From azure & gold to mainly grey..

How dark and cluttered England alway seems after an absence: pale pleated sky hanging low over endlessly cluttered terrain on the drive home from Plymouth. In Spain masks are mandatory for all public places, and after a month with this sense of safety, the 14-day requirement to withdraw was actually a relief while readjusting to the on-off policy that England allows. But Frome is all about community so I've attempted a skim-catch-up on how the enterprising townsfolk have maintained their creativity... and of course, the answer is: impressively. 

Words first: here's a link to Andy Wrintmore's Giant Pod  interview with Chris Bucklow, artist and art historian in which, as Andy says, 'We go down a rabbit hole of Chris’s complex and captivating theories about how his subconscious communicates with him via dreams, how we can learn to derive or interpret lessons about ourselves and get a better read on where our heads might be at.' Eleanor Talbot too has created several Variations on a Theme - interviews with a difference. Her recent themes were healing, hair, and 'sexy connections'. 

Hunting Raven Bookshop is maintaining its reputation for innovative energy, with a socially-distanced book sale at the Silk Mill this weekend. with two more planned.  

Frome Writers Collective is maintaining active support for an increasing membership, with a virtual writing workshop, story contest, and monthly meetings continuing on Zoom, with historian Peter Clark giving a talk on his new book, Churchill's Britain.

And - not from this patch, but poet Steve Pottinger is so well-liked in Frome that he's allowable - do check out Come to me now,, a reflection on nature and how life is always 'a moment you pluck between finger and thumb, a just-ripe moment...

Obedient self-isolation similarly precludes any report on this weekend's exhibition of visual artworks made by people in Frome during lockdown, Creation from Isolation, curated by the Edventure students, but there's a virtual tour here. North Somerset Arts group took a different online approach, with members' work posted in their Virtual Art Exhibition throughout the weekend. Masses of high quality work, in a wide range of media - here's a painting by Gail Mason, from 'imaginary 'Emotional Landscapes,' places that I would like to be, and memories of how it feels to be in nature.' - because I miss these colours. 

I narrowly missed the 6x6 exhibition at the WHY Gallery, selling cores of tiny masterpieces  donated in support of the charity counselling service that Jill Miller founded - particularly poignant in the month of the first anniversary of her death. 

The amazing Frome Street Bandits have responded to lockdown with a massively impressive display by the full clan of 'semi-autonomous anarchic syndicalist' instrumentalists in a piece they call Ca Fait Pas Mal (compilation credit Jez le Fevre). Premiered October 19th - a fullscreen must-watch, here.

Frome's individual musicians have been prolific in their online posts on facebook, both on their own pages and on the public group Open Micsolate (with an impressive 6,600 members, none of whom seem any more keen to retrain than Fatima...) - here's Guru in a Camper Van from Paul Kirtley and Shoreline by Jane Langley and friends, both original works. And there's a new album out any minute now from Phil Cooper: here's Over My Head, one of the tracks on These Revelation Games. 

And now as autumn arrives although the world still feels nowhere near normal, there are reasons to be cheerful: my pre-ordered copy of Staying Human from Bloodaxe Books (edited by Neil Astley) has arrived and hedges are spurting with vivid, glamorous, reassuringly ordinary, bunches of berries. 

  

 

Rich drama at the Old Vic - go by toboggan if necessary!

Natural beauty versus profitable land development... a big topic in Frome right now as social media buzzes with opinions about the proposal for our southern fields, and also the issue at the heart of The Cherry Orchard at Bristol Old Vic in a production so fabulous I'm posting this blog early so you can book before it's totally sold out. Lovely to look at, excitingly directed, with a fantastic team of actors - this ticks every box.
  Kirsty Bushell is mesmeric as well as heartbreakingly beautiful as the impoverished-aristocrat owner of the orchard in question who refuses to contemplate the rescue-package offered by the entrepreneurial son of one of her own serfs. Intended by Chekhov as an analogy of decadent old Russia losing its grip on the future as the end of serfdom allowed a new bourgeoisie to take control, it's also a moving drama involving complex passionate relationships and this production, with its faux-theatre surrounding all the action, is simply inspired. I'm annoyingly purist about my favourite classics and arrived feeling wary I might find a set made of trampled cherries, or Grisha as a puppet-child watching the action, but everything about this concept is superb with the poignant subtleties and the humour (there's quite a lot that's laugh-out-loud funny too) both exquisitely conveyed. I could say more, and will when in my full review ~ this is just to alert anyone who enjoys classy live theatre: this is essential viewing and it's on till April 7.

In other news: we had snow, and the hills of Frome were alive with tobogganists and even skiers. The river was frozen too, which I've never seen before, but not quite hard enough for skating. Supermarkets ran out of milk and bread over the three frozen days, and Three Swans ran out of ale, so the role of hosting Edventure's Open Mic was taken over by Cornerhouse.
A wide variety of music and words, including me doing some of me crone poems, raised funds for YMCA Mendip and Edventure's projects, congratulations all involved & that's all for now, after email chaos courtesy of Site5 I am again majorly behind in my work schedule... I need to get out less.

Our revels now are ended....

Day Ten has come & gone in Frome Festival and all the festivallers are knackered. In previous years I've reported throughout the week ~ daily, even, one year ~ and now there's far too much to mention everything that was exciting or delightful or for varied reasons simply splendid,  so I'll just pick out a few personal highlights ~ there's a much more extensive album on my facebook page.

MUSIC was amazing throughout. The Frome Street Bandits provided a superb opening for the first big open-air event, parading through the sunny evening streets to perform in the market yard for the Food Feast, and Pete Gage Band gave a storming session at The Cornerhouse on the final day.  I absolutely loved Al O'Kane's Magical Folk Garden at Archangel, four nights of superb folk-rock performances in a mesmerically decorated environment, where I was stunned by the Bookshop Band, overwhelmed by the Cedar, entranced by the lively Pigeons, and enchanted by Emma Shoosmith & Al O'Kane himself. There was music everywhere in town throughout the week, from really great little folk, country, & jazz bands in pub courtyards & gardens to memorable sell-out sessions at the Cheese & Grain like the marvellous Billy Bragg.
  VISUAL ARTS enhanced the festival vibe everywhere too, with over fifty artists in the Open Studios trail and other small events too ~ I especially liked Mutartis Boswell's weird pieces in the Cellar, Robert Lee's strange things in boxes, and Ciara Nolan's big black&white photographs of Humans of Frome at the Silk Mill- a good place to pause between events for tasty Peruvian tapas in the courtyard and wine...

DRAMA is always a major interest for me, though as with all festivals, clashes are inevitable. Nevertheless Fringe Theatre had to be my priority: our production Time Slides was on for two nights, the second of which sold out completely so we had to send walkups away as over forty people squeezed into the upstairs room at the Cornerhouse to enjoy our three excellent young actors, Gabrielle Finnegan, Tiffany Rhodes & Matt Harrison, with Patrick Dunn adding atmospheric live music. There's a great review in the Fine Times Recorder which explains what's going on better than I can, even though I wrote the play... and the feedback is all on our Nevertheless page ~"Very good acting and intriguing thought-provoking script" sums up the general view, I'm happy to report.

The other stand-out production for me was Legends of Frome, an 'immersive theatre' piece devised by the Edventure creative arts course and performed at Sun Street Chapel. Taking as starting point the older traditions of town life like weaving and baking, and using a range of interactive devices involving masks, mime, song and storytelling, this young team involved us as audience, in small groups, in a journey of sensual experiences so that gradually we all became participant performers in the living story of our town. An amazingly ambitious piece that worked extremely well.

WORDS are always a strong element in the festival, and Frome Writers Collective organised some excellent events for prose writers: the first weekend saw Writers in Residence in cafes and pubs throughout the town with a busy Small Publishers' Fair at the Silk Mill, and for the final Sunday there were workshops and a talk from literary agent Jane Judd at the library.  For poets & poetry lovers,  Liv Tork hosted a terrific Hip Yak Poetry Slam at the Archangel and my Festival Poetry Cafe at the Garden Cafe was also a great evening and a full house. Here's our superb guest Steve Pottinger (his scathing satiric poem Stabberjocky has since gone viral) with our new 'Festival Poet Laureate' John Christopher Wood, who will revisit us later in the year as a guest himself, hopefully with more strange odes.

Frome Festival more than any other I've known is a real community celebration, with so many free events for everyone to join in ~ pubs like the Archangel and the Artisan have hosted childrens' activities by day as well as evening music, and the Childrens' Festival in the market yard was amazing.  There's an 'open garden' trail too, although I didn't have time this year, and so much more ~ I shall keep thinking of people & acts this post hasn't mentioned as I fly off, now, to Greece for a week in Atsitsa Bay on Skyros island...
Have a lovely time, Frome, basking in the afterglow of another really good festival...

The week with an important date... summer solstice!

Yes, summer solstice brought us a full moon ~ first time since 1967 for this coincidence and there won't be another until 20162, apparently ~  so now the days will begin to get shorter and lets hope the rain starts to ease before Worthy Farm is completely under water. Glastonbury is not the only celebration on the horizon of course - here we're gearing up for a fabulous Frome Festival, whatever the weather. On Sunday afternoon the Grain Bar offered a taster from the box of delights that is this year's festival.
I was there to wave flyers for Nevertheless Fringe Theatre and the Poetry Cafe, and to enjoy samples of some of the performers ~ like composer/pianist Stephen Marquiss, spooky ghost-hunter Georgiana Hay and Martin Dimery with a tempting slice of his one-man show Shakespeare Rattle & Roll, showing how Buddy Holly would sing Sigh no more.. hey nonny nonny!
Also among the amazing range of productions there's an immersive theatrical journey entitled Legends of Frome, devised by the creative Edventure apprentices. I've had a peek of this in development and it looks fantastic, but everything ~ even the location ~ is under wraps so you'll have to just book & trust me.
And even though there's so much bubbling under for festival week ~ Friday 1st July to Sunday 10th, if you're not from round these parts ~ the usual art-y life goes on: a superb Roots Grain Bar night on Wednsday from a trio who could hardly get more international: Hiroki Okano from Japan joined by Canadian Domenic DeCicco and and UK's Nigel Shaw, between them sharing more instruments than I could count or name. Stunning session.

Friday night saw the opening of Black Swan Arts 30th Anniversary event, 1000 POSTCARDS, possibly the gallery's most ambitious project ever, and certainly the one causing most curating problems: to display one thousand postcards selected from the deluge submitted for this fundraising event. Launch night on Friday was so crowded the queue to view snaked all around the downstairs cafe as it seemed every entrant & their families wanted to check out the Wall of Fame poster - and view the postcards, of course, all of which are delightful or striking or both, and most of which are brilliant. The exhibition is on till 28th June with all postcards then for sale, including the 'big name' donations.

The market yard had more than stalls on Saturday as a bevy of richly-robed worthies from around the shires arrived to ring their handbells and O-Yea the features of their home in the annual Town Crier contest. They all looked marvellous in their feathered caps and braided robes - I didn't get a snap of the full troop but here's the Frome hosts in their own regalia.

What would life look like if we abandoned our 'civilised' industrial economy? And what other options are there, anyway? We The Uncivilised, an amateur film about a quest for these answers, was screened at Frome's Hubnub Centre on Saturday afternoon. Created by a young couple disillusioned with modern life who set off with a film camera to explore alternatives, this very personal story has some pithy interviews and finds some fascinating locations while ultimately highlighting very recognisable dilemmas. I'd have liked more interviews within the communities but there's excellent support on the website to help these valuable views gain wider awareness.

All of which new old-fashioned ways segueways neatly into my visit to the Earthhouse at the Ancient Technology Centre in Cranborne,  a 200-seater theatre under an earth roof held up by oak tree trunks, lit only by firelight as the sky darkens. Here you can gather around that fire to hear stories from around the world presented with sensational skill by Crick Crack Club. Their theme on Saturday was Bawdy! and there was much of that but other human longings & fears too in tales from Papua New Guinea to South America at this unforgettable event. Nothing like the kind of story-telling that makes you long for a fast-forward button, these were superb performers: immensely endearing quirky styled Nell Phoenix, rhythmic strength TUUT, and Tim Ralphs whose folk-ballad deploring the redundancy of porn-movie fluffers in these Viagaran days was my highlight of the night.

And now as England steadies itself for whatever lies ahead after the big vote, I'll end with a snap of the ECOS amphitheatre, built to celebrate England's joining the European Union. I'm really really hoping I won't have to tag this image with an adapted Wilfred Owen quote:
Oh what made fatuous Fromies toil
To build ECOS at all....

May Medley (2): historical dramas, art, life, and fish.

If you want an antidote to all those ponderous & inscrutable period plays, filmed or staged, look no further than Bath Spa University Theatre where the third year students have brought the 18th century comedy The Servant of Two Masters vividly up-to-any-date-you-think-of, and the audience couldn't stop laughing.  On a candy-striped set as sublimely silly as the plot and dressed in costumes either ludicrous or gaudy or both, a company of talented young actors showed huge professionalism in this high-energy romp in which three determined women successfully outwit three foolish & greedy men. Bravo to Beatrice, superbly played by Gabrielle Finnegan, and her lucky Florindo ~ and how lucky also that two of the shiniest stars of the show are coming to Frome for Nevertheless Fringe Theatre festival production: Time Slides.

From matches to hatches and dispatches, without the blissed-out bit in the middle: Vamos Theatre brought their new show The Best Thing to Frome's Merlin theatre. This production, writer-director Rachael Savage explains in the programme, is a tribute and apology to the women of the late 1960s who gave up their children for adoption under pressure to do ‘the best thing’.  Her two-year research is synthesised into the tale of one such girl recalled after her death when her father and daughter finally meet, bringing reconciliation to both. I found these programme notes essential, as a two-generation difference is difficult for young actors to convey without speech or change of facial expression, and the projected black-&-white visuals seemed mismatched to era ~ I say this with some assurance as my first baby was born in 1968.  Vamos is famous and highly-regarded for its wordless masked performances and the four actors are immensely skilful at body-language but it still takes a lot of mindwork to join the dots.

It's a serious topic but the show isn't all sombre: there are laugh-aloud comedic scenes like the shadow-silhouette coitus to that 1966 World Cup commentary "They think it's all over ~  it is now!”, the typing lesson, and even the labour ward. But as a coulrophobic I find it difficult to relate to masked characters however clever their gestures, and the soundtrack ~ after an initial burst of Lulu’s 1964 hit Shout ~ relentlessly avoids evoking any era. Sound is important in a wordless story and I did wonder if with different music the school party at the back might have stopped texting & chatting as the drama onstage slowly unfolded. But it was great to see the theatre so full, and the four actors behind 17 different masks were loudly applauded.

Animating Images is the exciting new exhibition at Black Swan Arts, curated by David Daniels. David's own work is on display alongside several other renowned animation artists and there are films, examples of storyboards & character sheets, and explanations of terms & processes, with a talk on May 19th.

Away-day corner: I'm less involved with courses now, my writing interests having taken me other ways, but this week have actually led two sessions: one for the Edventure 'Earning a Living in the Creative Arts'  course at 42 Acres ~ great to work with a group of young people choosing to design their own futures rather than fit into the square holes of routine 'job-specifications'. At the end of the session I asked for a 60-second summary in different style from everyone ~ here's my 'recipe': Ingredients: several acres of sunlit ground  ~  an old house cunningly converted ~ a dozen shiny people, curious, humorous and articulate.  Method: Place the house on the grass.  Sprinkle in the shiny people. Listen to them. They are all wonderful.

And on Saturday I went to Cheltenham for a reunion session with a group that first met several years ago in the Isle of Wight on a Skyros Holistic Holiday weekend, and has, impressively, continued to meet regularly ever since in various venues. They're great company and excellent writers, and such is their enthusiasm that we wrote, read, and discussed, for over four hours at the Abbey Hotel. Cheltenham railway station is about a mile from the centre via a footpath route strewn with wildflowers and May blossom ~ a delightful end to an immensely enjoyable session.

Back in Frome, Archangel's Sunday musician was Tom Corneill, playing in the courtyard as the sun shone and various small people danced.  This week's footnote post is a sad one though.
A leakage of slurry upstream has poisoned this stretch of the Frome, killing over 500 fish and countless invertebrates: an anxious prognosis for the health of the river stock this season and for the kingfishers and otters too. Good news is that the Environment Agency stepped in swiftly and the water quality is being restored so hopefully the river will recover.

false flags, bunting, and bluebells

I'm opening with a response to the talk at Westway cinema on Sunday so if you're one of those Mark Twain had in mind when he said "It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they've been fooled" then skip this bit, there's a picture of a cuddly toy further down.

What's really interesting about the talk by Richard Gage about 9/11 Truth is he sticks to the facts. He's a architect, and he knows about steel strengths and responses, he knows how buildings collapse. He doesn't use the C worlds like coverup or conspiracy, he uses a flowchart ~ which my inner logician loved ~ to show the analytic process the investigation should have followed instead of disposing of extensive evidence as waste and ignoring hours of eye-and-ear witness accounts of explosions. It's a fact too that the lift shafts, best place for detonators, were under maintenance at the time by a new firm which afterwards disbanded, and that the buildings were massively insured against terrorism shortly before the attack.
And why talk about it now? Because as Richard Gage says, Every major war has been started by a false flag operation, and in the words of Martin Luther King, "a time comes when silence is betrayal."  Richard is off to present his talk in Brussels now, congratulations to Sheila Coombes for bravely putting Frome forward as one of only three places in the UK ready to listen.

In other news:

Jazz Jam at the Cornerhouse on Sunday too, and on Monday an excellent evening with Warminster Writers' Circle talking about writing short plays with this friendly, very witty group.

Frome Arts Society spring exhibition is currently showing at Rook Lane Arts - some great paintings here.
And in another part of the forest, the Share Shop opening night another brilliant concept ~ non-ownership. Here you simply drop in to borrow a tool or a toy that you can't afford to buy or don't want to possess forever. How Frome is that! From skateboards, keyboards, and golf-clubs to household tools, it's all there, and big credit to the Edventure team and to Johannes for bringing our town one step nearer to sensible consumerism.

Hunting Raven Books was chosen as Julia Donaldson
Independent Bookshop of the Month, with a visit from the Gruffalo to celebrate, and although this being an arts blog I generally avoid matters political, I'm including this image of me with Theo Simon at the LoopdeLoop pop-up curry-house in the Grain yard.

Ending this posting with a sunny photo jaunt to Bradley Wood and Longleat ~ thanks Mike Witt for the trip.