As anyone who visited the recent Day of the Dead extravaganza will testify, the Parlour rooms at the bottom of Park street are well known to house some of the best local art you can find.  This coming February (cast your minds if you will, to a time when Christmas is long behind us and [...]

December 2nd, 2012 Read more

His family name being Evans, and his Christian name being Mark, he came to have a rather unremarkable name, which revealed nothing more than his Welsh origins and a parental lack of imagination. His, firstly, was the northern town of Wrexham and later the hallowed halls of Cambridge University where, like many a dashing and [...]

November 27th, 2012 Read more

A white sheet unfurls, paper cut outs dance. Thus begins The Paper Cinema’s The Odyssey, a unique adaptation of Homer’s well-known epic.   It is hard to classify The Odyssey. It is part puppet show, part silent film, part cinematic display, and part, hmm, interpretive dance? I am not sure it should be reduced to [...]

November 25th, 2012 Read more

You could be forgiven for thinking that the dancers of Bristol University do not get as much of the spotlight as their acting or singing counterparts. With an abundance of drama and musical productions put on each year, dance is often not showcased quire as extensively. This has all changed with the advent of the [...]

November 24th, 2012 Read more

An Autumn Art Lecture on a cold Tuesday night in the Wills Memorial building is perhaps not every human’s idea of Fun.  However, those uncool enough to turn up on Tuesday 30th October were definitely the winners, rewarded by being in the company of the erudite, humorous and well coiffured Denise Mina.   Currently in [...]

November 23rd, 2012 Read more

Waugh on War and the writing of military history   And so the Bristol Festival of Ideas marches on: provocative debate, public engagement and book hawking. On Friday 3rd November, Jonathan Dimbleby spoke to a lunchtime Watershed audience about his newest work of popular history, Destiny in the Desert: The Road to El Alamein – [...]

November 20th, 2012 Read more

With just over two weeks until The Welsh National Opera make their way over the Second Severn Crossing to Bristol, it was with great gusto that they recently announced their welcome gift of more than £1.2 million from one of America’s richest families.   The money from the Getty family, which totals US$2 million will [...]

November 19th, 2012 Read more

Could a novelist be replaced by an algorithm? Could a computer write a book? It might be a terrifying thought, given that storytelling is a distinctly human trait, but Philip Parker, professor of INSEAD Business School, believes a computer can write literature. Parker is the ‘author’ of some 200,000 books, mainly non-fiction, created using computer [...]

November 19th, 2012 Read more

My first impression of M-Shed’s Past Lives event was that it was extremely underwhelming. There was only a brief description of the event on M-shed’s website and no photos of what the event might actually entail. Maybe, I was therefore expecting too much, particularly as I was very impressed by their Imagined Lives exhibition, which [...]

November 16th, 2012 Read more

There were banners all over the town, hung over every street, plastered on every bus stop. The Baikal Film Festival was coming. Theme: Man and Nature. Be there. OK, I thought, that could be quite fun. I took a picture of an advert, paid no attention to it, and forgot about it for a week. [...]

November 14th, 2012 Read more