free events, with tickets priced somewhere between £5 and £20. Rave reviews came from pretty much everyone up to and including the Dean of Ripon, who proclaimed it a "triumph". Another commentator wrote that it was "ambitious, accessible, professional and personal".
It costs around £75,000 to stage, 60% of which is spent on professional performers and venues. The rest goes on other expenses, such as marketing materials and community outreach programmes.
Katie said:
We select paid artists based on either a strong recommendation from people we trust or because one of our own team has seen them perform and thought they would be a good fit. In 2025, the festival also featured over 400 performers from the community, which was great to see.
Katie gets involved in all aspects of festival production.
Although not a performer herself, Katie has worked in the arts since studying English at Oxford University, and has held numerous management and fundraising positions in theatres everywhere from Abingdon to Edinburgh, so the logistics behind making productions happen is very much her home territory.
She said:
This year we have £22,500 from the Arts Council, and we're already working on next year’s bid for funding. The remaining £50k or so comes from a combination of ticket sales, sponsorship and good old-fashioned fundraising. In the main, we raise money from multiples of very small amounts.
And once all the thousands of theatre-goers, hundreds of performers and her band of volunteers have come to the end of this summer's festival, how will she measure its success?
She said:
There are the traditional measures, of course, such as the number of tickets sold, but it is audience reaction that really matters, and whether or not Ripon feels better about itself as a result of eight solid days of theatre.
Last year, I saw a family actually running from one event to another – at that point I knew that maybe what we were trying to do was working!
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