A name in lights, a vintage caravan, a chorus warming up, stagehands sweeping, a band running through a soundcheck. The houselights dim. The caravan spins to reveal an open-fronted side, showing a comfy pink-cushioned den. Two ‘ladies’ in identical embroidered satin kimonos look out. Our narrator, Dora Chance, tells us that she was born on […]

I expect the empathetic burden to be entirely my own when I visit the Empathy Museum: A Mile in My Shoes. I expect the museum to put my empathy through its paces. What I experience is something more balanced. The speakers whose shoes I wear speak to me – via a recording on an iPod […]

I was shocked recently to learn that dock leaves offer no scientifically proven relief to nettle stings. What I had taken as a given all my life was not ancient folkloric wisdom but yet another tale told by those mischievous ‘old wives.’ What we choose to believe depends on how it is sold to us. […]

Rose Bruford is blooming! Ciaran Hammond reflects on the College’s growing presence at Summerhall in Edinburgh – at the Fringe and beyond It’s August, it’s the Edinburgh Fringe, and I’m running to Summerhall in the rain – forgetting that Edinburgh summers are a bit more overcast than London summers – with a vegetable pasty in […]

Dorothy Max Prior goes to Inside Out Dorset, a biennial outdoor arts festival with an emphasis on work that both honours and engages with the landscape in which it is sited, urban or rural A Friday evening in September on the waterfront at Poole Quay. A bright night, with a tiny sliver of new moon […]