The sun is bright above us as I sit on the grass in Stanmer Park waiting for Walking Stories to begin. We are handed headphones and gathered together as group. There is advice about trusting your instincts, and reassurances that, as you strike out into the open spaces, you will be looked after and you […]

Bits of the brain go dark. The memories they contain disappear. Speech, thought, up and down: all scratch and twist and fail. What do you do? In this case the artist continues to do what they almost cannot do, nothing else is possible. In January 2011 Peggy Shaw suffered two strokes, and as one half […]

At one stage in Love Sick I was doubled up with hysterical laughter in the front row, lost for breath.  It is always a transformative thing to laugh that much, and the memory exists as a warm glow – but somehow all this good feeling has to be communicated in a review that gets across […]

In the ancient Japanese picture-based story telling tradition, Kamishibai, the travelling tellers sold sweets to gather in an audience. For this Brighton Festival show, anyone who sat in the front row was given a lolly, one provocatively pre-sucked by the cheeky Chalk Boy (Glen Biderman-Pam). Chalk Boy acted as scene changer and entertainer, silent throughout, […]

The Girl and The Goat is the first production by new devised physical theatre company SynaesTheatre. They tackle an ambitiously earthy tale – a young woman’s conflict between her passionate affair with the god Pan (the eponymous goat) and the more conventional expectations of her family. It’s set in a loosely medieval frame and the […]