The Blue Light Theatre Company’s pantomime costume maker, Christine Friend, turning her hand to sewing wash bags for NHS frontline workers
CHRISTINE Friend normally would be making costumes for The Blue Light Theatre Company’s pantomime in York. For the past eight weeks, she has been turning her skills instead to sewing for frontline workers in the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic.
She is among a group of volunteers from York, Harrogate and Knaresborough that has come together via Facebook to make uniform wash bags out of anything from pillowcases to old duvet covers.
Now the Facebook group Bag The Bug is being wound up because many of the sewers and supporters are going back to work today, having made a total of 13,757 wash bags to donate to care homes, NHS staff, GP surgeries, ambulance stations and hospitals.
“They’ve been making the bags for all our Blue Light Theatre NHS friends and their colleagues and I think it’s amazing they’ve reached that total in only eight weeks,” says Christine’s husband, Mark, actor and publicist for Blue Light Theatre, a company made up of paramedics, ambulance dispatchers, York Hospital staff and members of York’s theatre scene.
Joanne Halliwell and her daughter Abbey, who set up the Bag The Bug group for York, Harrogate and Knaresborough
“The idea is that after a shift, frontline workers can remove their uniform at work, put it straight into the bag, then close it tight and pop it into their washing machine when they get home to prevent cross-contamination.”
The Facebook group Bag The Bug – Covid 19 – York, Harrogate & Knaresborough was set up two months ago by Joanne Halliwell and her daughter Abbey. “They were wanting something to do during lockdown and found a group called Bag The Bug, based in the north west, who were making the bags for NHS staff in Bolton,” says Mark.
“They decided to make some bags too and after talking to the group’s coordinator, they set up a group locally.”
Adrian Deligny: One of the frontline workers who has received a Bag The Bug wash bag
They had an immediate response, from people asking for the bags, others offering to donate material, sew, help to coordinate Bag The Bug and drive for the group.
Among the care workers to receive a bag was Adrian Deligny, who said: “The uniform bag is an excellent idea in order to help stop the spread of the virus at home.
“Before this, I was putting everything in a bin bag, which wasn’t the best. It is important that during these difficult times everybody is united. This project has shown an unparalleled demonstration of solidarity and generosity. My wife and I are extremely grateful.”
THE Guardian writer Tim Dowling closes the door on the 2020 York Festival of Ideas by shedding light on shed life in lockdown.
In this evening’s closing online talk, he asks: “What happens when a global pandemic shrinks life to a claustrophobic domestic sphere? Some of us adapt, some of us protest, some of us reassess our goals…”
…and some of us, like Tim Dowling, “barely notice the difference”. How come?
For 12 years, Dowling has chronicled a life of small nothings in his Guardian column. Suddenly, in these Covid-19 times, he finds the rest of the world is taking to the bunker too.
Who better to explore life in lockdown at a festival brimful of isolation ideas than this “leading expert in never going anywhere if he can help it”.
Dowling did make one big move, however: he first came to Britain from the United States at the age of 27. Now, in addition to his column in the Guardian’s Weekend magazine, he is the author of such books as How To Be A Husband and Dad You Suck.
Happy to be joining that CV is How To Be Happy All The Time, his audiobook on the subject of cynicism. Cynics will not be surprised to learn the audiobook is short. Happiness never lasts, as we cynics know.
Brought to you virtually by the University of York, York Festival of Ideas concludes today. Visit yorkfestivalofideas.com/2020-online/ for full details of this afternoon and evening’s programme.
Will the last one out tonight, please turn off the virtual festival light. See you next June.
YORK Musical Society’s glorious celebration of Baroque music at York Minster tonight is postponed rather than cancelled.
“We are classing it as ‘postponed’ as we do plan to incorporate this fabulous repertoire at some point in the future when we are allowed to sing together again,” says YMS’s Lesley Peatfield..
“We are still rehearsing the lovely Handel anthems and the Gloria via Zoom for those members of YMS who have been taking part this term and plan to sing each piece through online in the ‘splendour’ of our own homes instead.”
Lesley adds: “With the future of choirs and singing in groups a big subject for debate, we are planning to rehearse and enjoy Handel’s Messiah for the autumn term via the Zoom platform. Keep singing and stay safe.”
The dust jacket to Roman Krznaric’s imminent new book, The Good Ancestor
WILL you even read to the end of this sentence?
I asked because social philosopher and author Roman Krznaric reckons we are “living in the age of the tyranny of the now, where the greatest challenge facing humankind is our inability to think long term,”,as he will discuss in this afternoon’s free talk at the online 2020 York Festival of Ideas.
Sorry, you can’t read his powerful new book just now. Be patient. You will have to wait until July 16 when The Good Ancestor: How To Think Long Term In A Short-Term World will be published by WH Allen (Penguin Random House).
For a taster, tune in this afternoon, when Krznaric will contend: “Politicians can barely see past the next election or businesses past the next quarterly report, and we are addicted to the latest tweet and the ‘buy now’ button.
“How can we overcome this frenetic short-termism and extend our time horizons to tackle long-term challenges from the climate crisis to threats from artificial intelligence and genetically engineered pandemics?”
Krznaric will reveal how you can expand your imagination far beyond the here and now. Exploring everything from the seventh-generation thinking of indigenous peoples and politically empowered “guardians of the future” to the history of the London sewers and the latest neuroscience research, he will argue that we have an inbuilt capacity to become “cathedral thinkers”.
“It is time to confront one of the most vital questions of the 21st century: How can we be good ancestors?” says Krznaric, a “public philosopher who writes about the power of ideas to change society”.
His books, such as Empathy, The Wonderbox and Carpe Diem Regained, have been published in more than 20 languages. His new one, the aforementioned The Good Ancestor: How To Think Long Term In A Short-Term World, is “the book our children’s children will thank us for reading”, says U2 guitarist The Edge.
What did Roman ever do for you? Write books, plan long term, found the Empathy Museum, give a talk online today….
After growing up in Sydney and Hong Kong, Krznaric studied at the universities of Oxford, London and Essex, where he gained a PhD in political sociology.
Founder of the world’s first Empathy Museum, he is a research fellow of the Long Now Foundation in San Francisco and his writings have been influential among political and ecological campaigners, education reformers, social entrepreneurs and designers. H
His public speaking, talks and workshops have taken him from a London prison to Google’s headquarters in California. Learn more at romankrznaric.com and @romankrznaric.
Oh, and good news, if you have only a short-term attention span, the talk shouldn’t take up too much if your time. It lasts only 50 minutes.
Brought to you remotely by the University of York, the 2020 York Festival of Ideas is into its last two days but is still brimful of ideas this weekend, gathered under the new online umbrella of Virtual Horizons. For full details, visit yorkfestivalofideas.com/2020-online/.
Did you know?
FOUNDED by Roman Krznaric, the Empathy Museum’s offices are in London but this international arts project does not have a permanent home. “All our projects are travelling, nimble pop-ups – they’ve been across the UK and to Belgium, Ireland, the USA, Australia, Brazil and even Siberia,” says the website.
“The Empathy Museum is an experiential project exploring the art of empathy through stepping into the shoes of other people and looking at the world though their eyes.” In a nutshell, “outrospection”, rather than introspection.
Not coming back: Harland Miller’s York, So Good They Named It Once exhibition, featuring his mock Penguin dust jackets, is now a closed book. The end.
ALAS, here is not-so-good news on Harland Miller’s Coronavirus-stymied exhibition, York, So Good They Named It Once, at York Art Gallery.
Government pandemic strictures meant the show ground to a halt little over a month into its run from February 14 to May 31, and now confirmation has come that there will be no second life in Miller’s home city for the tragi-comic Pop artist’s biggest-ever solo exhibition, once the gallery re-opens.
Tentative exploratory discussions had been held with exhibition partners White Cube, his London agents. However, today York Art Gallery announced: “Unfortunately, because of the complexities of arranging an exhibition of this kind, it has not been possible to extend the run of the show.
“The team at York Art Gallery are working hard behind the scenes to bring you fantastic, thought-provoking and inspiring art when we reopen in the coming months. More details of these exhibitions and events will be published on our website and social media very soon.”
Today should have marked the opening of Grayson Perry: The Pre-Therapy Years in the Exhibition Square gallery’s Centre of Ceramic Art (CoCA): a show of the earliest works and “lost pots” by the Turner Prize-winning, transvestite Essex artist, potter, writer and broadcaster, latterly the host of Channel 4’s “boredom-busting” lockdown art-making series, Grayson’s Art Club.
Cocktail Party 1989, copyright Grayson Perry/Victoria Miro, from the Grayson Perry: The Pre-Therapy Years exhibition, whose opening at CoCA, York Art Gallery, was in the diary for June 12 2020
Talks are “on-going” with York Museums Trust’s exhibition partners over what may happen to Perry’s show, not least because The Pre-Therapy Years is scheduled to move on to other venues.
Whenever it hopefully does still run in York, Perry’s show assembles lost creations for gallery display for the first time, not least 70 ceramics crowd-sourced after a national public appeal: a cause for celebration for the Royal Academician Perry.
“This show has been such a joy to put together, I am really looking forward to seeing these early works again, many of which I have not seen since the Eighties,” he says. “It is as near as I will ever get to meeting myself as a young man; an angrier, priapic me with huge energy but a much smaller wardrobe.”
Watch this space for news of the fate of Perry’s pots and indeed the delayed progress of the Richard III portrait from the National Portrait Gallery to the Yorkshire Museum, Museum Gardens.
Harland Miller’s York, So Good They Named It Once was four years in the talking and curating, bringing together his best-known series, the Penguin Book Covers and the Pelican Bad Weather Paintings, complemented by his Letter Paintings and new works.
Harland Miller’s Who Cares Wins (2020): Raised £1.25 million for Covid-19 frontline carers from sales of 250 prints. Copyright: Hatrland Miller/White Cube
At the heart of a show full of deadpan humour and one-liners were works referring directly to the 56-year-old artist’s relationship with York, the city where he was born and grew up before moving to London, as well as making wider reference to the culture and geography of Yorkshire as a whole.
“If you’re wondering why I’m wearing dark glasses inside in February,” he said at the launch, “It’s because these works are so bright!”
Alas, York Art Gallery went dark, shut down as Coronavirus took hold. In April, Miller revealed he was “nursing mercifully mild symptoms of Covid-19”, coinciding with White Cube selling all 250 editions of his print, Who Cares Wins (2020), created in the familiar style of his mock Penguin dust covers, for £5,000 each, raising £1.25 million in under 24 hours for carers working on the pandemic frontline.
Sale proceeds have been donated to the National Emergencies Trust in Britain, the New York Community Trust and HandsOn Hong Kong. Part of the UK funds have gone to the York Teaching Hospital Charity to support NHS staff in hospitals across Yorkshire – a positive ending to this particular Miller’s tale.
On the panel tonight: Franziska Kohlt, Tim Radford and Penny Spikins, hosted by Tom McLeish
THIS evening’s panel discussion at the online York Festival of Ideas will explore how stories, things and thinking can bring comfort in times of stress. Times like now in Covid-19 2020.
Taking part under the chairmanship of Tom McLeish, the University of York’s first professor of natural philosophy, will be Dr Franziska Kohlt and Dr Penny Spikins, from the University of York, and science journalist Tim Radford.
Franziska Kohlt asks why many of us have felt drawn to the comfort of childhood classics, often unjustly dismissed as “escapism”, she argues.
This evening, she explores how books such as Lewis Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland, Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind In The Willows, or Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies, were written in times of epidemics, illness and crisis, and how these works can be valuable emotional tools to carry us through such times.
Penny Spikins asks why, when in crisis, we turn to programmes such as BBC One’s The Repair Shop to find some sense of comfort, and why cherished possessions seem to help when we feel stressed or isolated.
She examines where our tendency to attach to things came from in our evolutionary past and how finding attachments to objects can compensate for missing human relationships at times of stress or isolation.
Tim Radford’s contribution is drawn from his book The Consolation Of Physics. “It is both a conversation with the past and a celebration of the shared scientific tradition of generosity and co-operation that has taken human understanding, mediated by international experiment, to the edge of the solar system, to the origins of universe and to cataclysmic star-death in distant galaxies,” he says.
Franziska Kohltis a research associate with the University of York’s department of sociology and editor of The Lewis Carroll Review. She is a researcher in the History of Science and Fantastic Literature and an active science communicator with an interest in the socio-psychological history of what narratives make science communication effective.
She has explored a broad variety of topics, from insects to AI, in journal articles and exhibitions, and regularly appears on international media as an expert on Lewis Carroll.
Penny Spikins, senior lecturer in the archaeology of human origins at the University of York, is a Palaeolithic archaeologist with a particular interest in the evolution of human emotions.
Her research has covered the human origins of our sense of compassion, gratitude and tolerance and has been published in many journal papers and in her book How Compassion Made Us Human.
Now, she is completing a new book, Hidden Depths: The Palaeolithic Origins Of Our Most Human Emotions.
New Zealand-born freelance journalist Tim Radford has spent most of his life in weekly, evening and daily newspapers. He retired as science editor of the Guardian in 2005 and is now a founding editor of climatenewsnetwork.net.
Tom McLeish is professor of natural philosophy in the physics department and in the centre for medieval studies and the humanities research centre at the University of York.
He has won awards in the UK, USA and EU for his interdisciplinary research in “soft matter and biological physics” and also works across science and humanities on medieval science, theology, sociology and philosophy of science. He is the author of The Poetry And Music Of Science and appears regularly on BBC radio.
Brought to you remotely by the University of York, York Festival of Ideas is brimful of ideas until June 14, gathered under the new umbrella of Virtual Horizons. For full details, visit yorkfestivalofideas.com/2020-online/.
Director Juliet Forster, second from right, top row, in a Zoom rehearsal for The Flood, part of this summer’s York Radio Mystery Plays
TODAY is Corpus Christi Day, the day when the York Mystery Plays were first performed on wagons on the city streets from dawn until dusk in mediaeval times.
The Covid-19 pandemic scuppered any chance of a wagon production this summer, however, so instead the 2020 Mystery Plays are taking to the airwaves.
Instalment two of the four-part series will be aired on the Sunday Breakfast Show with Jonathan Cowap on BBC Radio York, partners to York Theatre Royal in this debut audio collaboration.
The York Radio Mystery Plays form part of York Theatre Royal’s Collective Acts, a programme of “creative community engagement” set up in response to the St Leonard’s Place building being closed under the Covid-19 strictures.
“The York Mystery Plays are part of the DNA of this city,” says director Juliet Forster, whose production began last weekend with Adam And Eve. “In lockdown, these plays seem exactly the right choice to pick up, find a new way to create, communicate afresh and encourage one another.”
Juliet, incidentally, previously co-directed Anthony Minghella’s Two Planks And A Passion at the Theatre Royal in July 2011, a play set around a performance of the York Mystery Plays on Corpus Christi Day in midsummer 1392.
This time, she and writer husband Kelvin Goodspeed have adapted Mystery Play texts for the radio series, drawing on material dating back to the 1300s, first resurrected after a long, long hiatus for the Festival of Britain in 1951.
Working remotely from home, a cast of 19 community and professional actors has recorded the 15-minute instalments that continue with The Flood Part 1 on June 14, The Flood Part 2 on June 21 and Moses And Pharaoh on June 28.
“When we went into lockdown, Tom [Bird, the Theatre Royal’s executive director] kept saying we ought to try to do something with the Mystery Plays, and I suggested that we should do radio plays,” recalls Juliet.
“But I’d never done a radio broadcast, so I contacted Radio York and said ‘let’s do this together’.”
Under the partnership that ensued, the Theatre Royal has chosen the texts, sourced the scripts, recruited the actors and provided the music, while BBC Radio York sound engineer Martin Grant has mixed the recordings, splicing them together into finished crafted instalments.
“Making these radio plays in lockdown has probably been the most challenging thing I’ve ever worked on,” says director Juliet Forster
Ed Beesley has provided composition, sound design and foley artist effects. Madeleine Hudson, musical director of the York Theatre Royal Choir, has given the choir and cast songs to perform.
In choosing the plays, Juliet says: “The ones that make for the most fun are the ones around Noah’s flood, but they are also about a family in isolation for 40 days, maybe falling out with each other, so there are parallels with what’s happening now.
“Then there’s the positive ending, which would be good, and that sense of starting again, so it was the perfect choice.”
The Flood, Parts 1 and 2 were picked initially for a spring pilot show, but then the BBC decided to build a series around the Corpus Christi Day tradition in June, and so two more plays were added: Adam And Eve and Moses And Pharaoh.
“I’d already started working on Adam And Eve and thought about doing a Nativity play, but in our conversations with Radio York, they then talked about wanting to keep the series going, with the possibility of four Nativity plays at Christmas and four for Easter based around the Crucifixion,” says Juliet.
“So, I thought, ‘I’ll stick with Old Testament stories’, and I’d done the Moses and Pharaoh story for The Missing Mysteries with the York Theatre Royal Youth Theatre in 2012.
“It’s a play about a desire for freedom to get out, which again relates to now: that need to breathe, to get to the other side, but there’s also that moment where they dare not go out, where they stay behind closed doors, so that really is like now. That feeling of living in fear.”
As for Adam And Eve, again the Genesis story is a resonant one. “They were living in this paradise but then lost it, facing hardship and their own mortality, which we’re all facing now,” says Juliet.
“That sense of not knowing paradise is what you have until it’s gone; also that role of being guardians but always wanting that little bit more, when instead we need to be more environmentally friendly.”
In choosing the cast, Juliet says: “I knew I wanted to involve a mixture of professional and non-professional actors from York, and straightaway I thought of casting Paul Stonehouse as God. He’d been in Two Planks And A Passion and had gone on to gain a professional contract for radio plays for the BBC.
A scene from Two Planks And A Passion, co-directed by Juliet Forster at York Theatre Royal in July 2011
“I knew Mark Holgate from directing him in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the first year of Shakespeare’s Rose Theatre in York. He has a lovely Yorkshire voice and I knew he’d turned part of his house into a mini-sound studio to do voiceover work.
“I cast him as Noah, and the next role that came into my head was Rosy Rowley for Mrs Noah. She was so amusing in that role in the 2012 Mystery Plays and she brings such an instinctive intelligence to the text.
“I ended up with a cast where I’d worked with almost all of them before, thinking how they all might fit in.”
One exception was Taj Atwal, a recommendation by Tom Bird. “She grew up in York, played Rita in Rita, Sue And Bob Too at the Theatre Royal in November 2017 and was back self-isolating in the city, so she’s playing Eve in Adam And Eve and 3rd Daughter in The Flood instalments,” says Juliet.
In keeping with Covid-19 social-distancing rules, the production required the actors to record their lines on a smart phone from home, having done collective rehearsals for each play over the Zoom conference call app.
“It might depend on the day of the week you ask me, but I would say that making these radio plays in lockdown has probably been the most challenging thing I’ve ever worked on,” says Juliet.
“Normally, when I’m in a rehearsal room, I like to guide, but not be too instructive, not telling them exactly what to do; it’s more flexible that way, whereas with this project, there was no chance to do that as we were all rehearsing in isolation, gathering on Zoom, rather than in a room.
“When it came to the recordings, done alone at home, on a number of occasions, I would send a note by email or phone them to say ‘could you re-do that line with more of this or more sense of that?’.
“On top of that, I had to get my head around each play, thinking about how they needed to be adapted for radio recordings and what did I want I want to get out of the project. All the actors have been so generous, knowing how difficult it would be to do a production in these circumstances, so it’s been a real challenge but also really exciting.”
So much so, Juliet would welcome the opportunity to do further Mystery Plays radio recordings. “But first we’ll see what the response is to the first series…” she says.
That series rolls on this weekend. If you missed Adam And Eve, would you believe it, in addition to the early-morning broadcasts on Jonathan Cowap’s Sunday show, the radio plays can be heard on BBC Sounds at bbc.co.uk/sounds.
Wool Britannia: This Golden Fleece author Esther Rutter weaves her way through Britain’ s knitting history this evening at the York Festival of Ideas
WOOLLY thinking will be encouraged at the online York Festival of Ideas this evening.
At 6pm, author Esther Rutter will weave a journey through Britain’s long history of knitting in her talk This Golden Fleece.
Esther grew up on a sheep farm in Suffolk, learning to spin, weave and knit as a child. On re-engaging with that past, over the breadth of a year, she travelled the length of the British Isles to discover the fascinating stories of communities whose lives were shaped by wool, knitting them together in her book This Golden Fleece (Granta Books).
Esther unearthed tales of mill workers of the Border countries, English market towns built on profits of the wool trade and the Highland communities cleared for sheep farming. She also found tradition and innovation intermingling in 21st century knitwear industries.
Esther, who read English at Magdalen College, Oxford, is writer-in-residence at the University of St Andrews (2017-2020) in the School of Geography and Sustainable Development.
She also works as a freelance project manager for UNESCO, developing cultural engagement projects in collaboration with Edinburgh’s City of Literature Trust.
Join Esther this evening, albeit remotely, for her discussion of the craft and history of knitting, exploring wool’s influence on our landscape, history and culture. Admission is free but booking is required at eventbrite.co.uk/e/this-golden-fleece-tickets-105237367800.
Brought to you remotely by the University of York, York Festival of Ideas is brimful of ideas until June 14, gathered under the new umbrella of Virtual Horizons. For full details, visit yorkfestivalofideas.com/2020-online/.
Iestyn Davies: York countertenor switches from Bach arias on July 8 to John Dowland and The Art Of Melancholy on June 9
THE cancelled 2020 York Early Music Festival is back on…online, headlined by York international countertenor Iestyn Davies.
The virtual version of the summer festival will be streamed from the National Centre for Early Music from July 9 to 11, replacing the original live event from July 3 to 11.
Concerts will be recorded at the NCEM’s home, St Margaret’s Church, in Walmgate, with social-distancing measures in place and no live audience.
Booking will open on Friday, June 19 at tickets.ncem.co.uk and boxoffice@ncem.co.uk, with a festival package at £30, individual concert tickets at £10 each and illustrated talks at £3.50 each.
The artwork for the 2020 York Early Music Festival , now replaced by a streamlined, streamed version of the festival next month
Iestyn Davies would have been performing Bach: Countertenor Arias with Scottish instrumentalists the Dunedin Consort on July 8 at the Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall, University of York. “We figured we couldn’t get the whole of the Dunedin Consort down from Scotland under the lockdown rules,” says festival administrative director Dr Delma Tomlin.
Instead, Davies will present The Art Of Melancholy, joined by lutenist Elizabeth Kenny, a former artistic adviser to the York Early Music Festival and frequent performer at the NCEM, for a concert streamed on July 9 at 7.30pm.
The music of Elizabethan lutenist John Dowland will be complemented by Davies’s renditions and readings of poetry by Robert Burton, Michael Drayton, Rose Tremain, Leo Tolstoy and Dowland himself.
“Iestyn lives in York but he’s a countertenor of truly international prowess and we’re delighted he can join us for the revised festival,” says Delma.
Dr Delma Tomlin: Administrative director of the York Early Music Festival
“Dowland is known for his music of extraordinary misery but utter beauty. He knew that in love, the only thing sweeter than happiness was sorrow. Few living interpreters understand his music more profoundly than Iestyn, who has devised this evening of poetry, music and drama for voice and lute to explore a composer for whom a single teardrop can hold a universe of emotion.”
On July 10, festival artistic advisor John Bryan will provide an illustrated introduction to the day’s online festivities at 10.30am, with each concert linked by a theme of fantasy. Lute and theorbo player Matthew Wadsworth will perform Echoes In Air, a 1pm programme of works by Kapsperger and Piccinini, Dowland and Francesco da Milano, alongside a new piece written specially for him by Laura Snowden, Echoes In Air.
At 3.30pm, harpsichordist Steve Devine will continue his NCEM series of Preludes and Fugues from Book 1 of J S Bach’s The Well-tempered Clavier, here performing Nos 13 to 24. The day will end with Richard Boothby’s 7.30pm concert on lyra viol, with his programme yet to be announced.
Pianist and professor David Owen Norris will give an illustrated introduction to the July 11 online concerts at 10.30am.
Stile Antico back in the days when you could stand together on a staircase. Social distancing will prevail at their July 11 concert. Picture: Marco Borggreve
BBC New Generation artists Consone Quartet, comprising Agata Daraskaite and Magdalena Loth-Hill, on violins, Elitsa Bogdanova, on viola, and George Ross, on cello, will play Beethoven’s String Quartet in G Major Op 18, No 2 and String Quartet in D Major Op 18, No 3 at 1pm.
York Early Music Festival luminary Peter Seymour, a leviathan of the York classical music world, will introduce the story behind his recording of Bach’s St Matthew Passion at 3.30pm.
Stile Antico will present Breaking The Habit: Bringing to life the music of the Renaissance through song at 7.30pm.
“The 16th century saw an unprecedented number of female rulers,” says Delma, setting up the concert’s premise. “From the powerful Medici women of Italy to the great Tudor queens of England, women across Europe held more power than ever before.
Steven Devine: Bach to the future as he works his way through Preludes and Fugues
“Many of these monarchs used their patronage to facilitate the production of music of exquisite beauty by the finest composers of the day, extravagant showcases of their power contrasting with intimate and personal compositions.
“The century also saw the first publication of music by female composers, often Italian nuns, whose convents supported musical groups of astonishing ability.”
To bring the online festival together, the NCEM is working with digital producer Ben Pugh.” We’ve purchased more video and sound equipment, so it’s more like a TV studio environment now,” says Delma.
“It’s fortunate that the NCEM is a big space, being a church building, which will help with social distancing. The opening and closing concert will be streamed as live, and the other concerts will be pre-recorded over a ten-day period.
Elizabeth Kenny: Joining Iestyn Davies for July 9 concert
“After their concert, Stile Antico will stay on at the NCEM for three days of recordings for their Mayflower project, now put back to 2021.
“We’ll also be putting the remainder of Steven Devine’s Bach’s Preludes and Fugues series online in the autumn as his Bach concerts streamed from the NCEM during lockdown have been received really well.”
The 2020 festival was to have run from July 3 to 11 with a theme of “the Method & Madness of musical styles, from the wild excesses of the Italian Renaissance, through the soothing virtuosity of Bach, to the towering genius of Beethoven”.
Among the artists would have been Davies; Devine and Consone Quartet; The Sixteen, singing The Call Of Rome at York Minster, and Barokksolistene, from Norway, with their vivacious festival opener, Alehouse.
Violinist Rachel Podger: Scheduled to play 2021 York Early Music Festival
Lined up to take part too were Rose Consort of Viols; Voces Suaves; Prisma; Profeti della Quinta; L’Apothéose; Hubert Hazebroucq & Julien Martin; The Society of Strange & Ancient Instruments; the University Baroque Ensemble and Peter Seymour directing Handel’s opera Orlando.
Already Delma has confirmed the 2021 festival will run from Friday, July 9 to Saturday, July 17. “Guest artists scheduled to join us next summer include The Tallis Scholars, The Sixteen, Brecon Baroque, led by violinist Rachel Podger, and gamba specialist Paolo Pandolfo,” she says.
The 2020 York Early Music Christmas Festival will go ahead, “but it may all be online,” reveals Delma. “That should be a little bit easier to arrange than for this summer’s festival.
“I should be able to work it all out in good time, whereas re-organising the summer event on a big scale became utterly impossible because the majority of performers were from overseas.
Consone Quartet: Performng Beethoven String Quartets on July 10
“So, instead, we’re doing a digital festival of musicians based in England willing to come to the NCEM next month for this very exciting venture that’s turned out to be brilliant, but for different reasons than the festival we first envisaged.”
The NCEM’s spring series of streamed concerts in lockdown has gone well. “They’ve been free with the option to donate to the NCEM afterwards, and we’ve even had people tuning in from Ecuador, Australia and Southern India, which has been fascinating for us,” says Delma.
“It gives us a chance to connect with a much broader audience and we may well re-share these concerts in the future, but we’re now going to have to find a way of earning money from streamed concerts, setting up a paywall to pay for watching them, in order to help us still be here in a year’s time. The free model can’t continue; we will have to get people into the habit of paying for streaming.”
The hand of friendship: nature’s “little helper”, according to author and professor Robin Dunbar, who needs to talk tonight. Image: Symbolon from Noun Project
AT this pandemic-enforced time of alienation, disconnection, lockdown, social distancing, shielding and virtual gatherings when everyone’s gone to the Zoom, how topical for the York Festival of Ideas to host a talk on Friendship: Nature’s medicine. Online, of course.
At 8pm tonight, psychology professor and author Robin Dunbar, from the University of Oxford, will explore the psychological and neurobiological mechanisms involved in friendships and how they produce these remarkable effects as nature’s “little helper”.
“Like all monkeys and apes, humans are intensely social,” says the festival website. “Close relationships, whether family or friend, are our way of buffering ourselves against the stresses that life puts us under.
“In fact, loneliness has turned out to be the biggest killer. It turns out that friendships have a bigger effect on our quality of life, as well as our ability to resist and recover from illness, than almost anything conventional medicine can throw at us.”
The cover to Robin Dunbar’s 2010 book of evolutionary quirks, How Many Friends Does One Person Need?
Robin Dunbar is professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Oxford, an Emeritus Fellow of Magdalen College and an elected Fellow of the British Academy.
His principal research interests focus on the evolution of sociality with particular reference to primates and humans. He is best known for the social brain hypothesis, the gossip theory of language evolution and Dunbar’s Number (the limit on the number of relationships that we can manage).
Among his science books are: Grooming, Gossip And The Evolution Of Language (1996); The Human Story (2004); How Many Friends Does One Person Need? (2010); The Science Of Love And Betrayal (2012); Human Evolution: A Pelican Introduction (2014); Human Evolution: Our Brains And Behaviour (2016), and Evolution: What Everyone Needs To Know (2018).
Online admission tonight is free but booking is required at eventbrite.co.uk/e/friendship-natures-medicine-tickets-105701357606.
Brought to you remotely by the University of York, York Festival of Ideas is full of ideas until June 14, gathered under the new umbrella of Virtual Horizons. For full details, visit yorkfestivalofideas.com/2020-online/.
