The Week in Light & Sound
- Details
Northern Nights - The Edinburgh International Festival will open its 70th-anniversary year with a major public event in Edinburgh's St Andrew Square. Bloom will be the third opening event by EIF associate artists 59 Productions. For the first time, it will be held over two evenings, on 4 and 5 August. It will combine large-scale animation with architectural projection-mapping techniques using the facades around St Andrew Square as a vast canvas.
Under the direction of 59 Productions founder Leo Warner, the square will become an immersive environment, incorporating a newly commissioned musical score from composer Nick Powell. Warner said: "We decided to place audiences inside the event, encompassing them within nearly half a linear kilometre of projection-mapped architecture and bespoke lighting fixtures. We will use music, sound and light to tell a story celebrating the 70-year history of the International Festival and the associated Edinburgh festivals, and the immeasurable impact that it has had on the cultural world."
Gold Standard - Six of the UK’s leading drama schools have been awarded gold status under the government’s new Teaching Excellence Framework. Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts and the Conservatoire for Dance and Drama – which encompasses Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, LAMDA and RADA – all received the rating.
Guildhall School of Music and Drama and Chicken Shed Theatre Trust were both given a silver ranking and the Academy of Live and Recorded Arts received a provisional rating. LIPA’s principal and chief executive Mark Featherstone-Witty welcomed the rankings: “The TEF is one helpful decision by government: to acknowledge that teaching and learning is what higher education does, as well as research. For institutions like ours, where craft learning predominates, our often stated misgivings about the current rankings have finally been heard.”
Evita Returns - Bill Kenwright's production of Evita will return to the West End for 12 weeks in July. It runs at the Phoenix Theatre from July 28 to October 14, with a gala performance on August 2. It originally ran at the Dominion Theatre in 2014, before embarking on a national tour. The production marks the 65th anniversary of the death of Eva Peron, whose life the musical is based on. Bob Tomson and Bill Kenwright direct, with design by Matthew Wright, choreography by Bill Deamer and sound design by Dan Samson.
Pay-for-Review - The website which proposed a controversial pay-for-review scheme for productions on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe has postponed its plans. The edfringereviews.com site proposed to charge companies £50 for a review during the fringe under the slogan "It is not about the reviewer it is about your show". The site, which does not have any reviews on display, now says that the concept is "more complicated than we thought", and that it will introduce the scheme in 2018. A spokesman for the site has told The Stage that the proposal this year was a "fishing trip" to see if there was any interest in what he was offering.
(Jim Evans)
27 June 2017
