All in Arts & Culture
On the longest day of the year sunlight floods Hyde Park Book Club for the launch of Clare Fisher’s short story collection How the Light Gets In. Joined by Influx Press, Leeds Big Bookend, Naomi Booth and Samuel Fisher, it's a summer solstice book launch to remember.
Refugee Week is dedicated to recognising the overlooked. Home, Manchester, set aside 16th-22nd June to provide a platform for theatrical, musical, cinematic and political offerings from refugees and solidarity supporters.
For Breach theatre company, we live in a world where planning for the future is at odds with the constant threat of lacking a future altogether. We live under the looming threat of terror attacks or even “a tornado, probably with a woman’s name, so no one will take it fucking seriously”.
You’ll never catch me listening to a female-fronted band. Why? Because there’s no such thing. You probably already know that ‘male-fronted’ bands don’t exist—it’s rare to see male artists being defined by their gender, so why have people latched onto the idea that a band can be female-fronted?
Katherine Christie Evans = Velodrome: a queer artist whose work is concerned with social inequality, Feminism, and mental health and queer visibility. Harpy meets Katherine to talk about Velodrome’s debut single and debut event.
Lining the route with pink balloons, Girl Gang Manchester transformed the Lowry’s loading bay studio space into an inclusive and welcoming room full of frivolity. If you fancy heading to a Girl Gang event but aren’t sure what to expect, here’s a rundown of all the action from where I was sat last Saturday night.
In a new adaptation by Bryony Lavery, who’s on a mission “to create iconic roles for women […] because the world is full of fantastic female actors”, Brighton Rock enacts the classic Graham Greene novel and aptly fits Week 53’s ‘coming of age’ theme.
Writers Rachel Wagstaff and Duncan Abel return the stage version of The Girl on the Train to the setting of Watford, refreshingly diffusing any sense of glamour and bringing a gritty domesticity to the drama.
As part of the annual ‘Week 53’ festival at The Lowry, Manchester, Girl Gang are offering the latest in their series of immersive theatre experiences: enter the world of Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion.
“Fuck you and your excellent words.” Questioning how actors and audience ought to interact with the canon, RashDash explode onto the stage to fight for an artist’s right against the dictatorial bonds of the script.
Tessa Coates - sketch comic extraordinaire, trio-of-podcasts host and now stand up - unveiled Primates, her debut solo show, at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2017. Part-autobiography, part-anthropology lecture (and a whole lot hilarious) Primates has just finished a sell-out run at the Soho Theatre. Harpy was lucky enough to snatch half an hour with Tessa to talk about her experience creating the show.
It is easy to justify the need for more inclusion from a political point of view: discrimination is wrong, period. Yet, I have often been asked if I thought that inclusion would actually bring anything positive to the film industry. After all, do we need an nth chick flick or another Dr Dolittle?
Three men, eleven instruments, one psychedelic puppet show projection. Billed as "The Godfathers of Alternative Cabaret", The Tiger Lillies take to the stage to tell the story of Maria: a Mexican woman who escaped the clutches of the cartels and of the devil himself.
The entrance of a small, ghostly child, before the house lights go down, marks the opening of this latest production of The Cherry Orchard and suggests that this may not be Chekhov as we know.
The Femmeniste exhibition will tackle female experiences and issues such as sexual harassment, women's mental health, cat-calling, girl hate and much more, by bringing together spoken word artists, female rappers and dancers, as well as art and photography... Whether you’re an artist, a writer, or just want to spread the word, your input is what will power the revolution!
Minefield marked the opening night of the ¡Viva! Festival! an annual celebration of Spanish and Latino culture, from HOME and Instituto Cervantes. Described as the festival that celebrates coming together in a world of division, this opening production exemplifies the spirit of cultural collaboration and provides a platform for unheard voices.
A staged biography of Marc Chagall, The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk is the story of an iconic artist and the woman both blessed and cursed to be his muse...
You were never really here. From the little the synopsis and trailer offered, I had imagined the film to be your typical conspiracy thriller centered on a hammer wielding anti-hero (Jo) responsible for the saving of a teenage girl (Nina) from an organised group of pedophiles. Apparently not the type of film I would have spontaneously chosen to see, especially when the gruesome violence of Red Sparrow was still very fresh in my mind...
I went to see Red Sparrow... I did not want to see this film, at all, but there were some disturbing issues, mentioned in critiques, that I felt the need to address. So, I went to see it, with an open mind, eager to reach my own conclusions.
Plunged into darkness, with a crash and a flash, we are on Captain Walton’s ship, trapped amidst the ice. 200 years after Mary Shelley’s iconic novel was published, April de Angelis and the Royal Exchange Theatre reignite life into the pages of Frankenstein.
