Cheltenham Festival of Performing Arts

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Nurturing performers since 1926
Music-Dance-Drama 🎵🩰🎭
6-16th May at Cheltenham Town Hall, Centenary Festival 2026

09/09/2026

The thing that makes a festival different from a show is the person sitting a few feet from the stage with a pen.

Our adjudicators are working professionals, and they don't just hand out marks. They watch closely, then tell each performer exactly what worked and what to try next. Honest enough to be worth having, kind enough that a nervous child walks off wanting to do it again. That balance is harder than it sounds, and getting it right is the whole job.

It's why teachers trust us with their pupils, and why performers come back year after year. The trophy goes on a shelf. The advice is the bit that lasts.

06/09/2026

Here's something most people in Cheltenham don't know about us.

The festival wasn't started by musicians, or a council, or a school. It was started in 1926 by the town's business community, the Chamber of Commerce, who thought a growing town needed a proper stage where its young people could perform and be judged by people who knew what they were doing. A hundred years later that's still exactly what happens every May.

That founding idea has aged well. A town is only as strong as what it gives its young people to aim at, and a group of local business owners understood that a century ago. We're glad the connection still holds, and glad the Chamber is still part of the town it helped shape.

With thanks to , then and now.

02/09/2026

Our Choirs Day is one of the fullest days of the festival, and not everyone singing on it is local.

Alongside the Cheltenham choirs, we get groups who drive a long way to be here. Choirs from Cardiff, from Hampshire, from as far as Sheffield, loading a coach on a Saturday morning to sing in the Town Hall and drive home again the same night. Some of them list the cups they've won here on their own websites, years later. A room full of voices, some who rehearse ten minutes away and some who set off at dawn.

If you sing in a choir, of any size, there's a place for you on that day. It's one of the best sounds we make all year.

30/08/2026

People sometimes picture a festival like ours as one kind of child from one kind of school. It has never been that.

The performers who come to us are taught in front rooms and church halls and studios above shops. They come from state schools and independent schools in roughly equal number, from villages in the Cotswolds and streets in Gloucester, some sent by a teacher with fifty pupils, some by a parent who found us online. A few travel a fair way to be here.

What they have in common isn't where they're from. It's that someone thought they were ready to stand on a stage and be heard. That's the only entry requirement that has ever mattered.

25/08/2026

The summer's nearly out, and the new term is coming into view.

If you teach dance, music or drama, whether in a school or a studio of your own, this is the time of year the diary starts filling. So a quiet word while you're planning it. The festival runs every May; it's open to performers of every age and stage, and preparing for it gives pupils something real to aim at through the year: a proper stage, expert listening, and honest feedback they'll remember.

No need to do anything yet. Just worth knowing it's there as you shape the year ahead. We'd love to see your pupils in the hall next May.

23/08/2026

Every May we hand over a lot of silver.

Some of our cups carry engraved names going back further than anyone on the committee can remember. Winners from decades ago, sitting a few lines above a child who lifted the same trophy last spring. That's the part of a hundred-year-old festival you can't manufacture. The cup a ten-year-old carries home was carried home by someone else long before they were born, and someone else before that.

We look after them between festivals. They're not really ours. We just keep them safe until the next name goes on.

19/08/2026

A quiet word of thanks this week to our Friends of the Festival.

There are about thirty of them. Some have been Friends for years, a few for decades. They pay a modest sum each year, come along across the festival, and ask for very little back. What they give us is steadier than any single donation: the knowledge that whatever else changes, a group of people who care about this festival will still be there in May.

A hundred years in, that kind of quiet loyalty is worth more than we can easily say. So we won't try to dress it up. To our Friends, thank you. We see you in the hall every year, and we're glad you're there.

16/08/2026

The Town Hall is full of ukuleles this weekend, and we are here for it.

The Ukulele Festival of Great Britain closes today, with players from around the world in the same hall where our own performers take to the stage each May. Vendors, workshops, mass jams and a great deal of joyful noise. If you are in town, go and have a look.

We have a soft spot for anything that gets people playing rather than just listening. That is what a hundred years of the Cheltenham Festival of Performing Arts has been about. Different instrument, same idea.

Our 2027 festival runs 6 to 15 May at Cheltenham Town Hall. Ukuleles welcome.

📍

13/08/2026

Behind every performer on our stage is someone who got them there. A dance teacher who drilled the counts. A singing tutor who found the right key. A drama coach who talked a nervous child down before they went on.

The festival is where that work becomes visible. Months of lessons, distilled into three minutes under the lights, watched by an adjudicator who knows exactly how hard it is. When a pupil does well here, their teacher did well too. We've never lost sight of that.

To every dance, music and drama teacher who brought pupils to us this year, thank you. And to any teacher weighing it up for next time, your pupils would be in good hands. A hundred years of practice tends to show.

10/08/2026

People hear "performing arts festival" and picture one thing. Ours is nearer three hundred.
A four-year-old's first solo dance. A choir of twenty. A teenager alone with a monologue. Pianists, string players, folk singers, mime, verse speaking, public speaking, tap, ballet, musical theatre. Speech and drama classes for children who've barely started school, and open classes for adults who never stopped. Dance, music and drama, and inside each of those, more variety than most people would guess.
Whatever a young person is drawn to, there's very likely a class for it. That's been true for a hundred years, and it's the quiet reason the festival still matters.

Address

88 Cambrian Road
Tewkesbury
GL207RP

Telephone

+447812201818

Website

https://cfpa.org.uk/

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