Ryedale Open Literature Entertainment

A meesage from John Dean:

Now, with April’s sweet showers around, a new open access occasional literary group is forming. Ryedale Open Literature Entertainment (ROLE), with the aim to share poetry, plays and prose, initially in Kirkbymoorside, then at various Ryedale venues.

Examples of activities which will assist the launch of  ROLE, directly or indirectly, include:

* the Scarborough Literature Festival 

* a book launch by poet Paul Munden: poems and photographs of Shandy Hall, Coxwold. Thursday 12 April, 7 -7.45 p.m. at Kirkbymoorside Library tickets available £1 now at the Library;

* poetry sharing at and around the Daffodil Walk in Farndale on Sunday 15th April

* a WEA literary course launch ‘True Voices of Feeling’ - Friends Meeting House, Kirkbymoorside   Monday 16th April 10.45-12.45 for ten weeks.

If you would like to help with these readings, or at others in the future, please contact John at 01439 771639 or email.

John Dean

Local writer wins award

A Ryedale author has won an award for her latest novel.

Jane Lovering, who works as a science technician at Lady Lumley’s School, won the award for the Romantic Comedy Novel of the Year at a ceremony in London.

The title was awarded by the Romantic Novelists’ Association for her novel Please Don't Stop The Music, the tale of a jewellery designer and a musician who keep secrets from each other and the world.

Please Don’t Stop the Music now goes forward to the Romantic Novel of the Year competition, which is influenced by public vote.

Find out more about the awards here.

'Playhouse Creatures' coming to the Arts Centre - 17th & 18th May

1699, and the theatres have re-opened after seventeen years of suppression. A bawdy and troublesome new age has begun, and with it the entrance of the first English actresses allowed upon the stage. Nell Gwyn, Elizabeth Barry, Rebecca Marshall, Mary Betterton: flesh and blood heroines admired by many, but living a precarious life... the gutters ever ready to reclaim them.

'Playhouse Creatures' directed by Jonathan Lewis is a Blue Aces Theatre production. In the following video Jonathan chats with some of the actors about the play and the process of putting it on the stage:
 





Blue Aces Theatre Ltd is a touring theatre company run in association with Helmsley Arts Centre and based in the Ryedale district of North Yorkshire. Founded by director Jonathan Lewis, the group produces high quality plays and educational workshops for local secondary schools, arts centres and theatres, (although we are keen to spread our wings and visit other areas!)

We have two ambitions. Firstly, every play we do matters to us; we choose projects with care and invest our work with a great deal of thought and passion. Secondly, we aim to give talented young actors the opportunity of working with professional performers. If you are aged between 16-30 and are serious about your acting, please get in touch.
Find out more about Blue Aces Theatre.

'Playhouse Creatures' is being performed at Helmsley Arts Centre on 17th & 18th May. Call the Box Office on 01439 771700 for tickets.

Our next film - 'War Horse' - 21 & 23 March

Set against a sweeping canvas of rural England and Europe during the First World War, "War Horse" begins with the remarkable friendship between a horse named Joey and a young man called Albert, who tames and trains him. When they are forcefully parted, the film follows the extraordinary journey of the horse as he moves through the war, changing and inspiring the lives of all those he meets-British cavalry, German soldiers, and a French farmer and his granddaughter-before the story reaches its emotional climax in the heart of No Man's Land.



Buy Tickets.

Parts 7 of Chris Ware's search for stormy weather

Part 7 : a new location to explore

Our Next Film - 'The Iron Lady' - 7/8th March

"The Iron Lady" is a surprising and intimate portrait of Margaret Thatcher, the first and only female Prime Minister of The United Kingdom. One of the 20th century's most famous and influential women, Thatcher came from nowhere to smash through barriers of gender and class to be heard in a male dominated world.

Buy Tickets

Call to artists

Arts and crafts people with a love of the North York Moors are being invited to take part in an exhibition celebrating the 60th anniversary of the National Park. ‘Your Place’ runs from 21 July to 19 August at the Inspired by… Gallery, Danby and will feature exhibits from 60 creatives whose work captures the area’s special qualities.

The Inspired by… Gallery was set up five years ago to give local artists an opportunity to promote their work to a wider audience. The Your Place exhibition will build on this ethos by offering 60 artists a chance to hire space at the gallery to raise awareness and sell their artwork throughout the four week run. The gallery is part of The Moors National Park Centre which attracts over 110,000 visitors each year.

The exhibition is part of a range of events to mark the National Park’s anniversary and will follow Inspired Landscape – a showcase of new work by six of the region’s leading contemporary artists Peter Hicks, Len Tabner and William Tillyer, Joe Cornish, Stephen Gillies and Kate Jones which runs from 13 May to 17 July.

Next Film - 'Hugo' - 29th February

Martin Scorsese's adaptation of Brian Selznick's award-winning novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret stars Asa Butterfield, as an orphan boy who lives in a Parisian train station. Sent to live with his drunken uncle after his father's death in a fire, Hugo learned how to wind the massive clocks that run throughout the station. When the uncle disappears one day, Hugo decides to maintain the clocks on his own, hoping nobody will catch on to him squatting in the station.

His natural aptitude for engineering leads him to steal gears, tools, and other items from a toy-shop owner who maintains a storefront in the station. Hugo needs these purloined pieces in order to rebuild a mechanical man that was left in the father's care at the museum -- the restoration was a project father and son did together.

When Georges (Ben Kingsley), the old man who runs the toy stand, catches on to the thievery, he threatens to turn Hugo over to the station's lone police officer (Sacha Baron Cohen, who makes every effort to send any parentless child in the station to the orphanage. But Hugo's run-in with Georges leads to a friendship with the elderly gentleman's goddaughter, Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz), who unknowingly possesses the last item Hugo needs to make the mechanical man work again.

Buy tickets.

Helmsley's Jazz 'n' Swing Weekend - line up announced

The line-up of musicians for this first ever jazz 'n' swing weekend has now been announced. Tickets are still available for the weekend, programmed by international jazz drummer John Petters.  It will bring together a unique combination of traditional jazz, swing and American songbook music, played by some of the top jazz performers in the UK today.

The musicians performing include the incredible Julian Stringle on clarinet, who made his TV debut with Acker Bilk when he was just 14. He has since played with George Chisholm, Don Lusher, Kenny Baker, Cleo Lane & Sir John Dankworth and Meatloaf. He has recorded with Roy Williams, Marc Almond,  George Melly, Joe Brown, Chas & Dave and the Spice Girls.

Featured on double bass is Annie Hawkins, another great international musician dubbed "Europe's first lady of the double bass".

Also in the line-up is pianist Dave Browning, who has been playing the British jazz scene for 20 years to great acclaim and who’s main influence is the great Thomas 'Fats' Waller.

The weekend has lectures, a forum and quizzes and incredible jazz performances, including the music of Fats Waller, Benny Goodman and the wonderful ‘Satchmo’, Louis Armstrong.

It runs from 2pm on Saturday 24th March to late on Sunday 25th March.

Full details and online booking click here.

Tickets start from £4 and a full weekend tickets to all the events costs £65.

The Shed brings KAN to Kirkby

The Shed On Tour brought the folk group KAN to Kirkbymoorside Memorial Hall tonight and attracted an appreciative audience of 180+ to the delight of promoters Simon Thackray and Sue Wright.

KAN

Irish flute and whistle player Brian Finnegan and Scottish fiddler Aidan O’Rourke, front men with Flook and Lau, have joined forces with two of the brightest stars in the world of rhythm and accompaniment – Yorkshire-based guitarist Ian Stephenson, who works with Kathryn Tickell, and Jim Goodwin, drummer and percussionist with the Halle and Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, to travel an innovative new musical path.

Visit the KAN website here.

The Shed On Tour is a new collaboration between The Shed and Rural Arts North Yorkshire and will bring leading artists from the world of folk, jazz, country and contemporary classical music to village and community halls like ours across Ryedale and beyond.

The Shed has been awarded £34,500 from the National Lottery through Arts Council England to work with Rural Arts on this exciting new pilot project.

You can watch KAN footage on YouTube here.

Chris Ware and the Benbecula Saga part 6

See how the paintings develop.

Our next film - The Deep Blue Sea - 22nd February

 
There couldn't be a better fit for playwright Terence Rattigan than film-maker Terence Davies, in his adaptation of The Deep Blue Sea, one of Rattigan's most touching plays....The film taps into the emotional thrust of the play, aided by an understated but eloquent and finally very moving performance from Weisz that's one of the best she has accomplished on screen....

Davies dares to fillet the play of some of its extraneous characters, and not all the dialogue is Rattigan's. He collapses most of the first act into a 10-minute wordless sequence and occasionally adds his own take on the affair between Rachel Weisz's Hester, married to Simon Russell Beale's High Court judge, and Tom Hiddleston's Freddie, an RAF pilot who scarcely deserves her love.

What he does tap into is the emotional thrust of the play, aided by an understated but eloquent and finally very moving performance from Weisz that's one of the best she has accomplished on screen.

Comparisons with David Lean's Brief Encounter seem obvious. And this, in its own way, has the same feeling for the period, in this case the post-war fifties, and the same sympathy with characters bound by the constraints of the time.