Beccy Smith reflects on Stoke’s Appetite programme and the challenge of valuing the arts July 2014 has been a month about money. The first day of the month saw the announcement by Arts Council England of their national portfolio organisations for 2015 – 2018, unleashing a flurry of discussion on social media and national newspaper […]

The success of Hands Down lies in its simplicity. The title, to be easily the best with not too much effort, effectively describes the visage of this duet, performed by Company Chameleon’s Artistic Director Anthony Missen with Riccardo Meneghini. Creating an effortless style using contemporary dance, Company Chameleon’s complexities lie in the subtlety of their […]

  Greenwich+Docklands International Festival (GDIF), founded in 1996, is now a well-established date on the UK outdoor arts calendar – the former Greenwich Festival developed, over the past eighteen years, into the cross-river cross-artform GDIF by artistic director Bradley Hemmings. The festival comprises numerous elements: the main programme presentation of large-scale national and international outdoor […]

Cinematography is a precise and demanding business. Juggling angling, light and shadow, the right lens, the challenge of a smooth pan or unforgiving close up. As a theatre maker, such preoccupations feel fussy: I’m interested in the freedom of the live moment, immediacy and mess! So it has been provocative and mind-expanding as both artist […]

Awe and wonder: Forced Entertainment, masters of the fragmented narrative, shock us with a linear narrative based on a novel – The Notebook, by award-winning Hungarian-Swiss author Agota Kristof, first published in Paris as Le Grand Cahier. And what a corker of a story: a reflection on the terrors of war,  on the effect of […]