festivals
ash.smyth
It is a stinking hot afternoon. In an unventilated shed seemingly purpose-built for breeding mosquitoes, I am walking round and round a stone spiral. A benign-looking woman has assured me it is the way to peace. Despite my scepticism, I follow her instructions, pausing every few feet to read the peace-themed quotations carved on each of the rocks. Some are moving, some purely poetic. Most tread Oprahishly along that that very fine line between simple brilliance and childish naïvety.As an artwork, it is uncomplicated stuff, but it gives one pause – not least because several of the inscriptions Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Bestival was the first festival to embrace fancy dress and, five years into its career, still does it best. This year the theme was "Out of Space" and with the weather delivering gorgeous Indian summer sunshine, a welcome contrast to Bestival 2008’s deluge of wind-blown sleet, a contagious carnival of intergalactic characters extended across the site. Most attendees regarded it as mandatory to make some effort for the big Saturday dress-up and a few, such as the gent who’d carved a cargo-loading exoskeleton, as worn by Sigourney Weaver in Aliens, from polystyrene, had really gone beyond the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The presence of an ellipsis in the title of Sean Hughes’ new show, What I Meant to Say Was..., is a clue to how the evening proceeds. He comes on stage with no announcement, chats for 90 minutes about this and that, rambles a bit when he loses his thread and frequently goes off at a tangent when he interacts with the audience. He even tells us he always talks rubbish for the 15 minutes and the show proper will begin after then.On first sight then it looks unplanned and rather disordered, but Hughes is a sly old fox. Because behind his casual appearance and seemingly shambolic delivery is a Read more ...