Helmsley Arts Centre: March 2011

Tuesday 29 March 2011

York Theatre Royal Dance-A-Thon - 3 April

Dance-A-Thon
De Grey Rooms
Dance through the decades for Access For All

You could be one of hundreds of people dancing in the De Grey Rooms Ballroom for 1½ hours or from morning ‘til night to provide Access for All. Whatever your age, whatever your talent, try your hand at just one or all of the following: Turn of the century Ceilidh Dancing, Spicy Salsa and Latin American, 1920s and 1930s Jazz, Glamorous ‘40s Ballroom, 1950s Rock ‘N’ Roll, 1990s Hip Hop or classic Disco (perfect fun for all the family).

Each class will be taught by professional dancers, so while you experience something new and take part in this brilliant event, you can help raise money to allow everyone to experience and enjoy these spectacular facilities.

York Theatre Royal is committed to providing Access for All, but we need your participation in the Dance-A-Thon to ensure that these superb workshop, Youth Theatre and event spaces are accessible for wheelchair users, those with physical impairment or anyone who requires the use of push chairs or trolleys for mobility.

This will also be the first of many opportunities to dance in the beautifully restored De Grey Room Ballroom.

To play your part in this exciting event follow these four simple steps:

1) Register for a dance style and slot, or commit to dancing for the whole 10½ hours by calling the box office on 01904 623568 or online at http://www.yorktheatreroyal.co.uk/

To sign up for more than one class or the whole 10½ hours, please ring Box Office or visit us in person.

2) Pay your £5 registration fee
3) Receive your sponsorship pack (or download below) and collect your donations
4) Come and dance the style of your choice under professional instruction and help us provide Access for All

10.00am to 8.30pm - Dance All Day
10.00am to 11.30am - Classic Disco
11.30am to 1.00pm - 1990s Street & Hip Hop
1.00pm to 2.30pm - 1950s Rock 'n' Roll
2.30pm to 4.00pm - 1940s Glamorous Ballroom
4.00pm to 5.30pm - 1920s & 1930s Jazz
5.30pm to 7.00pm - 1920s Salsa & Latin American
7.00pm to 8.30pm - Traditional Ceilidh

Sign up to an individual session online or to sign up for more than one class or the whole 10.5 hours then please ring Box Office or visit us in person.

If you would like to donate to our Access For All Fund you can do so by clicking here.

Monday 21 March 2011

A new wave ripples through Yorkshire's culture

As tickets go on sale for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, the Yorkshire region is beginning to feel the ripple effect of this momentous event which is not just a sporting stage, but also a cultural arena. As the world’s spotlight begins to turn to the UK in anticipation of next year’s games, imove, the Legacy Trust UK programme for Yorkshire, is launching the next wave of cultural events taking place across the region.

imove is bringing together the best creative talent from the region to produce a programme of events designed to inspire the public in the run up to the London 2012 Games. The programme is funded by the Legacy Trust UK - an independent charity set up to create a cultural and sporting legacy from the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games across the UK, Yorkshire Forward and Arts Council England. Over the next 18 months, more than 100 events will be taking place across Yorkshire encompassing every artistic medium including dance, drama, music and photography and all sports from cricket to synchronised swimming.

The events will be region-wide, ensuring that everyone has the chance to experience the creative collaborations, many of which will be set against the backdrop of Yorkshire’s diverse and dramatic landscape or in unusual spaces.

These include:

‘The Mill – City of Dreams’, a project by Freedom Studios, uses the derelict Drummonds Mill in Bradford as a grand setting for a theatre production which explores the lives of the mill workers, using a cast and crew made up of the local community and ex-mill workers and their families, with performances taking place in March and April 2011.

The crowds at the Hull Super League Rugby Derby will be treated to a half time performance by Northern Ballet at the Hull Super League Rugby derby in April 2011 as part of ‘Don’t Just Sit There’ – a series of events involving some of the region’s top dance companies which aims to get people off their seats and moving.

A ‘Flying Day’ at Sewerby Hall in July 2011 on the coast of Bridlington will take place as part of ‘Wingbeats’, a music-theatre project which explores the relationship between flying and the striking landscape of East Riding.

‘Stanza Stones’ sees poet Simon Armitage working with the Ilkley Literature Festival and groups of young writers aged 13-18 taking them out onto the Pennines and creating a series of poems in response to the landscape. Alongside this work, a new series of poems by Simon will be carved on a trail of standing stones and rocks along the Pennines from Ilkley to Marsden – creating a lasting legacy from the project.

‘Sea Swim’ is a mass participation project involving sea-bathing at Scarborough. The project has a strong connection with poetry and creative writing and poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy has agreed to be its patron. Led by writer John Wedgwood Clarke and artist-curator Lara Goodband, this project will explore the relationship between swimming and creativity in literature and the visual arts, alongside the history of sea-bathing as documented in Yorkshire's unique museum collections.

New projects are still being commissioned as part of imove. Over the coming months, imove will be announcing more new commissions which will extend the programme into further towns and cities across Yorkshire and will ensure a lasting cultural legacy is left in the region in the slipstream of the 2012 Games.

Tessa Gordziejko, Creative Director of imove, comments: “We are extremely excited about imove and the creative programme that is emerging from the two worlds of sport and art that rarely co-exist. The inspiration and energy from the UK’s hosting the Olympics in 2012, combined with the Legacy Trust resource, has opened up a once in a lifetime opportunity to showcase the huge pool of creative talent here in Yorkshire to a global stage. We hope that by combining these two disciplines in a fun and original way – we’ve produced a programme which will appeal to people of all ages and backgrounds from across the region.”

To find out more information about the imove projects and events happening in each area go to the imove website at http://www.imoveand.com/. The site will be regularly updated with new events and commissions. Source

Tuesday 15 March 2011

'Behind the Scenes' - Appleton le Moors

An exhibition of costume and stage sets by Jessica Worrall, who has worked for 18 years with Barry Rutter and Northern Broadsides will take place later this month to raise money for Appleton Village Hall.

Preview Evening 25th March 7.30 - 9.30pm
including Wine and Nibbles
£3.00

Saturday 26th March 10.00am - 12.00 noon
with Morning Coffee and Presentation by Jessica Worrall at 11.00am
£2.00

Sunday 27th March 2.00 - 5.00pm
with Tea and Cakes
£2.00

Further information may be had from nicolaoldroyd@btinternet.com.

JESSICA WORRALL - ASSOCIATE DESIGNER

Jessica has designed the majority of ABSOLUTE THEATRE¹s productions, including Queen Christina, The Misanthrope, The Wizard of Oz, Dona Rosita the Spinster, The Shoemaker's Wondrous Wife and Don Perlimplin. She has worked on several productions in Bath with Andrew and Simon, including Spring Awakening, The Rivals, Electra and The Butterfly's Evil Spell and Twelfth Night.

For NORTHERN BROADSIDES designs include A Midsummer Night's Dream and Anthony and Cleopatra (NATIONAL TOURS). Jessica is a member of performance group THE PEOPLE SHOW, designing and devising on shows 99 to 102. She directed and designed the Elvis-inspired Song Without Sound? People Show 107 (YOUNG VIC, LONDON and NATIONAL TOUR) and in 2002 wrote and directed Second.

Film work includes The Loss of Sexual Innocence. As an artist she has exhibited in London, Glasgow and Los Angeles. She was a short-listed finalist for the Glasgow-based Bulkhead Art Prize, for her video and sound installation Memorial Imoral.

Saturday 5 March 2011

Global Street Art Project

Can art change the world? Just possibly. Or at least it may just be able to change the way that certain parts of it look. Coming soon to a wall near you: a vast, black and white, billboard-sized print of a face – which could be yours, your mother's, your child's or a total stranger's.

It's the latest and most spectacular project of the French street artist, JR: one of the biggest global art projects ever attempted, a public art initiative conceived on a truly monumental scale.

For the project which JR is calling Inside Out, and which he launched on Wednesday at TED2011, he's seeking collaborators from all across the world.

He is asking people everywhere to supply him with photos, which he will then return, blown up to billboard-sized prints. He wants us to paste them up for him: on walls, roofs, across buildings, and fences, anywhere it's possible, and preferably in places that matter to us. . It's street art, crowd-sourced and super-sized.

TED Prize Winner JR & INSIDE OUT from TED Prize on Vimeo.

The project won him this year's TED prize the prestigious award previously given to Bono, Bill Clinton and Jamie Oliver, which involves being given $100,000 and "One Wish To Change The World". And he announced that this was it: "I wish for you to stand up for what you care about by participating in a global art project and together we'll turn the world inside out."

It's not the first time he's attempted to change a street or cityscape. He's taken photos of teenagers from the Paris banlieue and posted them across the city's more chi-chi quartiers. He's covered roofs in a Kenyan shanty town, Kibera, with huge photographic portraits of women who live there. And in Brazil he pasted the walls of a favela in Rio with vast, black and white eyes, in order to give it, quite literally, a more human face. But Inside Out is a of a different order of magnitude altogether.

This time, he wants to use not just his photographs, but ones taken by as many different people as possible, and for them to post them in as many locations, in as many countries of the world as they're able. It is, he says, "a chance for everyone to share who they are and what they stand for". He's asking people to take a photo of "someone they care about and post it somewhere it matters".

Upload the photo with details of what you want to do, and he'll send you back a huge poster-size print for you to post where you want. "Art is not meant to change the world," he told the TED audience. But it can "change perceptions" which in turn will "change energy" and ultimately it is that will "enable you to change the world".

If JR, who calls himself a "photograffeur" and who started out painting illegal grafitti on walls across Paris, had simply announced this on his website, it would be one thing, but the aim of the TED prize is to lever the power of the TED community, one that includes former presidents and the founders of Google, and given what he's achieved before on a tiny budget with no publicity, the results could well be startling.

The website has already been built – http://www.insideoutproject.net/ – and the printing presses that will make the huge poster-size prints is already in place. All he needs now is your photos. Source

Do you want to take part?

Friday 4 March 2011

Kirkbymoorside artist Jim Wright - exhibition 5 - 12 March

Jim Wright will be showing his latest paintings at his studio gallery in Kirkbymoorside from 5th to 12th March, it’s an opportunity to see his new works, before they are sent to galleries across the North of England.

The work of landscape and seascape artist Jim Wright is all about atmosphere and emotion. His favourite haunts are the moors, mountains and coastal regions, where he can really feel the full force of nature and soak up the energy of the place.

Last autumn he travelled from his home in Kirkbymoorside, to stay at The Lighthouse in Ardnamurchan, it’s the most westerly point of mainland Britain, and experiences some wild and tempestuous storms, perfect conditions for an artist inspired by light and movement. Many artists have been inspired by the quality of the light in Cornwall, the West coast of Scotland also offers this clear unpolluted light, with the additional benefits of a little more solitude. This exhibition will feature paintings done on location and inspired by his journey to the Lighthouse, alongside his paintings of The North York Moors and the sea.

Jim Wright spends so much time away on the moors and at the coast, that in Kirkbymoorside, he is probably better known as a singer and guitarist on the music scene, than as an artist. He began playing soul music with members of Kirkbymoorside Town Brass Band at annual charity 'Big Night Out' gigs, which led onto the formation of the band 'Late in the Day'. If you pass the door, when he's painting at home, you may be able to hear a classic soul number, as he always works to music.

The week long exhibition is open daily from 11am to 4pm, at 53 West End, Kirkbymoorside. Further information can be found on Jim's website.

Thursday 3 March 2011

Google Art Project

A collaboration between Google and 17 of the world's top art galleries and museums, including the National Gallery and Tate Britain in the UK, the Google Art Project takes the Street View approach into the gallery.

With Google Art Project, users can wander around 17 of the world's top galleries and museums and view 1,061 artworks. There are also 17 special gigapixel images – one for each participating institution's most treasured piece, allowing viewers to zoom right in to brush-stroke levels of detail.

Over the past 18 months, a Google team has been zipping around the likes of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the Palace of Versailles using trolley mounted cameras to photograph corridors and galleries. Users can explore each gallery from room to room or create their own collections of masterpieces.

This video explains a little about how it was all done:

The project is explained in more detail here:

The full list of participating museums is as follows:

Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin - Germany
Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian, Washington DC - USA
The Frick Collection, NYC - USA
Gemäldegalerie, Berlin - Germany
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC - USA
MoMA, The Museum of Modern Art, NYC - USA
Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid - Spain
Museo Thyssen - Bornemisza, Madrid - Spain
Museum Kampa, Prague - Czech Republic
National Gallery, London - UK
Palace of Versailles - France
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam - The Netherlands
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg - Russia
State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow - Russia
Tate Britain, London - UK
Uffizi Gallery, Florence - Italy
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam - The Netherlands