Transmission Festival
A celebration of Tameside’s dance heritage, Brought to life through community engagement, live performances & participatory moments.
A Weekend of Dance
A vibrant celebration of Tameside’s dance heritage, produced by artist and cultural producer Sarah Hardacre, in partnership with Tameside Borough Council and GMArts. Honouring the past while inviting communities to help shape what dance means to Tameside today.
From Morris traditions to ballroom elegance, Rock and Roll energy, Northern Soul passion and rave culture, the festival brings these stories to life through community engagement, live performances, participatory moments and panel discussions.
The challenge
Transmission needed a visual identity that could hold a genuinely complex idea: that Morris, clogging, breakdancing and Northern Soul all share the same working-class, egalitarian spirit and that culture stays alive by being passed on, remixed and reimagined.
The challenge was to do all of that whilst speaking to the full breadth of Tameside’s diverse communities, across every age and background.
The solution
The festival identity was built around a bold collage aesthetic, colliding Tameside archival imagery with vibrant contemporary colour and dynamic graphic elements with a dance notation running through as a graphic thread.
The result is a system bold enough to stop people in Hyde town centre, inclusive enough to feel genuinely community-owned and flexible enough to carry an entire weekend programme across posters, social media and environmental applications.
