Festival News
Having taken a break in 2013, Leicester’s Summer Sundae festival has been permanently cancelled with organisers Concert Clinic saying “Having taken a hiatus for 2013, we have worked hard on a number of different options to try and make the festival viable moving forward. Sadly we have found that running a city-centre event of this size with such an array of entertainment and professional production standards is just not possible in the current economic climate. Read more at http://www.efestivals.co.uk/news/13/130904d.shtml#AQMoW7AQWSXE521y.99According to the Mirror newspaper, Live Nation have made a multi-million pound offer for David Bowie to play East London's Olympic Park. The paper reports the two biggest promoters Live Nation and AEG have embarked in a bidding battle to persuade the iconic singer to make a return to the live stage after an eight year hiatus. Bowie is also rumoured as a possible Glastonbury headliner although Michael Eavis said he had lined up three big acts who had never headlined the Somerset 177,500 capacity festival before – Bowie headlined the Pyramid Stage in 2000. Any live dates next year would tie in with the singer's 50th anniversary of his first single 'Liza Jane' released under the name Davie Jones with the King Bees when he was just 17. This year the 66 year old released his first new album in a decade 'The Next Day' sparking hopes of live dates although Bowie has not toured since a heart attack on stage in Germany in 2004.
Creative Common has revealed details of the inaugural Bristol Circus Festival, opening on Friday 13th September. Set to "wow" crowds with 41 performances over 33 nights and featuring 8 local, national and European companies, 16 live bands and DJs, and 143 individual performers, the festival will celebrate the city’s historic and continuing strong links to the art form. Curated by Bristol’s very own Invisible Circus, the festival climaxes with the world premiere of their brand new show ‘Under A Dark Moon’. More exciting performances from Fringe First winners Pirates of the Carabina, family favourites The Insect Circus and stars of the National Theatre’s ‘Watch this Space’, Joli Vyann. Plus more Festival exclusives including Mr Scruff, The Sheelanagig Band and Twisted Fairground. For details of the full festival program and tickets, visit the Creative Commons website.
Typically more than 60% of waste thrown on the ground at festivals is plastic pint cups and bottles. This takes staff time to clear, incurs waste management costs, and makes festival experience less pleasant. Bottled water is typically 2000 times as expensive as domestic tap water, often lower in quality, has a huge ecological burden, creates waste which endangers ecosystems, pollutes our own food chain with tiny plastic nodules, compared to tap water represents a massive contribution to green house gasses through production and transportation, is causing mass-scale pollution of rivers and oceans, is a risk to wildlife , and is a very resource-inefficient way to consume generally. The phenomenon of buying bottled water is a perfect expression of how ridiculous and disconnected to environmental cause-and-effect modern consumer society has become. Shambala has decided to tackle this issue head-on AND IN 2013 DECIDED TO BAN BOTTLED WATER: Shambala banned the sale of bottled water with concessions onsite and asked all festival- goers, staff and artists to bring their own re-usable bottles to the event. To make the initiative work the Festival: (a) made it easier to get fresh clean water by installing more taps across the site; (b) Worked with charity FRANK Water to provide free chilled filtered water on all the bars and (c) Provided quality re-usable bottles for sale for those that forgot to bring a bottle. A new online pdf graphic on how they did it will be available online soon. We'll drink to that!