Your views are important to us. 

Big Burns Supper has been running for 10 years, and we’re interested in understanding if there are opportunities or challenges in the current event design.

We are particularly interested in understanding if any changes to our festival model (venues and opening times) could have a positive impact on members of our community, especially the ones who live closest to our festival venues.

Part 1 – Consultation Survey 

A community consultation survey is taking place between 23rd July and 30th August 2021, to gather as many different views on the festival. This work is being carried out by Big Burns Supper, and will be used to help influence future event designs.

Part 2 – Community Consultation Results 

From this, Dumfries Carnival is making a return, and our carnival team have been working in schools, and throughout the wider community in a series of free community arts programmes from carnival dance and make to lantern making workshops. 

During our 2022 festival, we will be hosting Burns Night Live featuring Eddi Reader – a hybrid event that will be available to our online audience free of charge on the 25th January, with songs from Eddi Reader and local artists who are performing in our Festival Hub.  

Our 2022 festival will see us occupy the Loreburn Hall, and transform it into our Festival Hub, the home of our free programme featuring local and national musicians and artists, as well as our festival bar, cafe and box office. 

For the first year ever, Big Burns Supper is a 3 week, winter fringe festival, with more than 300 shows, including 194 free shows in our Festival Hub. The programme includes music, comedy, dance, theatre, community arts and cabaret.

We’ve made a commitment to our neighbours in the area of the festival site that there will be no loud music, loud noise (including during the build, and the take down of the festival) after 10.30pm midweek, and 12.30am at weekends. This includes our Festival Hub which has a stripped back and acoustic late night programme.  

Our festival team have been working on create a more accessible venue and as a result of this both our Festival Hub and Spiegeltent is more accessible than ever. We’ve removed the need for most ramps throughout the festival site, and included amenities such as lower bars and access host services for our access patrons. 

We’ve banned the use of single use plastics across our business, and for the first year ever, our festival bar will be using re-usable cups. We’ve also partnered up with a recycling specialist to ensure that our waste management is as eco-friendly as possible. 

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