The Arts Section

Rheingans Sisters at Bridport

THE Sheffield-based Rheingans Sisters come to Bridport Arts Centre on Friday 19th September, with their golden voices and inventive soundworlds. In their live shows and recordings, Rowan and Anna Rheingans create an immersive and uplifting musical journey which is both steeped in tradition and fresh and contemporary. Exploring evocative influences from across Europe, the sisters’…

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Colourful Consequences

DORSET’s famous Cerne Giant had a colourful companion for a few hours when Consequences, a huge temporary artwork was installed next to the enigmatic carving in the chalk downs above Cerne Abbas. Consequences was created by artist Becca Gill’s Radical Ritual company with the input of local community groups as part of Nature Calling, an…

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Tired All the Time

WHEN actors Poppy Hardwicke and Lauren Mooney set out to tell a story about chronic fatigue, a condition they both live with, they called their performance Tired All The Time – it’s hard to think of a more appropriate name for the work they produced during a three-day R&D residency at Poole’s Lighthouse arts centre….

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Laugh with the leopard

IT’s hardly your average response: “The consultant had told me he was confident I had throat cancer that had spread into the lymph glands. Joyfully, I held his hand, and looked up to the heavens like a South American footballer after scoring a goal. It was one of the happiest moments of my life.” But…

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Uncovering the dark secrets of a house in Santiago

PHILIPPE Sands is probably this country’s most famous and respect human rights lawyer. He comes to the Marine Theatre at Lyme Regis, in conjunction with the East Devon-based Shute Festival, on Thursday 25th September to talk about his latest book, 38 Londres Street, in which he uncovers some of the darkest secrets of Chile’s history,…

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Visions of Hildegard

THE words and music of the inspirational medieval Abbess Hildegard of Bingen, a visionary musician, polymath and nun in Germany in the 12th century, echo down a thousand years. Performance group The Telling come to St Mary’s Church, Dorchester, on Tuesday 30th September, at 7.30pm, to perform Vision, celebrating the life, testimony and music of…

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Pot Licker, Bristol Tobacco Factory and touring

THERE are several definitions of the term Pot Licker, and the one that describes mischievous Icelandic Yule Lads pranksters fits Dorset-based playwright Ed Viney’s play extremely well. Just as the Yule Lad licks a pot clean, leaving not a morsel behind, so Viney explores the fate of three school teachers who, faced with the problem…

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Debussy in words and music

PIANIST Lucy Parham comes to St Mary’s Church at Dorchester on Sunday 21st September at 7pm, with Sir Simon Russell-Beale to present Reverie: The Life and Loves of Claude Debussy. This is the fourth in her extraordinary Composer Portrait series and for this exploration of the prolific and innovative French composer, she is joined by…

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Bouncers, Amateur Players of Sherborne

JOHN Godber’s 1977 play Bouncers was once voted the nation’s most popular play, and has been performed at the National Theatre, toured the world and been staged by countless amateur companies in its almost 50-year long life. The current production at Sherborne’s Studio Theatre, directed by Sarah Webster, is my first encounter with this story…

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