Community Games provide a great opportunity to really explore the cultural heritage, diversity and strengths of your community, and you can encourage members of your community to share their skills and experience.

What?

Dance is probably one of the most obvious cultural activities to include in your Community Games because it crosses over so well from ‘art’ to physical activity. Dance can be very spectacular to watch, but it’s also fun to take part in!  The Friar Park Games included belly dancing, ballroom dancing, street dancing and Argentine tango dancing.  Dance is both fun to watch and to participate in and recently in the West Midlands the Dancing for the Games programme has successfully encouraged people to dance more.

At the Wenlock Olympian Games the sports events were accompanied by cultural competitions that included poetry, prose and art for the adults with spelling, arithmetic and handicrafts for children.

You could ask yourself whether there are any traditional activities in your local area that you could focus on, whether your area is famous for any key industries (textiles, engineering, cars, etc.), maybe there has been a historical event in your area or something else your community is famous for (e.g. food/drink?), and, ultimately, who forms your community or group?

The possibilities are limitless; you could:

• Look at your community’s architecture or heritage
• Involve craft making groups, or encourage a local art, photography or journalism competition
• Find local music groups, who could even help out with your opening/closing ceremonies 
• See whether a local school wants to organise an exhibition
• See if any local theatre or art groups or businesses may have something special they could bring to your event

How?

As with sport there are many ways to include these activities, whether it’s a dance or skills performance that occurs during the event or within your ceremony, or a taster session allowing people to get involved.  You could even set up a mini-exhibition and perhaps have professional or amateur artists show their work.

Competitions!

You could set your community a creative challenge at your Community Games.  Photography competitions are one popular example, where participants would be told a theme at the beginning of the day and the best submission in that theme by the end of the day would win a prize. Such a competition may be a good way of involving a local radio station or newspaper in your Community Games.