Give Peace A Chance (From York Press)

Give Peace A Chance

5:40pm Friday 2nd September 2011

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THE 2011 York Peace Festival will be held, as ever, in Rowntree Park, where Sunday’s event will run from 11am to 7pm with more than 100 acts in nine areas of the riverside park. Entry is free.

Organised by Miller’s Yard, in Gillygate, the festival started 25 years ago as a small gathering and it has since blossomed into a community event that drew more than 5,000 people from all over Yorkshire last year to “share the message of promoting peace, environmental awareness, inclusiveness and diversity”.

Events and activities will be divided between the Arena and One World Stage, the Backyard Cabaret Area, Give Peace A Dance, My Chill Out zone, the Media tent and several Performance Theatre areas: the Woodland or Lavendar Cottage for intimate pieces and the Classical and Theatre Quarter, where an orchestra, puppetry and performances can be found.

Look out too for the food and drink stalls and the peace market with its selection of crafts, jewellery, T-shirts, bags, and household products with the emphasis on fairly traded goods.

Confirmed acts for the Arena stage are Hannabiell & Midnight Blue; Mojah; Falling Spikes; We Could Be Astronauts; The Players; Bluephunk; Mambo Con Rumbo; and Karno’s Circus.

On the One World Stage, Reverend Chunky presents Voices of the Day Choir and other acts will include Kalimero featuring Giuliano Modarelli; Dub Barn Collective; TC & The Moneymakers; Mark Wynn & GT Turbo; Atlantika; DJ Mr Green; Troy Faid and Oh My Gospel!, Emily Sargant; Levhearts; and the Super Singers Community Choir.

The Backyard Cabaret Tent is under the curator’s hand of Portia Simpson, Colin Jackson and Jinny Truman, who are promising music, dance, comedy, theatre and poetry and fantabulous frivolity. Among the acts will be Scrap Value, an English/Nepalese duo of Michael Freeman and Manjil Bajracharya, who play funky world rhythms on instruments made from recycled objects.

The Ruby Larks, Madame Zucchini, poet Henry Raby, Darren Poyzer, Marshal Anderson’s Angry Old Man and musical comedy duo Bush & McCluskey will perform too, while Rebecca Smithson will dance a newly choreographed contemporary piece; Six Lips Theatre will present a Victorian drama, Brown Paper Parcel, and Four Shadows Theatre will stage Portmanteau: Prepare To Be Saved.

Give Peace A Dance is the place where two arts become one as dancers and artists draw inspiration from one another. Artists lining the dance area will be creating original pieces inspired by the dancers, who will be showcasing street, breakdance, contemporary, salsa, belly-dancing, hip hop, Zumba, ballroom and tango dancing.

The Classical and Theatre Quarter will play host to fifty6ninety6 theatre company’s Only Water Between, a powerful performance of letters between a First World War soldier and his wife back in Doncaster, mixed with the memoirs of Hiram Maxim, the inventor of the first automatic machine gun. The Cobweb Orchestra will give performances at 2pm and 4pm and the Phoenix Puppet Group will be performing tales from around the world, told with fantastical puppets, masks, music and magic.

In the My Chill Out area, the York School of Holistic Therapies will be on hand to wrap you up in a cosy blanket and give you a taster massage or reflexology treatment to soothe away your stresses.

The festival’s solar-powered field media centre will be hosted by Northern Indymedia, a “radical, DIY media collective”. Activities include learning how to report your own news in writing, photography or audio/video recording; discussing the political aspects of media and why a DIY approach matters; finding out how to use free software in your media work; seeing how computers and other hardware can be used in a socially and environmentally responsible way; and planning how you or your group can use media in your future campaigns.

The Kids’ Area will be hosted by Theatre Workshops York, a company with an innovative approach to theatre that encourages learning new skills, increasing confidence and making new friends in a fun and creative environment.

To find out what is lurking in Lavender Cottage, Gertrude, Ethel and Nancy invite you into their lodge to explore the space and the objects within. Imagery and different inspirational sources will be explored through play to form and shape a performance.

In the Woodland, Viaperformance will combine theatre, dance and music to create a commemorative ceremony using ritual and performance to explore the aftermath of conflict. “You are welcome to join us. There will be drumming. There will be dancing. We will celebrate living,” they say.

See yorkpeacefestival.org.uk for more details.

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