Frome Festival is Go...

Frome Festival began today, so Tristan Stevens' FITHWALL at Black Swan Arts which opened last night acted as a kind of amuse bouche to the feast to come. Tristan's exhibition invites us to "walk along the banks of the information-stream and among the sacred gifs and jpegs of the projected unconscious"and to emphasise the significance of these generated images, there's a zen garden where screens are bedded like hallowed rocks. Showing here till the end of August.
And now we're off in style, ten days crammed with so many events and displays no-one could get to even half of them. I'm planning to do as much as I can, and use the blog as a daily late-night bulletin to give the flavour of the immense variety and vivacity that is Frome Festival.
First stop the Silk Mill, which has already re-opened its famous 'festival tapas bar', where the Open Studios upstairs are sharing the extraordinary creativity of artists from clothes creators like Raggedy, aka Hayley Tresise, to the musical artistry of Tim Moore. 
There's a fabulous gallery exhibition here too: paintings of power stations by Lin Hawkins. some sinister, some almost like holy temples.
Over in Stony Street, Barry Cooper's exhibition Sonata 2014, is inspired by Bartok's 1944 violin concerto which he feels motivated every brushstroke. The graffitied newspapers are shown alongside his paintings made while listening, with thoughts of the 8.7 million British men about to go into the trenches one hundred years ago, 'a reflection of that past in the fragility of our present.'  There's resonance too with Picasso's angry sense of injustice. "All art is a kind of healing" Barry says.
On then to the talk by Will Buckingham at the Library, organised by John Payne and Wendy Miller-Williams, on the philosophy of the Moomin stories. Will says he's only an amateur Moominologist, but he's analysed the problems that troubled the young Moomintroll, like authority and apocalypse, and explains how Tove Jansson's tales carry within them solutions for us all. Then a quick dash with Rosie Finnegan and Alison Clink over to the Cornerhouse for an hour's dancing to the fabulous Critters, the band who can play anything but are supreme at ska-reggae and get the whole place bopping within minutes...  and a late ending at John Payne's party where Will Buckingham was guest of honour. A suitable conclusion to the festival's opening day: friendly, fun, and a little bit esoteric.

Cows, carnage, and festival creatures

In the week Gove shocked the sentient nation by extending his megalomaniac tweaks to the Literature curriculum by a purge of international classics ~ to be fair he didn't actually demand burning of all copies of To Kill a Mocking Bird and Steinbeck's Mice & Men though he might as well have from the fury evoked (including mine) ~  Lynn Gardner gave me respite from despair at our 'spoilers for sadness' culture in a delicate demurral to Alan Bennett's view of the playwright's craft. With hindsight, the National Treasure said, he should have been kinder to the audience. The Queen Mum of theatre commentary, with due respect, shifts from agreement at the joy of 'floating out of the theatre on a cloud of pleasure' to a more vigorous view:

 I also want to come out of the theatre on occasion feeling riled, angry, fired up for action or as if my heart is breaking... Yes I love being charmed and delighted in the theatre, but I don't want to be killed with kindness by artists, I want to be provoked by them and made to look at the world differently. I want to be taken outside my comfort zone. If that sometimes means they are going to risk boring me, offending me or even being cruel to me, then I'm not going to complain. Great art is seldom easy or kind.  I so agree. As Banksy said, art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. Lynn's piece used a picture of King Lear but I'm using Guernica.

Coincidentally ~ this is not one of my contorted segueways ~ Nevertheless Pub Theatre is currently preparing for our next production War Zones: six 10-minute dramas which will be performed at the Cornerhouse for Frome Festival in July, 4th-13th. We've got two great actors so Rosie & I are getting quite excited about that one. There's a line-up on the Festival website of other wordy events, ranging from Moomins for adults to Teatime Treats for children, including talks, performances, a book quiz, and poetry workshops from me and Rose Flint whose inspiring poem Elements of Healing you may have seen featured in the RUH in Bath.
Rose lives on the outskirts of Frome on a dairy farm which I rarely visit, having a psychosomatic allergy to free-ranging bovine creatures (also equine, ovine, porcine and canine... anything bigger than a cat, basically.) But this farm having recently won BBC4's Food & Farming Award for 'outstanding contribution with cutting-edge thinking and creative ideas' ~ and Rose having provided strawberry-pink Wellington boots to replace my Edina-ish high-heels ~ I ventured forth. The big thing about Lordswood Farm is that all the cows are fed on grass not grain, and even though these ones were (safely) ensconced in the dairy yard they still had plenty of grass to nosh on. So here's a happy image to conclude.