Hello everyone.

My name is James and I have been hired by the Zinneke ASBL to follow the BelBoBru project for a year and report on its journey from conception to realisation, and culminating in the final public event due to take place in October 2009.

To remind you, the BelBoBru project is an urban parade laboratory with an international dimension as it brings together three partners from three cities in three European countries. These are the Beat Initiative (Belfast, Northern Ireland), Associazione Culturale Oltre (Bologna, Italy) and Zinneke ASBL (Brussels, Belgium).

The main idea behind the exchange project is very simple. Each one of the three cities chooses one artistic discipline and one local artist to represent it in one of three teams. So, Belfast has chosen drums, Bologna mime and Brussels has opted for giant puppets. Then, these three teams of artists will organise workshops in their respective discipline and city at the time of each parade. Namely, the Zinneke Parade in Brussels in May 2008, the Lantern Parade in December 2008 in Belfast and the Par Tot Parata in Bologna in June 2009. In between these events, the goal is for artists to work together to share knowledge, exchange competences, make new artistic creations and build a multidisciplinary performance for the final event.

According to Zinneke, "the three teams will then hit the streets together and analyse the interaction between artistic expression and social reality, between art and city. Every person’s skill (creatively as well as technically or intellectually) will be stimulated according to the sheer fun of creating. All these artists from Bologna, Brussels and Belfast will give shape to the vitality of the European identity and of a new common imaginative force."

My first assignment is to report on the many workshops taking place in the run up to the nocturnal 2008 Lantern Parade, which will 'dander' through the streets of Belfast on Saturday 6 December. It is my first time in Northern Ireland and my first time working on such a project for Zinneke, so I am naturally very curious and excited about meeting the artists and participants and bringing you, the readers, news of this social, cultural and artistic adventure.

So stay tuned for more as over the next two weeks I will be bringing you the ‘sights, sounds and smells’ of the workshops taking place here in Belfast and the Lantern Parade itself...