Rediscovering the Concorde Festival: A Story from the Archive at Dartington

Rediscovering a Moment of Cultural Exchange

In the quiet village of Dartington, Devon, in 1986, ten students from West Bengal performed a spring folk dance at Dartington Primary School, set to a Bengali poem by Rabindranath Tagore. Captured in a short What’s Ahead segment by Television South West, the clip sat largely unseen for decades (not lost, but hidden beneath layers of archival categorisation and institutional oversight).

Now resurfaced through the Reimagining the Film Archive (RtFA) initiative, this moment offers more than nostalgia. It reveals how individuals and communities are often obscured in official records, and what it means to recover stories that were always there just not fully recognised.

The Concorde Festival: Celebrating Culture Across England

The Dartington performance was one of 67 events across England, part of the Concorde Multicultural Festival, a nationwide celebration bringing global cultures into local communities, creating spaces for hospitality, exchange, and shared experience.

The festival was brought down through a pamphlet by Cy Grant, a Guyanese-born artist and activist who envisioned multiculturalism grounded in lived experience. Devon poet and painter John Moat collaborated with Grant to bring a segment of this vision to Dartington Primary School. Concorde festival overall had performers from West Bengal, China, Ghana, Trinidad, Jamaica, India, Japan, and Russia, staging events in schools, community centres, theatres, and cathedrals all aligning with the 1986 United Nations International Year of Peace.

Cy Grant: A Life of Art, Service, and Activism

Cy Grant (1919–2010) was a poet, actor, musician, barrister, RAF veteran, and cultural activist. During World War II, he served as a navigator in the Royal Air Force, surviving being shot down and held as a prisoner of war. After the war, he became one of the first Black creatives to appear regularly on British television, including the BBC’s Tonight show.

He voiced and was the design inspiration for Lieutenant Green in Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons. Before his arts and theatre career, Grant trained as a barrister but felt racial barriers limited his progress in the 1940s. Choosing to focus on the arts, he co-founded London’s Drum Arts Centre and authored poetry and essays exploring identity, colonial legacy, and spiritual awakening, often drawing on African and Caribbean heritage. His work challenged Western worldviews, calling for a deeper connection to nature and the self. At its core, his writing sought cultural renewal and inner liberation. His work challenged systems of cultural exclusion and opened space for new voices.

Though his name is absent from the footage’s metadata, his vision for community-rooted multiculturalism remains present throughout the festival.

Archives, Visibility, and the Politics of Representation

There's a lot to learn from this news report. When working with archival material involving global communities, it's crucial to consider how these histories were recorded, framed, and by whom. In regional broadcast collections, longstanding institutional practices have shaped what gets preserved, how it’s catalogued, and what is overlooked.

Performances by Black, South Asian, and other underrepresented communities were often framed narrowly in collections as special features, spectacles, or crisis stories rather than as everyday cultural expressions by and for those communities. These portrayals were often curated to suit broader audiences, rather than emerging from within and for the communities themselves they represented.

As scholar Saidiya Hartman reminds us, archives “contain the sedimented violence of history” and are “not innocent repositories but contested spaces where erasure and recovery happen simultaneously” (Hartman, 2008). In other words, while archives reflect past power structures, they also hold potential for rediscovery, reinterpretation, and restoration.

The Dartington footage offers one such opportunity. While names like Cy Grant may not appear in catalogues or official metadata, their influence becomes visible through deeper engagement with the materials. Highlighting moments like this, the RtFA initiative works to bring forward stories that have always existed, even when overlooked.

A Personal Reflection: Listening to Language in the Archive

As a British Bangladeshi woman working with this archive and drawing from my own diasporic identity, I approach this work with humility and awareness of my positionality. I’m consistently reflecting on what it means to preserve, protect, present, and be presented in an archive, recognising there is much work ahead to better reflect a ‘modern’ Britain that balances cultural memory. When RtFA researcher Tariq Ali surfaced this clip during digitisation, I experienced an unexpected wave of emotion. Watching the performance, I felt a bittersweet recognition. But most importantly, I heard my own language, Bangla and not in the context of crisis or trauma, but as a celebration of Tagore and a poem about spring, renewal, and hope.

For the first time, the archive transformed from something distant into something deeply personal. I felt seen not just as a hand of the archive, but as part of a living story, given the opportunity to reframe this footage. That feeling was quiet, intimate, and powerful.

About the RtFA Programme

This rediscovery is part of Reimagining the Film Archive (RtFA), a three-year initiative supported by the BFI and National Lottery Fund. Now in its second year, RtFA supports digital commissions, workforce development, community-led research, and participatory volunteering. It aims to uncover overlooked stories and broaden representation, making the South West’s film archives more inclusive, sustainable, and reflective of the communities they serve.