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

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

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

St Pancras International Station has teamed up with ScenePool, Camden Theatres and Quirkas to offer a regular platform for Creative Producers to pitch and present their work tothe thousands that pass through the station daily.

Launching on Sunday 26th February 2012, St Pancras International will be hosting a regular slot, on the last Sunday of every month from 3pm-4pm, for performers to preview a range of new productions before they move to mainstream London theatres.

This innovative programme will allow new and established producers to present an extract from their company’s show, as well as giving them a chance to take questions from an engaging station audience, and network with other theatre producers, artists and industry peers.

The showcase will feature a range of quality companies from the innovative Political Arts Company, to the exciting performance trio Mitsotu, as well as regular work from the
ScenePool Creative Producers and Quirkas Productions.

The scheme, which will give theatre producers a much welcomed showcase, has been endorsed by the 14 Camden Theatres venue managers who praised the station for“supporting small scale theatre in a time of recession by giving a boost to new vibrant creative work.

Wendy Spinks, of High Speed 1 (Owners of St Pancras International), said: “St Pancras International has a strong history of being a hub for culture, supporting the best of local talent across music, dance and now theatre.

Producers Platform is a brilliant opportunity for those passing by to get a real taste for fringe talent in Camden and in turn it provides a much needed space for emerging producers to showcase their work to a large diverse audience.”

This is an enquiry into the minds of those at the end of their time on earth.

Four men on death row and a young journalist who isn’t exactly who she seems.

Five stories of remorse, contentment, anger and lust interwoven in this new play by Sarah Goddard.

More at www.thehenandchickenstheatrebar.co.uk

Thursday 22 March 2012, 7.30pm
Swedenborg Hall, Bloomsbury, London

Rupert Rhymes looks back over his career from box office to theatre administrator working for Sir Laurence Olivier and Lord Harewood, dealing with personalities and politics and surviving!

He has worked at the National Theatre at the Old Vic, and then Sadler’s Wells Theatre / English National Opera. Among many other posts. he has been Chief Executive of the Society of London Theatre, Chairman of the Theatres Trust, and Chairman of the Bristol Old Vic 0:47rust and the Oxford Stage Company, and on his retirement from theatre management he founded the Rupert Rhymes Bursaries for recipients to undertake projects in theatre production or management.

www.str.org.uk/events/lectures/index.html

Ed Atkins, Emma Hart, Naheed Raza and Corin Sworn were picked last summer, as the first recipients of The Jerwood/Film and Video Umbrella Awards.

These awards (consisting of a £4,000 bursary, including production support from Film and Video Umbrella) were given to each artist to develop proposals for a ‘project for the future’ – providing a platform to move their practice forward (and highlight where their thoughts are heading), while also reflecting on ideas and images of ‘the future’ and how they resonate in the present.

These pilot projects are about to be revealed in the exhibition Tomorrow Never Knows, curated by Film and Video Umbrella and Jerwood Visual Arts and taking place at Jerwood Space, London from 14 March to 22 April 2012.

During the exhibition run, two of the featured artists will each be awarded a £20,000 commission to continue and complete their projects. The finished works will then premiere at Jerwood Space in early 2013 before travelling to CCA (Centre for Contemporary Art) in Glasgow.

The exhibition theme reflects both on our appetite for making predictions, and on the uncertainties of ‘futurology’. As well as a showcase of artists for whom a bright future can confidently be anticipated, the exhibition considers the theme of ‘futures past’. Casting its mind back to moments in history when a particular style or aesthetic was deemed to be the wave of the future, it will remind us of tomorrows that never quite happened, whilst also revisiting and re-appraising some of that untapped potential.

The speculative, future-oriented nature of the initiative is further elaborated in two specially commissioned texts by writers Martin Herbert and Paul Morley, which feature in an accompanying publication. Alert to our increasingly complex, ambiguous feelings about what tomorrow might hold (its promise overshadowed by growing senses of stasis or uncertainty), they identify a culture-wide nostalgia for futures past, or futures lost, while invoking the challenges, and the pleasures, of continuing to look and think ahead.

Jerwood Visual Arts (JVA) is a contemporary gallery programme of awards, exhibitions and events at Jerwood Space, London, and on tour nationally. JVA supports and showcases the work of talented emerging artists, and aims to make connections and provoke conversations within and across visual arts disciplines. JVA is a major initiative of the Jerwood Charitable Foundation.  www.jerwoodvisualarts.

www.tomorrowneverknows.org.uk

The Gallery is part of a landmark £9million redevelopment of the Stade, a historic area in Hasting’s Old Town, home to Europe’s largest beach-launched fishing fleet. The £4million gallery, for which the capital and running costs will be entirely funded by the Jerwood Foundation, is seen as an important catalyst in the cultural and economic regeneration of the area.

The Jerwood Gallery is part of a masterplan for the landmark location of the Stade in Hastings.  The Gallery will provide the permanent home for the Jerwood Collection and a new regional venue for the Jerwood Visual Arts Programme, which comprises some of the most prominent visual arts awards in the UK.  It will establish Hastings in the ‘string of pearls’ of prestigious cultural attractions along the South Coast, which includes the Turner Contemporary at Margate, the Folkestone Triennial, the Towner in Eastbourne, De la Warr Pavilion at Bexhill and Pallant House at Chichester.

Starting with the 15th annual Sprint Festival of live art, Camden People’s Theatre (CPT) are launching their spring season of new and experimental theatre, music, poetry, interactive performances, media and puppetry.

Sprint Festival highlights include Your Last Breath by Curious Directive, A Score for Audience and Performer by Greg McLaren, and Avon Calling, a piece by The Other Way Works performed to groups of ten in audience members’ own houses.

After Sprint, Stillpoint Theatre will present Triptych: Three Attempts at Love, written and performed by award-winning performer Rachel Blackman, which includes her Edinburgh Fringe 2011 show Steal Compass, Drive North, Disappear.

Resuscitate Theatre, the company behind 2011’s A Clockwork Orange, present the Greek play The Bacchae; and Amy Lamé teams up with Time Out Performer of the Year 2010 Scottee to bring Unhappy Birthday. The season ends on a high with Fuel Theatre’s Knight Watch: South’Story.

SPRINT FESTIVAL 2012 – Highlights
9 to 31 March | 7.30pm & 9pm | £10 (£8 concs) unless otherwise stated

- Your Last Breath by Curious Directive

This Fringe First Winner 2011 brings a science-theatre piece unraveling the landscapes of the heart and our own personal geographies.

- Perle by Dancing Brick

Work-in-progress performances of a new show in which theatre maker Thomas Eccleshare and world-famous illustrator Serge Seidlitz create a live comic-strip based on one of the oldest poems in the English language, Pearl.

- A Score for Audience and Performer by Greg McLaren

A group of three, fifteen-minute performances / interactions passing oblique comment on the current social situation in England

28 Feb to 17 March 2012
The Fantasist by Theatre Temoin and Cie. Traversiere. A re-working of Barbe Bleue. Directed by Ailin Conant, designed by Moss and Giorgio Ritucci, costiumes by Kirsten Fletcher, lighting by Allan Ramsay. Puppet Director: Robin Guiver. A blend of physical theatre, puppetry and original music tells the story of a woman’s battle with the swirl of extreme moods. Struggling with the tricks her mind plays on her, Louise yearns for sleep. Instead, she must take a strange journey with a surprise visitor in this exploration of bipolar disorder.

20 March to 14 April 2012
Women of Troy by Lazarus Theatre Company, after Euripides. Directed and designed by Ricky Dukes, costumes by Emily Stuart. Amidst the slaughter and ruins of Troy, the women wait to be handed out to the victors. Hecuba, Queen of Troy, must confront both a bleak future and Helen, the woman who brought this humiliation to them all.

17 April to 5 May 2012
Sonata Movements, by ConcertTheatre. Directed by DaDiow Lin and Jude Christian, designed by Gary Thorne, costumes by Nadia Malik. Sonata Movements is a collective of short pieces, like the repertoire of a concert, exploring the potential form of ‘ConcertTheatre’. ‘ConcertTheatre’ combines classical music and theatre.

More  at www.blueelephanttheatre.co.uk