LSE Cities Literary Festival – film screening and discussion

Date: Saturday 3 March 2012. 5-6.30pm
Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building

With Patrick Hazard, Michael Rosen, Emma-Louise Williams

Emma-Louise William’s film, Under the Cranes (2011), is based on the documentary play for voices, Hackney Streets, by poet and former Children’s Laureate, Michael Rosen. Blending rare archive footage and dreamlike sequences of present-day Hackney, Williams links the everyday with the social and literary history of this dynamic and culturally diverse East London borough.

Following the screening, Hazard, Williams and Rosen will discuss the hybridity of literature and film, as well as Hackney and the increasing attention it has received in light of the 2012 Olympics and controversial redevelopment projects.

Patrick Hazard is the Director of the London Independent Documentary Film Festival.

Michael Rosen was born in 1946 in north London. He has been writing, performing, broadcasting and lecturing since the early 70s. He co-devised and co-teaches a Masters course at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Emma-Louise Williams is a radio producer and first-time film-maker. She is currently making a radio documentary for BBC Radio 4 about unaccompanied, asylum-seeking children and young people in East London. Her work seeks to counter the prevailing perception of the inner city as a site of failure, ugliness and misdeed through a ‘socio-poetics’ of everyday life.

This is part of the LSE Space for Thought Literary Festival. More at http://www2.lse.ac.uk/publicEvents/spaceForThought/Home.aspx

First London Cabaret Awards – Winners Announced

The first-ever London Cabaret Awards took place at the Battersea Barge on the night of Thursday 16 February 2012.  They were organised by Paul L Martin, and the event was compered by Jamie Anderson.

The winners were:

Best Burlesque Performer: Kiki Kaboom

Best Speciality Act: Mat Ricardo

Best Music-based Act: Bourgeois & Maurice

Best Drag Act: Jonny Woo

Best Alternative Performer: Dickie Beau

Best Venue: Royal Vauxhall Tavern

Best One-Off Show: La Soirée

Best Ongoing Show: The Double R

Club Best Host: Dusty Limits

Outstanding Achievement Award: Duckie

Unsung Hero Award: Zoe Charles

Time Out Audience Award: Alp Haydar

The City Will Crumble, at the Courtyard Theatre, London N1

Features Fringe Report Award Winner, Elina Akmetova

6th March 2012 to 11th March 2012 – 8pm

Nyctolopic presents a new physical theatre piece with original music, inspired by Film Noir, and among the performers is Elina Akmetova, winner of a Fringe Report Award in 2011, as Best performer – choreography and dance.

This is what Nyctolopic say about the production: “Millions of people walk the streets of the dark city. Sometimes they notice one another; most of the time they pass each other by, driven on by the unrelenting rhythm of the city itself. How can one woman believe that her individual story matters, when the city makes everyone interchangeable, substitutable, and disposable?”

“Ana Marambio’s choreography and David Holyoake’s music revive the dark megacity for London in 2012. The slipping, vanishing, and corruption of the individual against the forces of the impersonal city were a central theme of Film Noir. We live in times with strong parallels to that era and the anxieties brought on by the shocks of social, economic and technological upheavals. This new piece expresses them in original movement bristling with energy and a haunting new musical score.”

Preview trailer: http://www.nyctolopic.org/thecitywillcrumble