festivals
caspar.gomez
It’s a Tweet-age Glastonbury aftermath. It’s monsooning grey outside. The real world’s back, consensus reality fast encroaching. Everything’s moved on, spun to the next thing as we A.D.D. onto Wimbledon, Hard Brexit or whatever. Even my 14-year-old daughter knows the “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn” chant (to the riff from White Stripes “Seven Nation Army”) that rolled across this year’s Glastonbury crowds like a steady rumble of perturbed destiny. “Jeremy Corbyn isn’t just Jeremy Corbyn, he’s a thing now,” she explained. And I sort of know what she means.I woke up today with Rag’n’Bone Man’s chorus Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Brighton Festival, which takes place every May, is renowned for its plethora of free events. The 2017 Festival is curated by Guest Director Kate Tempest, the poet, writer and performer, alongside Festival CEO Andrew Comben who’s been the event's overall manager since 2008 (also overseeing the Brighton Dome venues all year round). This year the Festival’s theme is “Everyday Epic”.“Kate has this sense of the arts being important through the everyday of our lives,” Comben explains, “at the same time as acknowledging that, for everyone, things can take on epic proportions, whether that’s Read more ...
Alison Cole
I have heard countless speeches advocating the importance of arts education, and making bold cross-curricular claims – from England’s cultural ministers and arts leaders, to the Arts Council and the Creative Industries Federation – but I have never heard the case put more persuasively and simply than by Ronnie Cheng, the softly-spoken headmaster of the Diocesan Boys School in Kowloon, Hong Kong.Cheng, a Top 50 finalist in the Varkey Foundation’s phenomenal Global Teacher Prize competition (now in its fifth year), has literally devoted his life to the school: he studied there, became music Read more ...
joe.muggs
There comes a point in any experimental music festival when you have to accept the silliness and go with it. And at Borealis, that point comes very early. Only a couple of hours off the plane in Bergen and we're in a pedestrian tunnel under the bus station, where a crowd surrounds Slovakian musician Jonáš Gruska who is sitting cross-legged on the floor with a laptop, directing the whirs, rumbles and cascades of bleeps that are emanating from different sections of the tunnel wall and ceiling. Through all of this, Bergen's Friday evening commuters bustle, variously perplexed and amused, many of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
This morning the Brighton Festival 2017 announced its much-anticipated programme, with guest director Kate Tempest enthusiastically leading from the front. The poet-playwright-novelist has put together a programme that responds to the strange, dangerous times we live in, but which also offers up a plethora of lively entertainment.The theme she’s given the Festival is “Everyday Epic”, adding that, “Singing, playing, dancing, moving, painting life and communicating about that in public spaces requires no qualifications, no training to enjoy. It’s truthful communication between humans about Read more ...
theartsdesk
Prepare to disagree. 2016 has been getting bad reviews all year long, but for film it was actually pretty strong. So strong, in fact, that there are big omissions from this list of our best films from the past 12 months. Our method of selection was arbitrary: each of the theartsdesk’s film reviewers was invited to volunteer one film each as their favourite of the year. No one was allowed to choose two.So there is no place in our top seven for the film which was this year’s winner of the Oscar for best film (Spotlight), nor best adapted screenplay (The Big Short), nor the film with the best Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
On the final night of Iceland Airwaves 2016, Polly Jean Harvey and her band are ranged in a line just inside the edge of the stage constructed inside Valshöllin, a sports hall south of Reykjavík’s city centre. The festival’s five days have climaxed with a diamond-hard performance drawing heavily on this year’s Hope Six Demolition Project album. The venerable “50ft Queenie”, “Down by the Water” and “To Bring You my Love” are played, but this is about the PJ Harvey of now and 2011’s Let England Shake: the PJ Harvey engaged with and aghast at a world which appears to be wrecking the lives of its Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Bridget Christie, The Stand ★★★★★When Bridget Christie planned this show, it was to be a work in progress about mortality for a tour starting later this year. But then the EU referendum happened, and everything changed. Within the space of a few weeks, she had written this heartfelt polemic about Brexit, and it's an astonishingly accomplished and moving work.She tells us that, with so many bad things happening in the world at the moment, she's going to do a nice, upbeat show about gardening, her new passion in life now that she is allowed to like the pursuit because she is past 40. She is Read more ...
David Kettle
Alix in Wundergarten ★★★★Think Alan Ayckbourn on acid: a commonplace (well, almost) set-up, exaggerated further and further beyond what we’d ever anticipate. In François Pandolfo’s wild, freewheeling and hugely entertaining satire on the acting world, delivered by Cardiff-based difficult|stage theatre company, it’s a gaggle of hammy actors who occupy a studio to make an audio recording of Alice in Wonderland – before the whole thing degenerates into chaos and spins off in entirely unexpected directions. Pandolfo himself is wonderfully nervy and needy as the assistant director, attempting to Read more ...
David Kettle
The big yellow banners proclaiming "Welcome, world" are out. And judging by the seething, heaving crowds, a fair portion of the world has indeed descended on Edinburgh, where the annual August festivals season has now been up and running for just shy of a week.For the Edinburgh International Festival, the city’s big brother event – as opposed to its unruly and far fatter sibling the Fringe – it’s been a very strong start, with a universally adored Bellini Norma starring Cecilia Bartoli (pictured below) kicking things off, and audio-visual son et lumière extravaganza Deep Time illuminating Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Idyllic setting, star-rated musicians, the sense of an occasion. Verbier so wholly fulfils the clichés of an international music festival that to the cynical it can seem complacent or arrogant in doing so. To the uninitiated – and this was my first visit to the Monaco of the Mountains – there is more than a sprinkling of magic about the sheer implausibility of the place. Perched 1500m up, yet nestling within a circle of Alpine peaks topped by Mont Fort, a town of hardly more than four main streets draws many of the world’s finest performers for three weeks of almost non-stop music-making.The Read more ...
Barney Harsent
“Ooooh, it’s gorgeous!” exclaimed my wife-to-be as we arrived at what had been described as “an oasis in Hertfordshire.” They weren’t kidding, either. The site for the inaugural festival organised by Notting Hill Carnival stalwarts Sancho Panza couldn’t have been more different from West London if it tried. In place of terraced houses there were wall-to-wall trees, the only flyover was the sound of planes headed for Luton across an open sky.Now, full disclosure here, I’ve never been the biggest fan of Carnival. I’ve been unlucky I suspect, but if I want to re-create the magic of Bank Holiday Read more ...