Blog readers are very likely to be interested in this event at Seven. Here is the flyer.
Michelle Scally Clarke proudly presents: Raw Inquest
A tribute to Daniel Nelson by Michelle Scally Clarke working alongside the Bassment Poets collective.
Special guests on the night:
Sula Jules
Music by George and the Champion Swimmers
Open mic spot
Venue: Seven Arts Space 31a Harrogate Road Chapel Allerton
Date: 8th May
Time: Doors open 7.30pm
Ticket prices: Entry £7 (£5 Concessions & Pre-booking)
For further information please contact:info@sevenleeds.co.uk
Daniel Nelson, my nephew, died in prison aged 18. He was on remand for allegedly dealing drugs: three weeks and six suicide attempts later, he was found dead in his cell.
My family learned of Daniel's death from Sky News on 20 September 2005. Daniel went into prison a confident young man. Three weeks later he was a shadow of his former self. Toxicology reports showed that he was clean - apart from the psychotic drugs fed to him in prison.
Raw Inquest is my family's story. It describes the failings of the justice system and uncovers the scab of negligence that affects children and whole families who have been placed in the care system. This is our inquest, the forgotten story.
Monday, April 21, 2008
Saturday, April 5, 2008
Any suggestions?
The small committee which got the wheels rolling for the first LitFest met recently. It was agreed that all went well and that there should be a second LitFest at about the same time of year in 2009 - no exact dates yet.
We are now 'looking at possibilities' - noting what other festivals do and finding out who might be available and affordable. A novelist? More for children? What do you think?
Please get in touch with your suggestions, for example through the email address on the right. Put LITFEST in the subject line so it is easily distinguishable from the spam. You don't even have to be a Headingley resident to give us advice.
There will be an open meeting at the New Headingley Club in St Michael's Road on Tuesday 20 May at 7.30pm.
We are now 'looking at possibilities' - noting what other festivals do and finding out who might be available and affordable. A novelist? More for children? What do you think?
Please get in touch with your suggestions, for example through the email address on the right. Put LITFEST in the subject line so it is easily distinguishable from the spam. You don't even have to be a Headingley resident to give us advice.
There will be an open meeting at the New Headingley Club in St Michael's Road on Tuesday 20 May at 7.30pm.
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Dave is Duncan
David Robertson has moved on from Captain Speedy (see below) to become King Duncan with Opera North. Full story is here.
Monday, March 17, 2008
Alamayou and Arthur
Richard Wilcocks writes:
Its rare - and perhaps unwise - to try and stage a piece that's written for radio. But the style, scope and subject matter of Peter's play made us risk the attempt.
That's a quote from the programme for I was a stranger by Peter Spafford, the first of the double bill from Theatre of the Dales which was performed on Saturday and Sunday evenings in the studio at the Yorkshire College of Music and Drama in Shire Oak Road. The studio was full to overflowing on both occasions. The programme continues:
We hope you'll enjoy this curious hybrid, where actors carry scripts as in a broadcast, at the same time as telling the story visually.
We did enjoy it. We loved it. During the post-performance discussion yesterday (Sunday) the director, David Robertson, who also played Captain Speedy, seemed a little uneasy, wondering whether the show had really worked, because actors wandering about with scripts was unusual, like a rehearsal.
If he was fishing for compliments, he caught fat trout, glistening and beautiful. The play is the story of Prince Alamayou of Abyssinia, captured at the age of seven as a kind of afterthought after the British had defeated his father, King Tewedros, and indulged in extensive looting of ancient treasures. The play traces his journey from Africa to India to Rugby School to Sandhurst to Headingley, where he lived with Cyril Ransome, father of Arthur.
The play has plenty of local references, of course. Alamayou, in search of his lost identity and breathing industrial air, walks about in Headingley in the middle of the night, which is not really advisable even today unless you are with friends and dressed as a bumblebee. He visits the menagerie in the zoological gardens, the very solid wall of which can still be seen in Chapel Lane, and he is holed up in Hollin Lane, which is very much still there, just a little changed since the time when a prince was dying of pneumonia, bombarded by telegrams from Queen Victoria, deeply concerned about the impending death of one of her little pets, a pretty black boy with a winning smile.
Jamal Rahman was a superb Alamayou. He's in the foreground of the photo below watched by - not in this order - Danny and Jessica Neale, Arif Javid, David Robertson, Jane Oakshott, Maggie Mash, Richard Rastall and Stuart Fortey.
Stuart Fortey was in his own short play, Duffers, which followed, playing Cyril Ransome, as he had in the previous one. It illustrated this 1930 quote on Swallows and Amazons from Arthur Ransome:
The children in it have no firm dividing line between make-believe and reality, but slip in and out again and again, exactly as I had done when I was a child and I fancy we all of us do in grown-up life.....In a way we were making the best of both worlds.
Stuart was playing dead when he was on stage looming behind David Robertson's entirely convincing Arthur on the banks of a Cumbrian river, a black-tied spectre with a sour voice. Jessica Neale playing Ransome's rather neglected daughter Tabitha is, incredibly, still at school - Notre Dame Sixth Form College - where she is doing Theatre Studies. She was terrific. We'll be hearing more about her in the future.
The Arthur Ransome Society was represented by Margaret and Joe Ratcliffe (that's them down below) who came with relevant books and who contributed to the discussion afterwards.
So, an excellent last evening of the LitFest. We've not really finished though.
Its rare - and perhaps unwise - to try and stage a piece that's written for radio. But the style, scope and subject matter of Peter's play made us risk the attempt.
That's a quote from the programme for I was a stranger by Peter Spafford, the first of the double bill from Theatre of the Dales which was performed on Saturday and Sunday evenings in the studio at the Yorkshire College of Music and Drama in Shire Oak Road. The studio was full to overflowing on both occasions. The programme continues:
We hope you'll enjoy this curious hybrid, where actors carry scripts as in a broadcast, at the same time as telling the story visually.
We did enjoy it. We loved it. During the post-performance discussion yesterday (Sunday) the director, David Robertson, who also played Captain Speedy, seemed a little uneasy, wondering whether the show had really worked, because actors wandering about with scripts was unusual, like a rehearsal.
If he was fishing for compliments, he caught fat trout, glistening and beautiful. The play is the story of Prince Alamayou of Abyssinia, captured at the age of seven as a kind of afterthought after the British had defeated his father, King Tewedros, and indulged in extensive looting of ancient treasures. The play traces his journey from Africa to India to Rugby School to Sandhurst to Headingley, where he lived with Cyril Ransome, father of Arthur.
The play has plenty of local references, of course. Alamayou, in search of his lost identity and breathing industrial air, walks about in Headingley in the middle of the night, which is not really advisable even today unless you are with friends and dressed as a bumblebee. He visits the menagerie in the zoological gardens, the very solid wall of which can still be seen in Chapel Lane, and he is holed up in Hollin Lane, which is very much still there, just a little changed since the time when a prince was dying of pneumonia, bombarded by telegrams from Queen Victoria, deeply concerned about the impending death of one of her little pets, a pretty black boy with a winning smile.
Jamal Rahman was a superb Alamayou. He's in the foreground of the photo below watched by - not in this order - Danny and Jessica Neale, Arif Javid, David Robertson, Jane Oakshott, Maggie Mash, Richard Rastall and Stuart Fortey.
Stuart Fortey was in his own short play, Duffers, which followed, playing Cyril Ransome, as he had in the previous one. It illustrated this 1930 quote on Swallows and Amazons from Arthur Ransome:
The children in it have no firm dividing line between make-believe and reality, but slip in and out again and again, exactly as I had done when I was a child and I fancy we all of us do in grown-up life.....In a way we were making the best of both worlds.
Stuart was playing dead when he was on stage looming behind David Robertson's entirely convincing Arthur on the banks of a Cumbrian river, a black-tied spectre with a sour voice. Jessica Neale playing Ransome's rather neglected daughter Tabitha is, incredibly, still at school - Notre Dame Sixth Form College - where she is doing Theatre Studies. She was terrific. We'll be hearing more about her in the future.
The Arthur Ransome Society was represented by Margaret and Joe Ratcliffe (that's them down below) who came with relevant books and who contributed to the discussion afterwards.
So, an excellent last evening of the LitFest. We've not really finished though.
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| Photo by Richard Wilcocks |
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| Photo by Richard Wilcocks |
Underground poetry
The trouble with poetry in cafés is the noises off - in this case a mildly irritating air conditioning unit and (for a few minutes) a vacuum cleaner upstairs. It didn't really matter, though. We were warm.
James Nash is such a kind and amiable compere that everyone present ended up feeling kind and amiable too. The Sunday afternoon session began with James reading a few of his best-known published pieces and that set the tone for the next two hours.
He made humorous references to timings, threatening to gag performers who strayed past the five minute limit with his own hand. It worked. This must be the most worrying thing about being a poetry compere - people just going on and on indulgently. Well they didn't. In one or two cases, the audience would have loved them to go on and on, but they stuck to the limits. James's yoke is easy.
As in the Café Lento the previous day, it was little things, small incidents, large musings. There seemed to be more published volumes about - slim tomes lovingly produced. The poets' places of origin seemed more important as well......Belfast, South Carolina, Liverpool......formative influences. Now here they all were in a cellar in Headingley.
"We should do this more often," was heard as a happy audience, pogged-out on poetry, climbed the stairs to brave the cold wind outside. We should.
Below, James Nash, Sheila Chapman from Irish poets' group Lucht Focail, the audience.
James Nash is such a kind and amiable compere that everyone present ended up feeling kind and amiable too. The Sunday afternoon session began with James reading a few of his best-known published pieces and that set the tone for the next two hours.
He made humorous references to timings, threatening to gag performers who strayed past the five minute limit with his own hand. It worked. This must be the most worrying thing about being a poetry compere - people just going on and on indulgently. Well they didn't. In one or two cases, the audience would have loved them to go on and on, but they stuck to the limits. James's yoke is easy.
As in the Café Lento the previous day, it was little things, small incidents, large musings. There seemed to be more published volumes about - slim tomes lovingly produced. The poets' places of origin seemed more important as well......Belfast, South Carolina, Liverpool......formative influences. Now here they all were in a cellar in Headingley.
"We should do this more often," was heard as a happy audience, pogged-out on poetry, climbed the stairs to brave the cold wind outside. We should.
Below, James Nash, Sheila Chapman from Irish poets' group Lucht Focail, the audience.
A piacere
Saturday evening in Café Lento. Closed sign on the door. Twenty nine sundry poetic souls packed inside. Through the steamy window, a typical Saturday street for Headingley: passing cars, a siren, the odd scream of laughter, two girls dressed as bumblebees...
Richard Lindley, who runs the café, runs the poetry, and it's a little bit like a Quaker meeting, with people standing to read as the spirit moves them and as Richard beckons (mostly they read, but one of them quotes from the Hebrew scriptures which are in her head) and everyone else glowing with encouragement and appreciation. Richard is gentle but businesslike.
He dispenses free coffee and quiz papers (where do these lines come from and so on) for the interval. He chats and jokes with everyone. He's in a long line of literary hosts stretching back to the one at the Tabard in Southwark. Cafés, he knows, go well with poetry. Short stories too - but that's for the future.
The poems are usually very personal (no surprise), and often have a focus on small incidents, tiny happenings with great significance. Start with the cosmos and you'll fall like a brick. Start with a brick and you'll end up with the cosmos.
Below, Cosmos:
Richard Lindley, who runs the café, runs the poetry, and it's a little bit like a Quaker meeting, with people standing to read as the spirit moves them and as Richard beckons (mostly they read, but one of them quotes from the Hebrew scriptures which are in her head) and everyone else glowing with encouragement and appreciation. Richard is gentle but businesslike.
He dispenses free coffee and quiz papers (where do these lines come from and so on) for the interval. He chats and jokes with everyone. He's in a long line of literary hosts stretching back to the one at the Tabard in Southwark. Cafés, he knows, go well with poetry. Short stories too - but that's for the future.
The poems are usually very personal (no surprise), and often have a focus on small incidents, tiny happenings with great significance. Start with the cosmos and you'll fall like a brick. Start with a brick and you'll end up with the cosmos.
Below, Cosmos:
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