thu 10/07/2025

festivals

Interview: Heiner Goebbels, on staging strange worlds

First, the name. There’s no family link between the 57-year-old German composer and Hitler’s Doctor Death. This Goebbels cuts an impressive figure. Solidly built, with thick white hair and slightly cherubic features, and speaking fluent English, he’...

Read more...

Berlin Sounds, Ether Festival, Queen Elizabeth Hall

One of the recurring themes in BBC4's recent documentary, Krautrock: The Rebirth Of Germany, was the importance placed by so many of its participants upon transcending Germany's then-recent past. Move on several decades, and you now have a country...

Read more...

Bronco Bullfrog, East End Film Festival

One evening in 1970, Princess Anne ventured forth from her manor to attend a screening of Bronco Bullfrog at the Mile End ABC. Three decades later, the same cinema, now called the Genesis, hosted a screening of Barney Platts-Mills' debut feature...

Read more...

Dan Arborise, The Roxy Room, Edinburgh

Dan Arborise: 'An organic kind of guy, in quiet thrall to nature.'

Sometimes the back story doesn’t lead you to where you expect it might. Sometimes that turns out to be a good thing. Dan Arborise was born in Borneo to Polish parents, which opens up all sorts of musical possibilities, most of them probably far less...

Read more...

theartsdesk in Glasgow: Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art

Douglas Gordon: a faster 24 Hour Psycho than ever before

During my two-day whistlestop tour of various galleries and arts venues across Glasgow, I’m afraid I didn’t spot one white bike. There are, apparently, 50 of them that punters are free to use for the two-week duration of the city’s second biennial...

Read more...

theartsdesk at Savannah Music Festival

Over four days I've gorged on some world-class music. If you take a pretty city in the full swing of spring, add a dose of Southern US hospitality, some exquisite venues, and a music promoter able to garner the cream of musical talent from across...

Read more...

theartsdesk in Oxford: Food, Sex and Amis

“If I were a woman I would shag as many of you as had pubes and pricks that gave me sexual pleasure…” No less elderly than he is eminent, Professor Stanley Wells – editor of the Oxford Shakespeare and international authority on the Bard – smiles...

Read more...

New World theme for Edinburgh International Festival 2010

Jonathan Mills has announced the programme for Edinburgh International Festival 2010, on a theme of modern culture in the New Worlds of the Americas and Australasia. Ranging from California to Canberra, New York to New Zealand, from Santiago to...

Read more...

Literary giants gather in Oxford

The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival kicks off this week with a dazzling line-up of today's literary giants - including Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Hilary Mantel, Rose Tremain, Tracey Chevalier, John Le Carré, Philip Pullman and Sebastian Faulks....

Read more...

English Journey Revisited, AV Festival, Newcastle

Alan Moore performing at the Southbank Centre, London 2007

The description of the AV Festival’s closing event was vague in the promotional material. Going only by the promise of “music/performance,” and the undeniably odd combination of Alan Moore and Iain Sinclair with performance musicians including the...

Read more...

theartsdesk in Newcastle: The AV Festival

At seven o'clock on a Friday night, with the first spring twilight of the year as a backdrop, Newcastle’s Civic Centre reverberated to a new composition for its Carillon bells. Mingling eerily with birdsong, it marked a rather different start to the...

Read more...

theartsdesk in Galle: Beer and Roving in literary Sri Lanka

Thursday Never been to the Galle Literary Festival before. Very excited. A long weekend of bona fide book-nerdishness is just what I need – if only to stop me lying on the roof for three days with a book. Also I have one-on-one time lined up...

Read more...
Subscribe to festivals