My Local Festival Has My Heart

It can sometimes be uncomfortable to say you’re proud to come from Stockton-on-Tees. It’s a town in Teesside, a region often criticised for high levels of crime and unemployment. It’s a town that Conservative MP James Cleverly allegedly called ‘a shithole’, while in earshot of Alex Cunningham, the former MP for Stockton North.

However, Stockton has one thing that very few towns in the UK can boast about: the Stockton International Riverside Festival or, as we call it round here, SIRF. For one weekend in summer, various performers from all around the world come to Stockton and entertain crowds with a variety of street art performances. You can expect interpretive dance, acrobatics, music, and much more, as the performers use the streets of Stockton to share their stories and display their cultures.

I’ve been going to SIRF for as long as I can remember, and it’s always been a highlight of my year whenever it arrives. This was something I only began to realise when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, which cancelled the event in both 2020 and 2021, but SIRF not being there during those years really put everything into perspective. It’s just always been a constant throughout my life, and I definitely felt the two SIRF-less summers during the pandemic.

My enthusiasm for the festival is well-known among my friends and family. In the days and weeks leading up to the event, friends always text me to ask about what’s on and where, and often tag along with me to see all the acts. When it’s on, I have very little else on my mind, and I try to see as much as I can. Programmes come out shortly before the event and I study it religiously, but oftentimes the best thing at SIRF is to see where the day takes you - you come down early afternoon thinking you’ve got the day planned, and by evening you stumbled across a mad bit of performance art that you can’t take your eyes off.

I’ve seen just about everything at SIRF. I’ve seen men in white tuxedos make hats out of corn and pretend to kill each other. I’ve seen toy pandas explode. I’ve seen cars hung up on a massive washing line. I’ve seen so many small and intimate dance pieces, each one with its own unique perspective, and I’ve seen large-scale finales with acrobatics, stunts and pyrotechnics - people in Stockton love us some fireworks.

So after making all these wonderful memories and seeing all those fantastic shows growing up, my experience at SIRF changed drastically this year when I was lucky enough to work for the festival as a visitor ambassador. To me, this was really a culmination of my long history and obsession with the festival. No longer was I just annoying my friends by going in-depth on what was on offer, I was being a helping hand to visitors, both from Stockton and from all around the world, and I was one of the many faces of the festival. For the first time, I felt like my obsessive love for the festival and my overexcited attitude was actually paying off.

In both the shifts I was working, and my downtime where I got to walk around as a punter, I saw the usual programme of wild and wonderful shows and, due to my role as an ambassador, I even got to talk to some of the acts between performances, something that I’d barely got the chance to do beforehand. While I have always loved going to the festival, I can comfortably say that SIRF 2025 was my favourite one I’ve ever been to.

I’ve spoken a lot about how fantastic SIRF is. Since its inception in 1988, it has become the perfect platform for artists to immerse visitors into their cultures, their stories, their values. However, SIRF has become something even more important. This celebration of cultures has become part of our culture, and it’s been going strong for nearly 40 years. And by being raised in Stockton, going along to SIRF as an excited little kid or working it as an ambassador, it’s become part of my culture.

My recommendation

The festival itself!