Hidden Door Postpones

Apr 23 2020 | By Thom Dibdin More

Festival will pop-up in Spring 2021

Edinburgh’s innovative Hidden Door Festival has postponed the majority of this year’s event because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The full ten-day multi-arts festival – in a location which will still remain a secret for the moment – will now be held “some time around May” 2021. Tickets already purchased will be valid for the re-arranged festival.

However the organisers promise that they will still deliver a “smaller, one-off event” some time in October this year. The 2020 festival was originally planned to run in an undisclosed derelict site in Edinburgh from Friday 9 to Sunday 18 October.

Hidden Door’s organisers made the announcement of the decision in a statement published on its website.

They explain that the current situation means that they are not able to move forward with much of the work needed to deliver a ten-day multi-arts festival in a secret new venue.

inspiring content

“It takes many months to pull together our packed programme of inspiring content,” they say, “and with so much on pause right now we need to ensure it is the best possible event for our artists, our audience and the city.”

More details of the October one-off event will be announced as soon as possible. It will not be held in the new venue, which is being kept as a surprise for the full rescheduled event.

Hannah Jarrett-Scott and Claire Willoughby in Plutus or The Comedy of Wealth after Aristophanes at Hidden Door 2018 State Cinema, Leith. Pic Jamie Wardrop

The organisers add: “We are also looking at ways in which we can provide something positive in the coming weeks and months, creating new online content to bring artists, performers and audience together, and developing projects to support the creatives who have taken such a massive blow through all this.”

Planning for this October’s event had already included call-outs for visual art, theatre, spoken word, music and film contributions. All of which have now passed their deadlines.

The statement concludes: “We want to take this opportunity to thank you for your ongoing support, for us, for the artists, for this amazing city.

“Stay safe, and we will see this place vibrant again…”