The Mayor of Brighton & Hove plus 30 cyclists cross the finish line in New Road at a special charity afternoon hosted by Brighton Fringe, following a four-day charity cycle ride from Paris.
Mayor Pete West was greeted by a military band, Brighton Fringe cabaret artists, ceilidh dancers, penny farthings, local charities and supporters at Fringe City on New Road on Monday (May 9).
The cyclists undertook the challenge to raise money for the Mayor’s chosen charities and the ABF Soldier’s Charity.
Fringe City returns this weekend with two more afternoons of free Fringe entertainment.
Author, Patrick Sandford asked 100 people “How do you know when you are happy?”
The answers – provocative, kaleidoscopic, astonishing – jump-started this crazy, optimistic-in-spite-of-everything show.
Can we ever really shift our troubles, even our trauma? You must be joking.
Can happiness be a key? Well it ain’t always easy but you have to try it on for size.
Following their success at Brighton Fringe 2016 with GROOMED, which won three major Fringe awards, Mankind present BLOOMING, a new production written and performed by Patrick Sandford, with actress Loren O’Dair, who plays accordion, fiddle and keyboard.
BLOOMING is a theatrical exploration of what it takes to be happy, especially after trauma. We all have wounds in our life – how do we fix them? How do we know when we are happy?
To find answers to these questions Patrick Sandford spoke to lots of people. In BLOOMING he weaves a selection of personal insights from male survivors into an uplifting exploration of ways we can all transcend trauma, and learn to love life
Although BLOOMING is written as a sequel it stands completely separately in its own right. There is no need to have seen the previous show to enjoy this one, in which Patrick continues his journey of examining a life touched by past trauma but determined to find his present joy.
Note: one lucky audience volunteer at each performance will receive a full professional neck massage. No obligation.
Mankind developed in 2000 from the need for an agency in Sussex that could provide appropriate services to men who had experienced sexual abuse, they now receive 150 referrals a year.
Their main services are 1-1 counselling along with a range of therapeutic groups and are the only service of its kind in the South East.
Part chamber concert, part performance work, Endings is a meditation on cycles and the ending of things. Using portable turntables, reel-to-reel tape players and live performance, Endings finds form for experiences both ordinary and extraordinary that cluster around death, dying and afterlife.
Built from people’s stories & reflections, these recordings are cut on to bespoke vinyl records and embedded within an electro-acoustic sound design that is accompanied with live performance and song from the beautiful Paddy Mann and Peter Knight.
Voices of the living emerge ghost-like from records, the performer’s converse live with the taped voices, tape loops carve round and round through the space, and song floats across the familiar crackle of records ending.
Saulwick come across like a retro-po-mo Madame Blavatsky using the vintage recording machinery and snatches of interviews to express her theosophical investigations, the temporary and temporal mashing up to form the present, the past and gone giving us creative material for the now, the reflection looking again at the lost and finding something new in the old, dead and departed. It’s a vivid and interesting concert and it’s been a long time since I’ve seen an audience respond in such a subdued but utterly engaged way, there were quite a few folk in tears, but tears of beautiful and profound joy, I suspect Saulwick’s relentless and honest musings about loss and the act of death itself being a release as well as a challenge.
The manipulations of recording, records, tape and lighting give the impression of snatches of conversation, the repeated claims and statements that people make about such profoundly emotional moments, it’s as if the grief has infected the machines, they repeat and reassure, they restore and state, over and over again. Mann and Saulwick duet on turntables which are scratched and rubbed to deliver some mediation from other witnesses of the dying, it blends into one great experience. There’s a recording of a visit to a spiritualist, it’s not clear if there is humour meant, but some of Saulwick’s responses suggest a slightly raised eyebrow, but then that turns into her Blavatsky catharsis which is shocking amongst all the gentle reverie and a powerful change of pace.
Paddy Mann’s softly beautiful music was folded into this melange and his voice, filled with emotion and as ethereal as a last sad kiss knitted the white-noise and electronica together, Saulwick’s subtle sophisticated harmonies adding a strongly familiar edge to his music, like it was something we’d all sung with our own families before.
It’s a work of understated elegance and power, the lighting swinging back and fore, suggesting journeys or pendulums, costumes and tech all conspire to erase their considerable effects on us, and focus us on the content and collective rising of emotional tautness that Saulwick manipulates in the most considerate but intentional way to a crescendo of light and movement, a shattering of the soft, welcoming, understanding ways of before, a change of tempo and movement which suggested the way grief takes us all in the end. There are moments of achingly sweet whimsy and suggestions of visitations, but it all loops back to the experience of letting go at (and in) the end.
I left Endings softly reflective of the power of a performer and performance using the death of her father; Irving, as the creative narrative of such a powerful piece and with his own words echoing in the crepuscular streets on my journey home. Saulwick allows her father’s last words to be the last words, he talks about after he’s gone there will be nothing; in his view death is the glorious end of life and worth celebrating as something we all face and should witness.
She stands there looking us all in the eye, one by one, and we know that what remains of her father and what will be left of us is memory, love and the ability to go on, to move on, to accept and celebrate both the life of the lost and their acceptance of the inevitability of dying.
Unconditionally stunning and a superb piece of performance rooted in death but speaking to us of comforting, creative life.
Bruna is an Italian woman of a certain age with hilariously broken English – the building superintendent of a New York apartment block.
We first see her in the confessional saying to the unseen priest – “God he is pissed off with me”.
This is because while sweeping the front steps she left a small patch of ice, which her husband Bruno fell on and died. “I killed my husband with an ice patch” she tells anyone who will listen.
So begins Good Grief – a series of monologues and one-way conversations written and performed by New York character actress Terianne Falcone. The characters she creates and the stories they tell all deal with death and our ability or not to come to terms with grieving.
Bruna’s pigeon English makes us laugh but she essentially has a heart of gold, giving away Big Mac’s to street beggars and putting flowers on the grave of a stranger whose son has died of “haids” as she puts it.
Besides Bruna, we meet, among others, a manic flat hunter who is overjoyed that her prospective room has no window, a neurotic woman recently widowed who discovers she is pregnant, an 86-year-old male cab driver and a baby killer.
Throughout there is humour and pathos for her characters – all linked somehow to the apartment block. The only exception being the harrowing episode where eventually a woman with learning difficulties confesses to two police officers that she killed her baby and has stored it in clingfilm under the stairs for twenty years.
All the characters deal with death in their own way – anger, guilt, humour, sadness and longing. As one says: “I haven’t shed a f*** ing tear”.
The cab driver scene is innocent in its beginning humour but turns very dark as we learn that the guy – a survivor of the attack on Pearl Harbour has a terrible murderous secret which he is only too willing to tell. But even he has a light side – marrying again to a 74-year-old who is much taller – “I’ve always looked up to women”.
In her uninvited wedding speech to two tenants, Bruna totally misreads the situation, telling inappropriate toilet jokes – to our delight.
In the end we cannot hate any of these characters. Terianne moves smoothly from one to the other via small interludes of Big City filmic music played by the local trio Purple Pudding Clause.
She holds the stage magnetically and magnificently, and her true skill is in bringing out their humanity and making the point that grief can be good.
You can catch Good Grief at the Warren Theatrebox on June 3 and 4.
Delegates representing 36 countries attend International LGBT+ travel conference in St Petersburg, Florida.
St. Petersburg, Florida
The International Gay & Lesbian Travel Association’s (ILGTA) 34th Annual Global Convention, brought together more than 400 tourism professionals representing 36 countries to the Vinoy Renaissance St. Petersburg Resort & Golf Club for networking and education from May 4-6. It was the largest number of countries represented in IGLTA convention history.
John Tanzella
IGLTA President/CEO John Tanzella, said:“At a time when the news is filled with talk of travel bans and closed borders, our LGBT+ travel community united to show its support for diversity and a more welcoming world.”
“Our speakers from all tourism segments sent a clear message that our industry has a responsibility to promote inclusiveness. It was especially meaningful to debut the Second UNWTO Global Report on LGBT+ Tourism at this event.”
The Second UNWTO Global Report on LGBT Tourism, created in a partnership between UNWTO, IGLTA and the IGLTA Foundation, takes an in-depth look at the increasing visibility of LGBT+ consumers and the global tourism trends that impact this market.
Vinoy Renaissance St. Petersburg Resort & Golf Club
IGLTA’s convention programming also featured a CEO panel on crisis management, the Entrepreneur Roundtable Discussion for small business owners led by HE Travel president/owner Phil Sheldon, and for the first time, breakout sessions in Spanish.
The fourth annual IGLTA Foundation fundraising event, raised more than $10,000 for education, research, and developing the next generation of LGBT+ travel professionals.
The Foundation also supported educational and volunteer activities in the St. Petersburg/Clearwater area on May 6, including the creation of an original LGBT+ mural along the Pinellas Bike Trail that is now a permanent part of the convention host city.
David Downing
Visit St Petersburg/Clearwater CEO David Downing, said:“We’re proud and honoured to add St. Pete/Clearwater to the list of world capitals privileged to have hosted this event.”
“We’ve been an up-and-coming gay-friendly destination for several years, but the global visibility that results from hosting 400 of the world’s most influential LGBT+ tourism professionals puts us on a new map altogether. We simply couldn’t be more pleased.”
The next IGLTA Annual Global Convention will be held in Toronto from May 9-12, 2018.
Conservatives choose Emma Warman to fight the Brighton Pavilion seat.
Emma Warman
Originally from West Wales, Emma’s father is an electrician and her mother worked for the NHS. She attended a comprehensive school in Wales before studying at the University in Reading and becoming a primary school governor. She later attended law school in London – working full-time and taking evening classes to qualify as a lawyer.
Emma says she is “delighted” to be selected to fight the Brighton Pavilion seat.
She says:“I’m passionate about the Prime Minister’s commitment to create a country that works for everyone, because coming from an ordinary background and a state school education I know how difficult it can be to get on in life. Theresa May speaks for all of us, no matter what our backgrounds.”
At the moment Emma works in the insurance industry. She is a former deputy chair of LGBT+ Conservatives, has previously been a councillor and stood as the Conservative prospective parliamentary candidate for Cardiff South and Penarth in the 2015 General Election.
Local Conservative Party Chairman for Brighton Pavilion, Councillor Lee Wares said:“We are extremely pleased that Emma has been selected and she will be an excellent MP for Brighton Pavilion.”
Emma says she is “looking forward to supporting Theresa May” in securing a strong and stable government delivering jobs and security for Brighton Pavilion.
Caroline Lucas is the sitting MP for Brighton Pavilion. She retained the seat in 2015 with an increased majority of 7,967 over the Labour candidate Purna Sen. The Conservative were third with 22.8% of the vote.
The Lib Dems prospective candidate for 2017 Paul Chandler has announced he is standing aside so as not to split the vote on the left.
The police service in the Republic of Ireland decides to drop its investigation into Stephen Fry, over allegations he blasphemed in an interview on Irish channel RTE over two years ago.
The police say they failed to find “enough outraged people” in order to proceed with any prosecution.
The news comes as the kerfuffle over the investigation into Fry prompted all major parties in New Zealand to commit to repealing their own blasphemy law, with an amendment to a bill to do it expected perhaps as soon as next week.
Both pieces of news have been welcomed by The British Humanist Association (BHA).
Blasphemy laws in England and Wales were repealed in 2008, but remain on the books in Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Neither law has been used in some time, but that was also true in Denmark, until its ‘dead’ blasphemy law was resurrected a couple of months ago, to bring charges against someone for the first time in 46 years.
Other European countries such as Greece, Poland, Russia, Italy, Austria, and Finland also have such laws in active use, while places like Germany, Canada, and parts of Australia have laws that haven’t recently been used.
More seriously, 13 Islamic states, have blasphemy laws that come with the death penalty, with citizens in Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Mauritania actively facing persecution.
In recent days and weeks there have been extrajudicial killings of humanist activists for blasphemy in Pakistan, India, and the Maldives, as well as a spate of ongoing killings in Bangladesh.
The BHA is part of the global End Blasphemy Laws campaign, which has successfully seen blasphemy laws repealed since it was founded two years ago in France, Norway, Iceland, and Malta.
New Zealand now seems likely to be rapidly added to that list, with the renewed debate around Ireland leading to hopes that the current Government’s existing commitment to hold a referendum on the matter meaning that it will soon follow.
Andrew Copson
BHA Chief Executive Andrew Copson, said:“We are delighted that the investigation against Stephen Fry has been dropped, and what is more that the furore has prompted New Zealand to pledge to scrap its own blasphemy laws. It is urgent that Ireland soon follows, as well as Northern Ireland, Scotland, and other countries that have apparently “dead” blasphemy laws. This is important not only to ensure they are never resurrected, as almost happened in Ireland, but also to send a clear message to the rest of the world that blasphemy laws are unacceptable and that the fact that people are still dying over them in many countries must come to an end.”
Practicing Joy on the Road to Hell and Back.
Bruna is an Italian woman of a certain age with hilariously broken English – the building superintendent of a New York apartment block.
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