Monday, May 30, 2016

Preview: Alternative Routes 2016 (National Dance Company Wales)

Every year the next generation of young Welsh choreographers and designers are given an invaluable helping hand in their journey to becoming tomorrow’s innovators.

The annual Alternative Routes platform from National Dance Company Wales and the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama is an important and admired for young dancers who have an eye on their own choreographic futures. It’s been going for more than a decade, and has helped dancers and choreographers at NDCWales develop, explore and improve their artistic ideas, together with design students from the RWCMD.

For an entire month these stars in the making work together on forming new work which is then presented to the public as part of a full evening of dance at NDCWales’s home at the Dance House, part of the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff Bay.

Friday, May 27, 2016

Think No Evil of Us (Theatr Clwyd, Mold)


'Another day yawns ahead of me. All that is in my mind now is the way to commit suicide: it has got to be efficient and it has got to be in a place where no one is inconvenienced. Never known a period when I felt so utterly lonely.' - Kenneth Williams Diaries, August 30th, 1987

David Benson's semi-autobiographical one-man show about Carry On legend Kenneth Williams was first performed to great success at 1996's Edinburgh Fringe, after which it transferred to the West End and then toured the country. Benson revived the show for its tenth anniversary, and has done so again for its twentieth.

There's no denying Kenneth Williams was a strange man. But that's not intended as a slight, because in this case, strange means peculiar, odd, unusual. Unique. And that uniqueness means it's very difficult for anybody to fully capture Williams's indelible presence and character. Many have tried, including Olivier Award nominee Adam Godley and the crown prince of celebrity impersonators, Michael Sheen.