MORE THAN 1,400 artists from Keighley and Bradford will showcase their talents alongside national and international acts at Bradford Festival.

The Bradford Council-organised festival opens on July 8 with more than 1,000 performers from the district’s schools staging an eight-hour programme of music and dance.

Highlights will include the district's top youth ensemble, the Bradford Youth Orchestra who will perform a Bollywood dance version of Bizet's opera Carmen, Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld, Elgar's Chanson de Matin, a James Bond medley, and themes from Pirates of the Caribbean.

There will also be woodwind and junior orchestras, rock and samba bands, dance troupes and percussion groups.

More than 900 school children from 14 schools will combine to perform a Big Sing, a mass choir performance of I'm A Believer by The Monkees, I Gotta Feeling by The Black Eyed Peas, Rockstar by Vaccarino/Axel and Sing by Gary Barlow.

Later that evening, Bradford band Nervous 'Orse, who have played Keighley, will perform a wide range of songs with powerful four-part harmonies.

Local favourites Gerry Cooper and Phil Snell, who have performed several times in Haworth, bring their repertoire of blues, rags and hokum songs from the 1920s and 1930s.

Festival goers will be able to see beautiful charcoal drawings created right before their eyes in Lou Sumray's Promenading Artist.

Shipley arts company, Q20 Theatre, will delight audiences with a mad-cap interactive street theatre piece, The MirrorMen, where the characters reflect each other and everything around them, including their audience.

Folk music fans will enjoy the York-based Irish folk musician Paula Ryan and celebrated Leeds acoustic band Phil Cockerham Trio.

Puppet and lantern makers, Cecil Green Arts, return to the festival with a new colourful giant puppet performance, Out Of The Ashes, which is inspired by the Drummond Mill fire in which they lost all their artworks.

Bradford Playhouse will debut an original interactive piece of theatre, Escape From The Invisible Zoo, which will allow children to use use their collective imagination and knowledge to the get the ‘escaped animals' back into their cages.

Bradford-based visual artist, Zareena Bano Saeed, brings a spiritual Eastern flavour to the festival with Sufi Soul workshops where painting and music will be combined to evoke lands of the East, Persia and Andalusia.

Visit bradfordfestival.org.uk for further information about all events.