Beccy Smith, Darren East and baby J head to Lancashire for a weekend of top-notch puppetry Creating visual theatre events within their local community was where Horse and Bamboo, based in the rural East Lancs valley of Rossendale since 1978, began. Large scale processional work, fire displays, music and masks worked to bring communities out […]

Every year Horse + Bamboo organise a puppet festival at their base in Waterfoot, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it town on the road to Bacup which is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it town on the road to Todmorden. Put simply, the festival is a little gem and features indoor ticketed shows and free outdoor work. So the audience gets to see […]

In 1971 photographer David Hamilton caused a stir by releasing a book, Dreams of a Young Girl, filled with nude, or almost nude, soft-focused and dreamy images of teenage girls on the brink of adulthood. Looking at them now, they still provoke an uneasy tension – the likes of Nabokov’s Lolita, and the films Leon […]

Building blocks and planks, towers of people and pianos, guardian angels, and a street show featuring a bag lady – Rebecca Nice enjoys a weekend of sunshine and showers at the Greenwich and Docklands International Festival 2016 marks the 21st birthday of Greenwich+Docklands International Festival, which kicks off on Friday 24 June with The House, […]

It’s a rainy evening, a funereal grey sky broodily tipping it down – as befits an outing to a cemetery. We could be extras in a film about the undead. As night falls, we are led off into the woods in a silent procession. As we go deeper, feet tramping through mud, twigs crackling beneath […]