I've been doing a lot of thinking about crowd funding recently. This thinking is partly fuelled by the sheer volume of crowd funding notifications that appear across my networks in a given a month, but also because I have for the first time donated to a crowd funding campaign four crowd funding campaigns. I want to ask the following questions: 1. What is the real purpose of a crowd funding campaign? 2. Why did I, a ...
October 13, 2014
Dancing with Strangers: Fierce Festival’s Slow Dance
"Would you like to dance?", her voice calm and inviting. An extended hand towards me, I stumble nervously to put my bottle of beer to one side. Reaching the dance floor, the mirror ball spins fleeting lights across the walls and ceilings, the music soothes itself into a low rhythm and together we take position. She's leading, a gentle shifting of feet from side to side, our hips swaying in time and her eyes sparkle, ...
June 24, 2014
A List of Theatre Festivals in the UK
Whilst doing some research for a project I'm working on at the moment I struggled to find a comprehensive list of theatre festivals in the UK. There's this half attempted list on Wikipedia which proved to be useless and another list of British associated festivals in the arts, but nothing for theatre specific. Below you'll find the list I've compiled. (Frustratingly I know the dates will naturally be old before I even ...
In February 2009 the Arts Council England launched A Night Less Ordinary, a scheme designed to get young people engaged with theatre through the allocation of 618,000 free tickets. The scheme ran until 2011 before being curtailed due to Governmental cuts. At the time I was deeply disappointed by this decision, for me it was the perfect opportunity to get many of my peers involved in something I felt passionately about with ...
February 26, 2014
Art in a Vacuum: The Future of Arts Journalism
The following speech was delivered at No Boundaries, the State of the Arts Conference by Arts Council England on Tuesday 25 February 2014. In October last year I wrote a blog piece entitled ‘What is the Future of Theatre Criticism?’ it addressed my concerns over the demise of the theatre critic in the next ten years. It is a subject that has been addressed countless times and because of this I almost feel ...
October 19, 2013
Review: Stuart Semple’s Suspend Disbelief, Heritage Rooms
Stuart Semple's solo exhibition, the first to exhibit new work in London for four years, is a playful look at how we view entertainment and our abilities to let go, to play and to - as the exhibition title suggests - suspend our disbelief. Spanning two floors within the beautifully unseen Heritage Rooms that sits alongside the Bloomsbury Ballrooms, Semple's work combines bright and bold acrylic paintings with joyfully ...
