An International Feast at the Respect Festival At Totnes Fringe Festival 

Just as the Bard had plays within his plays, so the Leechwell Garden has its own festival within the second Totnes Fringe Festival.

This year’s Respect Festival, “Hidden Gems”, is a feast of international talent culminating in a bring-food-to-share, international picnic for a Sunday lunch with a difference. With big help from the Fringe, there will be an array of talented artists telling tales from all over the world from Scotland to Benin to Arabia to tales from locals and back to the garden with an imaginative quest for the Garden’s hidden gems.  All this on the weekend of July 11th and 12th from 10am to 4.30pm. And it’s FREE!

Hidden Gems celebrates diversity. Diversity within the garden, the town and the world, through story, poetry, theatre, puppetry, dance and feasting.

The full programme is available to view on The Totnes Fringe Festival fliers, on the Leechwell website: https://www.leechwellgarden.org.uk/events/.

There will also be a repetition of last year’s very successful creative competition to imagine the hidden gems in the garden through pictures and words.

Building up to the Festival, local puppeteer, author and producer of the Festival, Tony Gee has been collecting some life stories and traditional tales from Totnes citizens from diverse ethnic backgrounds.  He comments: “There are stories of fairies, butterflies, lost homes and villages, fasts, Victorian explorers equipping themselves with dandruff brushes and much more. These stories will be told around our feast and to shake it all off, we will have a whole garden African dance workshop run by Andigwa Dance for all ages”.