Stretching its activities over the clustered Medway towns (the historic towns) of Rochester, Gillingham and Chatham, Fuse Medway is a compact, weekend street arts festival that programmes a lot of small-scale outdoor circus work, and the odd long piece in the evening. Programming tastes run to the sweet, the silly and the spectacular, and Fuse often ends a weekend by drawing audiences down to the river for a final flourish (one year, impressively, a pyrotechnics and aerial show on a 40-metre steel-hulled lightship).
An exciting prospect for the festival's future is the ongoing development of Slip 6, a creation centre based at Chatham's Historic Dockyard that will potentially be able to commission or support work that appears at Fuse.
« Part of the relationship between Fuse and Slip 6 will be Fuse providing a presentation platform for work that's created. Now that's not to say that everything that's created in the space is going to appear at Fuse – that's not practical. But certainly we want to be able to use it as a platform and make sure strategically certain projects are geared up towards Fuse – so the one and the other kind of feed in and out of each other and influence each other and it all becomes part of one lovely cycle. »
Kate Hazel, Fuse Medway Festival Artistic Director (October 2010)