Read more drama and dance industry news in August-October, January-July, 2007
AWARDS & PLAUDITS:
1.Scotland scoops five TMA Awards
Scottish theatre swept the board at the Theatrical Management Association Awards 2007, after winning five categories and being nominated for two more.
Read more in The Stage
2.Jane Elson wins Kings Cross New Writing Award
The Kings Cross New Writing Award has been presented to Jane Elson for Leonardo Stole My Crayon, at the reopening of the Courtyard Theatre, where the play will receive a rehearsed reading next year.
Read more in The Stage
3.Pearson wins £10,000 Meyer-Whitworth Award
Morna Pearson has been presented with the Meyer-Whitworth Award for new playwriting for Distracted, which was performed at Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre in 2006.
Read more in The Stage
4.Total Theatre Awards 2007
Ten years of the Total Theatre Awards at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe – and the consensus is that the 2007 Awards were the best yet!
Read more on the Total Theatre website
5.Theatre Designers take a bow
The Linbury Biennial Prize for Stage Design is 20 this year. Charlotte Cripps talks to three of its brightest stars, and to the directors who have championed them.
Read more in The Independent
STATE OF THE INDUSTRY:
1.Purnell announces £20 million arts boost
Culture secretary James Purnell has handed the arts a £20 million real terms boost over the next three years. Following the announcement that Treasury had given the Department of Culture, Media and Sport an inflationary increase at the spending review earlier this week, Purnell has announced that Arts Council England's settlement would rise from £417 million this year to £467 million by 2010/11.
Read more in The Stage
2.V&A to launch theatre design exhibition
London’s Victoria and Albert Museum will next month open its first theatrical exhibition since the closure of the Theatre Museum in Covent Garden. Collaborators: UK Design for Performance 2003-2007 will display a selection of British theatrical designs spanning the last four years.
Read more in The Stage
3.Arts Council Wales begins search for National Theatre for Wales chairman
Plans to create a new National Theatre for Wales in the English Language have taken a step closer to becoming reality as organisers reveal they expect to have a chairman in place by the end of the year.
Read more in The Stage
VENUES:
1.Tottenham’s Bernie Grant Arts Centre unveiled as flagship for cultural diversity in theatre
A purpose-built £15 million arts centre has opened in Tottenham, north London, with a brief to develop the next generation of black and culturally diverse theatre practitioners. The Bernie Grant Arts Centre, named after the Haringey MP who died in 2000, features a 300-seat theatre, rehearsal rooms and extensive training facilities.
Read more in The Stage
2.Birmingham REP to gain mid-scale theatre in £193m development
Birmingham City Council has approved £193 million proposals that will see a major extension and refurbishment of the city’s REP theatre, as part of a joint development with a new library. Under the plans, Birmingham REP will gain a 350-seat theatre to complement its existing 820-seat main stage and 140-capacity studio.
Read more in The Stage
3.Mayor challenges London theatre to ‘go green’ by 2025
London mayor Ken Livingstone has announced an industry-wide campaign to make the capital’s theatres more energy efficient and achieve a 60% reduction in carbon emissions by 2025. These measures follow the Climate Change Action Plan published in February, which demonstrated that London would have to reduce carbon emissions by nearly two-thirds within the next 20 years to “avert catastrophic climate change”.
Read more in The Stage
DANCE:
1.Tom Roden & Pete Shenton Q&A
Pete Shenton & Tom Roden have been New Art Club since 2001. Variously described as the Morcambe & Wise, Reeves & Mortimer and Gilbert & George of dance, they share a sense of humour and a serious commitment to contemporary dance.
Read more on the London Dance website
2.Rambert archive receives Heritage Lottery Funding
Rambert Dance Company has been awarded a grant from The Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) to support the development of its historical collection. The Rambert archive is one of the oldest and most extensive collections of dance memorabilia and documentation in the UK. It spans over 80 years of dance history and was started in 1926 by Dame Marie Rambert.
Read more on the London Dance website
3.A dance in the world's most beautiful room
A ground-breaking new project by Isaac Julien and choreographer Russell Maliphant tackles one of modern life's most controversial subjects. Sarah Crompton meets them
Read more in The Telegraph
4.b.supreme
The relationship between women and hip hop has always been somewhat controversial. But for the second year running, 'b.supreme', the UK's first and only hip hop festival for women, returns to the Southbank, providing the perfect, organic antidote to commercial misrepresentations of women in the culture.
Read more in Timeout
DRAMA:
1.'You can sniff the best plays after half a page'
If you want the freshest new writing, you have to look away from the mainstream, Dominic Cooke tells Michael Billington after a year as Royal Court director
Read more in The Guardian
2.Red Bull and Old Vic to host nationwide 24 hour plays created by young talent
24 Hour Plays - The Red Bull Sessions will see five short plays staged from scratch within a single day across the country. Groups of 18-25 year old writers, producers, directors and actors will work together to create the new plays.
Read more in The Stage
3.'We make our own ghosts here'
For seven years, Punchdrunk have created theatre in unlikely spaces: wild gardens, disused factories, and at festivals such as the Big Chill. Their approach puts the visual, physical and musical before the text. Lyn Gardner braves séances and the Red Death in a sneak preview of Punchdrunk's daring new show.
Read more in The Guardian
4.The A-Z of London theatre
Of course you know that Hytner runs the National, and that Pinter is a world-famous playwright. (You do, don't you?) But if you want to dig deeper into the world of contemporary theatre, you'll need this: Time Out's indispensable A-Z of the hottest talents, trends and venues.
Read more in Timeout
PREVIEW:
1.Preview: Noor, Warwick Arts Centre, Warwick
In her new show, the Birmingham-based Indian choreographer Anurekha Ghosh explores the concept of enlightenment. Noor (Urdu for "light") blends Western contemporary dance, Japanese Butoh, south Indian martial arts with modern north Indian Kathak.
Read more in The Independent
2.Preview: The Changeling, Nottingham Playhouse, Nottingham
The theatre director Stephen Unwin, who snapped up Alan Cumming, Sam West, Tilda Swinton and Patterson Joseph before they became famous, has now discovered the actress Anna Koval. He has cast the 21-year-old actress, fresh out of Rada, in the lead role as Beatrice-Joanna, in the dark Jacobean tragedy The Changeling.
Read more in The Independent
COMMENTARY:
1.Lifting the curtain
Michael Billington has lived through an era of radical change in politics, society and the theatre. And the stage, he says, is the art form that best reflects the mood of the nation. To mark the publication of his new history of postwar theatre, he takes us on a 50-year odyssey of war, unrest and social revolution
Read more in The Guardian
2.The dying light of women's writing
With productions like Jenufa and The Enchantment demonstrating the rich mine of dramatic writing by women, why is The Gate limiting a key initiative to male playwrights?
Read more in The Guardian
3.Bush Theatre's balancing act
When she arrived at the Bush in April, Rourke inherited four new plays, all written by men - David Watson's Flightpath, How to Curse by Ian McHugh, The Dysfunckshonalz by Mike Packer and Helter Skelter/Land of the Dead by Neil LaBute. Now, to balance things out, Rourke has appointed four female directors for them.
Read more in The Guardian
4.Time to act our age
It isn’t often that a tea dance sparks a revolution. But there is a revolutionary vibe fizzing around the edges of the elderly couples waltzing inside the small Chesil Theatre, Winchester. They are there to mark the launch of the Prime Theatre Company, a professional outfit that provides work for bus-passage actors, directors and writers.
Read more in The Times
PEOPLE:
1.Rosie Kay Q&A
This year as part of a Rayne Fellowship for Choreographers Rosie Kaye's been shadowing MPs, watching film maker Anthony Minghella at work in Botswana and working with Emio Greco in Holland. And then there's the ballet on a routemaster bus for Birmingham Royal Ballet and rehearsals for a UK tour of her riotous The Wild Party.
Read more on the London Dance website
2.Heart of blackness, The playwright Kwame Kwei-Armah would like to be the David Hare of black British theatre
Kwame Kwei-Armah’s newest play, Statement of Regret – inspired by Tony Blair’s speech about Britain’s role in the slave trade – opens at the National Theatre.
Read more in The Times
3.Simon McBurney: Ground-breaking theatre director, Hollywood actor and screenwriter
I am in a hotel lobby in Amsterdam, looking at my watch and wondering if I have miscalculated the time when I am meant to meet Simon McBurney, the globe-trotting actor-director who turns 50 this year.
Read more in The Independent
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