Boomtown Fair is more than a music festival with a bit of performance tacked on – it’s a full-on five-day immersive theatre event which invites you in to a living, breathing, fictitious city. Dorothy Max Prior talks to the festival’s narrative director Doug Francisco, to performer Ciaran Hammond, and to ‘citizen’ Frank Foster-Prior to hear […]

We enter the auditorium of the Attenborough Centre, but are led onstage. There’s a double circle of chairs, and bright white light. ‘Don’t sit in the front row!’ someone behind me hisses. ‘They’ll make you join in.’ On each seat is a book.: hardback, plain institutional green, embossed with gold writing that reads: ‘Total Immediate […]

As more and more artists turn to virtual reality as a medium, Dorothy Max Prior reflects on what works well and why VR – Virtual Reality – has been with us for quite a while. Some would argue that to trace its origins we need to go right back through the annals of time to […]

The Adventures of Curious Ganz is a puppet performance ‘based on the impossibly fascinating life of a fictitious scientist of the first Elizabethan era, Joachim Ganz, and featuring the enquiring mind of the monarch herself!’ We enter the theatre to take our seats. The stage is strewn with small tables, circular frames of various sizes, […]

So tell me what you want, what you really, really want… Ah, here they are, dancing into the space, five feisty gals, each with a story to tell. No, not the Spice Girls – but an equally refreshing burst of energy, redefining girl power for the 21st century. In this case, the girls (Emma Frankland […]