On Your Marks - audience responses

Here's the feedback for the event on 27 November:

Written comments after performance:

I never realised that sport could be so exciting! The young dancers in the section ‘Dancing on Together’ were an explosion of energy that took my breath away.

I also enjoyed the presentation by Palm where poetry and prose was sensitively presented, sometimes giving food for thought with a new take on sporting activity.

Really enjoyed this evening. Quality performances but with a touch of the personal too.

Fantastic. More please.

Excellent  well done everyone.

Great for its sustained intensity!

Very good and impressive performances by the group.

Enjoyed most of it –especially the choreographed movement.

Really, Really Really uplifting - very entertaining!

A great evening’s entertainment!

What an evening! I didn’t think anything sporty could be that entertaining.

Great level of performances and humour.

A grippingly entertaining performance- each different part was well-rehearsed, thoughtful and full of imagination.

Superb.

Very entertaining if a little loud.

A very enjoyable varied programme. Not a dull moment.

Many thanks to all those who have worked for this absolutely wonderful event.  Great work! Keep it up.

An excellent evening - superb performance by all. Can we have more of these events please? Well done to all organisers.

What an entertaining and interesting evening.

Comments by email:

Just wanted to say how much I enjoyed last night’s eclectic and very entertaining programme.                         I think I experienced nearly every emotion: which has to be a good test of an evening’s entertainment.

The Phoenix Dance piece was beautifully choreographed and Leeds Met MA Performance students’ performance was witty and clever.  A great evening.

Really good, high quality performances from all the performers.

Letter in Yorkshire Evening Post  30 November:

  

Dear Sir,

The great thing about Leeds is that it produces quality. Leeds United scored once on Tuesday evening November 27^th at Elland Road but also a second time at St Chad’s Parish Hall in Headingley where nine young dancers from Phoenix Dance Theatre wearing Leeds United shirts gave a performance of ‘Score’ that would have made Neil Warnock proud. Along with their colleagues spirited performance of ‘Dancing with Rhinos’ the evening of sport and art with the title ‘On Your Marks’ got off to a rousing start. From the young to the slightly more mature we were royally entertained by Palm Ensemble, students and staff from the performing arts programme of Leeds Metropolitan University whose mixture of wit, poetry and song and professionalism has been recognised at festivals across Europe. There were also guest singers, John Kilburn, Maria Sandle and Phil Widger a local folk singer whose rendition of his own clever amusing work must surely require wider recognition. St. Chad would have been proud.

 I suspect so was Doug Sandle who had put so much effort not only into this event but also the one day conference on sport in art called Field of Vision at Headingley Carnegie Stadium. Accompanying that event is a splendid exhibition of ceramic sculptures of footballers, rugby players and athletes by Mandy Long displayed in the stadium café until December 6^th. Yorkshire has so much to be proud of in this Olympic Year. I think I will have to pop down to the café to see if I can find an appropriate memento.

Yours sincerely

Jeffrey Sherwin (Dr)

Flamenco in Mint Café

Owner Marcos, who can be held responsible for all the superb food (try the Brazilian coxinhas) in Mint Café, says that drop-in poets will be welcome at the Flamenco Evening on Thursday 22 November. Just see him first if you want to read. It starts at 8.30pm.

Entry is £5, with a further £5 for the buffet. The four strong group is Flamenco Diez - guitarist, box drummer, singer and dancer.

For those new to Headingley, Mint Café is near the end of the row on North Lane, just a few yards further on from the Natural Food Shop.

Mimika - comments from the audience

All of the audience questionnaires collected after the Mimika performances at HEART last Saturday contained positive comments - and several drawings. Here are ten of them, and a penguin by Lizzie.

I liked it wen the monkey tried to steel the egg. Elsie

Wonderful! Really creative & moving. Loved the sound, the landscapes, the puppets and really special show Spellbinding Beautiful puppets.  Barba

Terrific show. It contained all the elements of theatre – magic, puppetry, a sense of wonder. Great stuff. Bill

A truly wonderful show bound to entertain & educate. As a model maker in another field I can truly appreciate the use of easily obtainable and inexpensive materials to make things. The thought that must have gone to put on this show, demonstrates  two very talented people Graham

Great we enjoyed it very much. My 2½ daughter liked the toucan best. “And the monkey and the snow falling down. ” “And the snake.” Ted

I liked the animals and the big tent especially the flamingo. Ella

Thankyou  for making this accessible to a local audience. It is stunning! Bravo Jenny & Bill. Wonderful light, movement, sound. Simply amazing Maggie

Please do have them again they are wonderful and great for any ages! Shirley

A magical show! Really absorbing for children and adults. Lovely. Helen

It was fantastic Erin age 8

Spellbound by Mimika Children's Theatre

Sally Bavage writes:

Son et lumière in a tent erected in the HEART Centre, Headingley

Speechless!  Not just the mixed audience of adults and young children but the show itself.  A puppet show like no other, Mimika Theatre is a locally-based group that takes its audience on a worldwide trip from the desert to the rainforest to the South Pole. Not bad in an hour. The welcoming reassurance of Bill and Jenny, who have crafted a fabulous set of animals to accompany us on our travels, created a rising sense of anticipation before we set off - into the tent with mood music and lighting to help young and old alike suspend disbelief.  And this was after showing the younger members of the audience the scary snake fashioned from a vacuum cleaner hose and the snapping crocodile model head to allay any fears.

We set off to the desert to see a baby bird hatch, menaced by a swooping raptor over the audience. Looking up with rapt faces, open mouths, the children – and the adults – were completely absorbed.  Laughter at the antics of the meerkats, alarm at the scorpion, edgy absorption in the creatures that slithered, bit and met their fate before us.

‘Caws’ and effect – the scene and the soundtrack gave way to bird calls amongst the reflections from a tropical rainforest.  How delightful to see children interested in tweeting, not Tweeting.  We listened to howls and growls, buzzing and snarling, with music and monkey business helping to create the story in each of our heads. 

We then dived underwater to observe anemones wave and fish twirl to a Japanese-style soundtrack that bubbled along.  A jellyfish swam by and clownfish came out to play over our heads, along with seahorses, sea snakes and a turtle.  The audience was completely immersed itself in this watery world.

Within thirty seconds the scene iced up, snow was falling and we were watching as a penguin hatched its tiny baby from a carefully nestled egg, to oohs and aahs of sympathy and delight.  There was then a seal of approval for the audience from the watching mammal which popped up.  The End was nigh, but not quite yet.

Next came a puppet show – and tell.  Bill and Jenny allowed the audience members to choose their favourite puppets and showed how they are made and work. Lollipops and marbles, colanders and string have never looked so inventive, even on Blue Peter.  Especially the meerkats – simples!

Entitled ‘Spellbound in a tent’ -  it WAS magic!  Young people watching and enjoying an older form of artistic entertainment, taken on a journey before and behind their eyes.

I wonder how many of them will be thinking up stories about the puppets and their journeys over the coming days?

After the performance, members of the audience were invited to write down their thoughts on the LitFest's assessment forms.

Geoffrey Hill returns to Leeds University

Stringent and Astringent

Richard Wilcocks writes:

Sir Geoffrey Hill, who was elected Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford in June 2010, returned to the University of Leeds, where he taught from 1954 to 1980 on Tuesday 16 October, to read from the work of himself and others. Organised by the University Poetry Centre, it marked two important occasions – his eightieth birthday and the Library’s acquisition of his archive. It was, as promised, a very special event.

Various people from the LitFest committee were there (Sir Geoffrey used to live in Headingley), along with most of the university English Department, undergraduates, postgraduates, poets, family and many others, to listen to a man who, according to one published anecdote, once strode backwards and forwards in front of students in this same Rupert Beckett Lecture Theatre, dressed in black and sweating. He told us that, as he sat there, sweating slightly. I remember him from my time as the only tutor who wore jeans, and his habit of savouring with attendant long pauses particular words from our contributions.

This is not a full account, but a series of glimpses and snatches: it seemed inappropriate to scribble more than a page of notes, and few did so, because this was not a lecture, and not just a poetry reading. After an elegantly concise introduction from Professor John Whale, Head of the School of English, he began with his own anecdotes, about how he had arrived in Leeds as a callow youth (“I was pretty awful”), and about Bonamy Dobrée, who was the Professor of English Literature for a year after his arrival. Dobrée liked to keep a balance in the department, which at that time contained both the Marxist Arnold Kettle and Wilson Knight with his “idiosyncratic mysticism”. He talked about his friendships with the poets Tony Harrison and Ken Smith, when they were students.

Poetry readings, he told us, are not just about the poet who is reading. After mentioning that it would have been better if we could all have seen the words in front of us, or perhaps projected on the screen behind him, he devoted at least the first half to the works of other poets, most of whom are represented in Oscar Williams’s A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry (1946), which he carried in his teenage years. Gerard Hopkins (he omitted the Manley) was first, followed by D.H. Lawrence (Bavarian Gentians, full of flowing lines and repetitions, mesmerizing read Hill’s way), T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (Pisan Cantos).

"Ezra Pound is incomparable,” he said. “He was the great life-giver to poetry in English in the twentieth century.”  He brought in the composer Arnold Schoenberg as analogous. “He was stringent and astringent… after so much dominance by Wagner, by Brahms, by the German Romantics, he gave us Pierrot Lunaire.” He enlarged on Ezra Pound: “…this man could be so enriching… and yet so vicious in his politics…The Pisan Cantos are a most extraordinary achievement, written when Pound was held in appalling conditions by his fellow Americans… his mind was filled with the healing power of poetry.”

Hill has a way of reading often described as ‘sonorous’, which is not quite the right word. He has a singer’s soul, his style distantly related to Sprechstimme, which was prescribed for Pierrot Lunaire. He is, incidentally, an Honorary Patron of Leeds Festival Chorus.

He read beautifully his translation of Eugenio Montale’s La Bufera, which dates from the middle of the last World War, but he does not describe it as a translation: his version, entitled The Storm, is, in his words, “after Eugenio Montale”. It is, in fact, notably close to the original (better, it has been mooted) and is a homage to an admired poet who has attracted his attention for some years, whose “muted discords” make him a kindred spirit.

He read from his own fairly recent work.  Ars, in memory of Ken Smith, which appears in Without Title, was particularly poignant, partly because several in the audience had known Ken, who was co-editor of Stand magazine, which continues. Improvisation for Jimi Hendrix was not poignant, almost funny. It resulted from an online article in which he thought he was being compared to the guitarist, resulting in his buying a number of CDs, which ended up being flipped to students in an American lecture hall. ‘Lysergic’, we were told, is fake Greek.

“There was a time,” he said in the last five minutes, “when I could wait twenty years for a phrase to find its right place, but I can’t wait that long any more.”

Most of the appreciative and, I am sure, affectionate audience walked across afterwards to Special Collections in the Brotherton Library to drink wine and to chat in an oak-panelled room – to the Master, and to each other.

Comments:

'Hill's work will never be fashionable but it is a corpus of such passionate seriousness and ethical thought, its every phrase written with a consciousness of the weight of history and language, that it is hard to imagine it ever being ignored.' - Robert Potts (Guardian 2002)

'Geoffrey Hill is the central poet-prophet of our augmenting darkness, and inherits the authority of the visionaries from Dante and Blake on to D.H. Lawrence' - critic Harold Bloom 

'Hill embodies his lacerating humour in the person of a sad clown, performer and temporiser, trying to bring together the multiple elements in a dispersed identity: "I'm to show beholden." And parts of speech, too, play many roles, like the German word traurig that recurs. The clown's task is less to juggle words than to catch the one word that his many meanings share.' – Michael Schmidt, reviewing Without Title (Independent 2006)

'But there are good reasons why some intelligent people find little of value in the sentimental consensus of modern poetry; Hill's writing, which speaks to those disputed conditions in which civil and spiritual, as well as personal lives are actually led, offers readers something more rewarding than the usual panaceas.' – Peter McDonald (Guardian 2007)

'Let's take difficulty first. We are difficult. Human beings are difficult. We're difficult to ourselves, we're difficult to each other. And we are mysteries to ourselves, we are mysteries to each other. One encounters in any ordinary day far more real difficulty than one confronts in the most "intellectual" piece of work. Why is it believed that poetry, prose, painting, music should be less than we are?' – Geoffrey Hill (Paris Review 2000)

Inspired by an old cornet

In the run-up to the LitFest in March, members of the local OWLS (Older Wiser Locals) group worked with children from Year 5 at Weetwood Primary School to produce poems inspired by an old cornet. The different generations each brought their own experiences to the project, ably assisted by poet James Nash. Special thanks are due to Year 5 teacher Judith Brockbank and to Lee Ingham and the OWLS.

A booklet of the poems is now up in Headingley Library. These photos are of a display which is currently near the main entrance of the HEART Centre in Bennett Road.