How Osamagbe Izevbigie turned St David’s Day into a meeting place for music, memory and contemporary Welsh identity

By Chinyere Chukwudi-Okeh  |  Writer, critic and Founding Director of C3 Centre for Creativity and Culture CIC

In CydSeinio Cymru 2026, the Cardiff-based curator and cultural producer treated national celebration as an artistic medium, bringing Welsh heritage into conversation with Black and multicultural Welsh music, storytelling, movement, visual art and bilingual participation across five communities.

National celebrations can become visually familiar before they remain culturally alive. The daffodil, the flag, the song and the ceremonial speech may all be present, yet the deeper question is whether people living in Wales can recognise themselves inside the occasion. CydSeinio Cymru 2026 answered that question by treating St David’s Day not as a fixed inheritance to be displayed, but as a living culture to be interpreted, shared and remade.

Led by Osamagbe Izevbigie through OTID Entertainment and Afrowales, the Welsh Government-funded programme placed five free community events across Cardiff, Swansea, Wrexham, Treforest and Carmarthenshire within one artistic frame. Music, poetry, oral storytelling, dance, visual art, participatory workshops and bilingual digital storytelling were not assembled as separate attractions. They were programmed as different languages through which contemporary Wales could speak.

Curating relationships, not filling a timetable

Izevbigie’s achievement is best understood as curatorial rather than merely organisational. The practical work was substantial: appointing regional partners, developing briefs, coordinating artists, shaping schedules and building the conditions for public delivery. But administration alone does not explain the programme’s meaning. The artistic decision was to make relationship itself the organising principle: between Welsh and English, tradition and contemporary expression, local authorship and national identity, professional artists and first-time participants.

That distinction matters. A less assured programme might have used diversity as decoration, placing unrelated performances beside familiar Welsh symbols and calling the result inclusive. Izevbigie instead created a shared proposition. Each location was asked to explore Welshness through participation, bilingual presence and locally relevant forms. The programme could therefore change its accent from place to place without losing its identity.

Izevbigie’s strongest curatorial instinct is his ability to hear connections before they become obvious to everybody else.

The title CydSeinio carries the idea of sounding together. That idea became the programme’s method. The locations were not reduced to replicas of one central event, and the participating cultures were not flattened into a single style. Izevbigie established a recognisable framework, then allowed artists and community partners to answer it from within their own practices. The result was coherence without uniformity.

A national programme with local authorship
The wider programme demonstrated the same architecture through different material. In Cardiff, the flagship celebration at Grange Pavilion on 28 February combined a parade, live performance, spoken expression, workshops and bilingual activity. Material from the programme was subsequently shared through Welsh Government digital channels, including Instagram. That visibility did not create the artistic value of the work, but it showed that a community-rooted programme could communicate credibly within Wales’s national civic conversation. A related CydSeinio contribution to Tafwyl’s city celebration on 1 March placed Ify Iwobi, Seraphyre and CKA within a concise public programme, bringing Black Welsh voices into a major Welsh-language cultural setting.
In Wrexham, DJ and rap-writing workshops used contemporary music practice as an entry point into Welsh language and identity. In Carmarthenshire, children encountered the music of Aleighcia Scott, compared bara brith with Jamaican bun, explored regional relationships between lobscows and cawl, and considered the confidence and representation embodied by Black Welsh speaker Molara Awen. These choices were specific, playful and intellectually serious. They allowed cultural comparison to deepen Welsh knowledge rather than dilute it.
This distributed structure carried an obvious artistic risk: five locations, several delivery organisations and many disciplines could easily have produced a collection of disconnected community events. Izevbigie’s curatorial framework prevented that fragmentation. Bilingual practice, participation, Welsh cultural reference, local creative authority and the meeting of tradition with present-day identity operated as recurring motifs. Like variations in a musical work, the regional programmes remained distinct while returning to the same central theme.

Bilingualism as artistic form
One of the programme’s most significant choices was to treat the Welsh language as part of the artwork rather than a compliance exercise. Welsh appeared in promotion, stage language, workshops, music and digital content. It was placed beside the languages, rhythms and memories carried by Wales’s multicultural communities, not in competition with them.
This is a subtle but important curatorial position. The programme did not ask Black and migrant communities to stand outside Welsh culture and perform their difference. It invited them to participate in the continuing production of Welsh culture. Nor did it present Welshness as infinitely flexible and therefore empty. The recurring presence of language, history, food, music, national symbols and St David’s message of community gave the work a clear cultural centre.
The six bilingual short films and wider digital campaign extended this proposition beyond the event rooms. Here again, the value was not simply promotional reach. Digital storytelling allowed artists and partners to articulate the programme’s themes in their own voices, creating an archive of how Welshness was being understood across different places and generations in 2026.

The curator as a composer of conditions
Curatorial leadership is sometimes misunderstood as ownership of every visible component. That would be the wrong reading of CydSeinio Cymru. Izevbigie did not paint every image, perform every song, facilitate every workshop or write every local programme. His authorship lay in composing the conditions within which those contributions could become part of a larger cultural experience.
He selected the central question, identified the artistic and community relationships needed to answer it, commissioned and briefed partners, balanced disciplines and audiences, and maintained a common purpose across the programme. This is a demanding form of artistic labour because its success is measured partly through the strength of other people’s contributions. Good cultural production makes collaboration visible without allowing the overall work to lose shape.
Izevbigie’s technical background in live sound and event production is perceptible in this approach. He thinks in terms of sequence, transition, energy, audience position and the practical conditions that allow performance to communicate. Yet CydSeinio Cymru also shows how far his practice has moved beyond technical delivery. His programming now operates at the level of cultural narrative: deciding which voices should meet, what their meeting might reveal and how audiences can enter the conversation.

The quality of CydSeinio Cymru lies in its compositional intelligence: many voices retain their distinction, yet together they form a persuasive account of contemporary Wales.

An artistically significant account of contemporary Wales
The most convincing aspect of CydSeinio Cymru was its refusal to choose between heritage and change. The programme respected St David’s Day as a national tradition while recognising that tradition survives through interpretation. Its Black Welsh, African, Arab, migrant, Welsh-speaking and intergenerational voices did not sit around the edges of the celebration. They became part of the means by which the celebration understood itself.
This is why I regard Osamagbe Izevbigie’s contribution as artistically significant. He demonstrated the judgment to connect disciplines without making them interchangeable, the sensitivity to centre Welsh language without narrowing Welsh identity, and the leadership to turn multiple local partnerships into one legible cultural work. He programmed not only performers and activities, but encounters: between children and symbols, audiences and artists, languages and memories, civic ritual and lived experience.
CydSeinio Cymru 2026 presents a model of national celebration that is confident enough to be plural. Its central proposition is that belonging is not achieved by asking everyone to sound the same. It is created by establishing the conditions in which different voices can sound together and still be heard. Izevbigie understood that proposition artistically, and built a programme capable of making it public.
 
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chinyere Chukwudi-Okeh is a writer, arts and culture critic, poet-performer and Founding Director of C3 Centre for Creativity and Culture CIC and Nganga Performing Arts and Mobile Theatre. She holds an MA in Creative Writing with distinction from Swansea University. Her signed criticism and cultural writing have appeared in Nation.Cymru and other publications, including reviews of literature and visual art. C3 Centre profile  |  Selected published review