If you spent last Sunday anywhere near the city centre, you might have noticed something a bit unusual going on. West Orchards Shopping Centre handed over its floors to Cher The News, a free three-hour event that turned the place into 'Cher-ventry', the self-declared (un)official European home of Cher. It was the centrepiece of the second Autumn Is Queer festival, which has been running since 22 September and keeps going until 30 November, and it leaned hard into the date it landed on: 25 October, the day the clocks go back an hour.
Every week we pick 🏆 the 5 best 🏆 things to do in Coventry and send them to your inbox. Just one weekly email, no spam.
By submitting your email, you accept our Privacy Policy
The whole thing ran from 1pm to 4pm, and the first thing to hit the speakers was a brass-infused set of Cher songs, with Mark Steele on tuba, Craig Holmes on tenor sax and Hannah Ockford on trumpet. After that came 'The Big Cherformance', a theatrical piece with a community cast, bands and performers, which was staged at 1:30pm and then repeated as a grand finale encore at 3:30pm. In between, there was a 'Zumba With Cher' session led by Matt from Fitness With Matt, and throughout the afternoon, adults and younger Chers alike could make their own feathered headdress to wear while shopping, eating or grabbing a coffee. Local drag performer Ibi-Profane, who goes by Cher as well, hosted the programme.
What made the numbers work was the sheer amount of Cher on display. More than 30 Chers took part, including community participant Andrea Mbarushimana, so the room was full of wigs and sequins rather than the usual shopping-centre crowd. The creative partners behind it were Highly Sprung Performance, Fitness With Matt and The Tin Music & Arts, and the whole thing was produced by Extraordinary Us CIC with support from Coventry City Council and Arts Council England.
There was a bit more to it than just the Cher theme, too. The festival's theme this year is 'Coventry: Feeling Proud', and the organisers framed the event around the city's civic pride and an LGBTQ+ ethos of radical inclusion, with the message 'Coventry loves you as you are' running through it. It was a nice way to tie a pop-culture celebration to something a bit more grounded in the city itself.
If you missed it, the festival is still going for another month, so there's plenty more to catch before it wraps up at the end of November. For anyone who wants to see what else is on or keep an eye out for what comes next, autumnisqueer.co.uk is the place to look, and hello@extraordinaryus.co.uk is the email to drop a message to. It was a busy afternoon for a shopping centre, and a good example of how a bit of community effort can turn a normal Sunday into something people actually talk about on Monday morning.
Published Date
29 October 2026
