YEOVIL’s young star choreographer James Bamford has a busy few weeks – at the end of July he will be working with the Covent Garden Dance Company at the schools day at the Walled Garden at Hatch near Tisbury, and on 27th and 28th August he brings his own Project Dance Company back to Westlands…
SHAFTESBURY independent bookshop The Kitchen Table, which specialises exclusively in food writing, has been named the official bookshop partner for the British Library’s Food Season, which runs to 2nd July and is one of the UK’s leading festivals dedicated to food, culture and storytelling, now in its eighth year. Approached directly by the British Library,…
THE north east of England has for many years (centuries, if you include the Border Ballads) been a hotbed of folk music – home to the Waterson-Carthy dynasty, Fay Hield, Kathryn Tickell, The Unthanks, Lindisfarne … The list also includes Rachael McShane, an original member of folk big band Bellowhead, who travelled from Newcastle on…
ANDY Morton, the director of this year’s Dorset Opera Festival production of L’Elisir d’Amore, was born and brought up in Sherborne, where his father was a teacher. It was as a teenager at Sherborne School he first came into contact with opera, joining the chorus of Dorset Opera then run by Patrick Shelley. After studies,…
SHAKESPEARE in the open air is a summer tradition, and this year the memory of sitting in the rain and cold seems like a thing of the past. It was a welcome relief as the cooling breeze wafted across the front of Muchelney’s ancient abbey, following the adventures of storm-separated identical twins Viola and Sebastian….
THE multi-talented actor, artist, playwright and adaptor Clive Francis has turned his pen to Graham Green’s comic novel Our Man in Havana to create a fast and furious visit to the Caribbean where the world’s most unlikely spy is recruited to help the British intelligence service in the time following the second world war and…
The Dorset-based monochrome collective of photographers has an exhibition in the Borough Gardens rooms in Dorchester in September, following the success of last year’s inaugural show of black and white images by artists and photographers including the distinguished portrait and still life painter Michael Taylor.
THERE is nothing funny about Peter Shaffer’s play Equus, the one about a boy who blinds horses, but there was a joke going around when it first opened on Broadway – that the British audiences thought it was a play about cruelty to horses, while the American audiences thought it was about cruelty to psychiatrists….
FOR the first time in more than 140 years, bitterns have bred at the RSPB reserve at Lodmoor, near Weymouth. It is the first breeding record for Dorset since 1883. The female bittern has been seen making regular feeding flights across the reserve, providing strong evidence that chicks are being successfully reared. Although the fledglings…
THE Rocky Horror Show, Blood Brothers and Salad Days have two things in common – they all had modest beginnings, before going on to enormous success. Rocky Horror began in the 60-seater Royal Court Theatre, Upstairs. Willy Russell’s play Blood Brothers, re-written as a musical, only met with modest success in Liverpool’s Playhouse. Salad Days,…