Free Running, Underground Rivers and the Largest Street Theatre: The Sixth InTRANSIT Performance Arts Festival moves you in every way this July
- Over 25 arts events on and around the streets of Kensington and Chelsea
- Festival launched 14 July by turning Portobello Road into an entire street theatre.
- Illusionistic 3D street art, new promenade commissions.
- Major arts festival from the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Culture Service
- Most events are FREE. Tickets and full listings: www.rbkc.gov.uk/intransit
Press contact: nazneen.nawaz@kallaway.com; 020 7221 7883
IMAGES: Contact Kallaway For Images
The InTRANSIT festival (13 - 27 July) - the only festival to move its audience physically as well as mentally – is back for a sixth-year, bringing the very best international and UK contemporary arts to streets, hidden spaces and parks of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea throughout the month of July. Most InTRANSIT events are FREE.
A stand out event for InTRANSIT will take place on 14 July with Portobello Road Arts Day. One of the most famous streets in London – Portobello Road - will become one huge stage as it hosts a celebration of street theatre along its entire length, including puppet shows, cabaret and music and dance performances. Join dragons, weird circuses and story-tellers as you journey down the street.
InTRANSIT is programmed by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea in association with leading arts organisations, including Chelsea Theatre, Hide&Seek and ReThinking Cities.
InTRANSIT highlights [full listings below] include:
- Portobello Square, Tavistock Road transformed by famous 3D street artist Edgar Mueller (on site from 9 July) and unveiled on 14 July as a culmination to Portobello Road Arts Day.
- Artists Louise Ashcroft and Fritha Jenkins lead a procession of artists and visitors from Paddington Basin to the Chelsea Embankment for Vessel – a newly-commissioned site-specific work - as they follow the lost River Westbourne. Canal water, holy water, lake water, fountain water, designer bottled water; each source of the river will be reflected upon by an artist, musician or academic whose practice relates to its site. Revellers are invited to join the procession and help with the filling and carrying of the vessel.
- RBKC Parkour – an interactive first-person game featuring film material shot over Kensington and Chelsea’s rooftops by freerunner Karen Palmer.
- Join Hide&Seek for Sandpit at Holland Park - an afternoon of new games designed by artists, musicians, writers and more. Hide from your rivals, plot with your friends, or take part in a competitive picnic. The games will be all about spectacle and movement, so expect processions, performance, frantic bolting-about for the energetic, thinking games for the cerebral, and walking games for the more sedate.
- RBKC Bikeminded and InTRANSIT festival team up with the Exquisite Folly Theatre to create an Alice in Wonderland-themed bike tour around the Borough - with a dark twist.
Cllr Nick Paget-Brown, Cabinet Member with responsibility for the arts, says:
“This year’s InTRANSIT Festival provides fresh experiences and encounters with some of the Royal Borough’s most recognised and hidden spaces through the work of local and international artists and performers. The Festival is an integral part of the Borough’s on-going culture service programme and our commitment to the role arts and culture have to play in making Kensington & Chelsea one of the best places to live, work and visit.”
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Press contacts and images:
Kallaway PR
- Nazneen Nawaz: nazneen.nawaz@kallaway.com; 020 7221 7883
- Jack Hickmott: jack.hickmott@kallaway.com; 020 7221 7883
- Susannah Glynn: susannah.glynn@kallaway.com; 020 7221 7883
Press tickets: Press tickets available. Contact Jack or Susannah above to request.
Notes to Editors
About InTRANSIT
InTRANSIT was first launched in 2006 when the programme took the form of artist-led walking tours around the Borough. Since then the Festival has expanded far beyond this remit, working with an impressive stable of emerging and established artists from Britain and abroad to bring the streets and outdoor spaces of Kensington and Chelsea alive for two weeks each summer.
Twitter tag: #InTRANSIT12
About the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea’s Culture Service
www.rbkc.gov.uk/culture; Twitter: @RBKCculture
The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea is home to a vibrant community of creative people; from large cultural institutions to independent producers, performers, artists and creative businesses. The Culture Service is building on the uniqueness and identity of the Royal Borough to drive major creative ventures, fresh ideas, talent, creative exchanges and nurturing networks that benefit all that visit, live and work in the Royal Borough.
InTRANSIT 2012 Full Programme:
"Evolution" by Edgar Mueller
When : July 14 – 31
Where: Portobello Square’, on Tavistock Road W10
Tickets: Free. Family friendly
Internationally renowned street artist Edgar Mueller has been commissioned as part of the InTRANSIT Festival to create a large-scale 3D illusion painting on Portobello Square, W10. Titled "Evolution" the artwork will transform the square into an interactive public artwork. Visitors to the area can watch the artist and his assistants create the scene during the week July 9 – 13. From July 14 – 31 the public can actively place themselves within the finished artwork and become part of the fantastical illusion. Cameras at the ready!
The Big Dance Bus at World’s End
When: Friday 13 July, 4.30 – 8.30pm
Where: World’s End Place, Kings Road, SW10 0DR
Tickets: Free. Family friendly
For this special evening the Festival will see Worlds End Place on the Kings Road turned into an energetic dance space. The Big Dance double-decker routemaster bus will pull up with a fantastic roll-out dance floor and oversee an evening of performances, workshops and lots more. Come along, watch some stunning performances and join in this special celebration of world music and dance.
The Portobello Road Arts Day
When: Saturday 14 July, 1.00 – 4.00pm
Where: Portobello Road, W10 (various locations, see map for details)
Tickets: Free. Family friendly
Join us on Portobello Road for an afternoon of amazing street theatre creatures, puppet shows, music and dance, feisty historic suffragettes (did you know July 14th is Emmeline Pankhurst Day?!) and interactive art activities.
See our map for location of events.
Vessel
When: Sunday 15 July, beginning at 2pm.
Where: Start point: Paddington Basin (meet by the blue 'helix' bridge near Merchant Square, W2)
End point: River Thames at Chelsea
Duration: approx 2 hours
Tickets: Free
Artists Louise Ashcroft and Fritha Jenkins will re-activate the lost River Westbourne by staging a sculptural procession between Paddington Basin and the River Thames. Samples of water found at sites en route will be added to a large, boat-like vessel and carried along the river's former course. Swishing and splashing through Kensington and Chelsea, the collected waters will mix together, echoing the mysterious Westbourne which now runs deep below the streets in an underground pipe. Canal water, holy water, lake water, fountain water, designer bottled water; each source will be reflected upon by an artist, musician or academic whose practice relates to its site. Revellers are invited to join the procession and help with the filling and carrying of the vessel. The journey will culminate in Chelsea, where the contents will be poured over the beach into the Thames.
www.louiseashcroft.info/vessel
Drawabout
When: Saturday 14th July, 2.00pm – 3.30pm,
Where: Portobello Road, W11 (meeting point Portobello Square)
When: Saturday 21st July, 2.00pm – 3.30pm
Where: King’s Road, Chelsea, SW3 (meeting point outside Chelsea Libarary)
Tickets: Free events. Booking essential (Limited to 20 places)
Everyone has a story to tell. Drawabout is a real-life walkabout drawing experience where we travel a small distance through a location, stopping and inviting strangers to pose for us and tell us about themselves as we draw them. The emphasis is on creative expression and capturing the story, not on exactly copying what you see.
All drawing materials are provided along with cabaret stewards and a roaming minstrel to guide you on your journey.
Drawabout is a not for profit arts organisation offering education, creativity and interaction for the curious, adventurous and brave
Sandpit at Holland Park
When: Sunday 15 July, 2.00 – 5.30pm
Where: The Orangery Lawn in Holland Park
Tickets: Free
Join Hide&Seek for an afternoon of new games designed by artists, musicians, writers and more. Hide from your rivals, plot with your friends, run down pathways with brightly-coloured balloons, take part in a competitive picnic - there's games for everyone, adults and families alike. The games will be all about spectacle and movement, so expect processions, performance, frantic bolting-about for the energetic, thinking games for the cerebral, and walking games for the more sedate.
Hide&Seek is a game design studio dedicated to inventing new kinds of play. We make games for streets, screens, pockets, parks, theatres, browsers and tables. We founded the UK's first festival of pervasive games in 2007: the Hide&Seek Weekender, running this year at the Southbank Centre in September.
Tender Age
When: July 16, 7.00 – 8.00pm
July 19, 3.00 – 4.00pm and 7.00 – 8.00pm
July 20, 3.00 – 4.00pm
Where: The Lighthouse, 111-117 Lancaster Rd, Ladbroke Grove, W11 1QT
Tickets: Free. Booking essential
Are the elderly and the young our burden or our treasure? Can art and music connect people of different generations and abilities? Come and explore these questions, as a group of mixed professional and community performers take you on a physical and emotional journey to the heart of being human. Live music, song and dance, and a beautiful garden too! First developed at Theatre Royal Bury St Edmunds with Arts Council support, Tender Age brings young adults and older people together in creative conversations, celebrating love, life and loss.
Previous audience comments:
‘It was marvellous to see young and old people in genuine engagement’
‘Very moving…I have never seen anything like it’
‘I was weepy more than once!’
‘It’s what our culture, world, needs. Now more than ever’
‘Never say you have arrived because everywhere you are a traveller in transit.’ Edmond Jabès
An Authentic Artist Collective production www.authenticartist.co.uk
Alice in Wonderland
When: Wednesday 18 – Sunday 22 July, times vary
Where: Start: Cremorne Gardens, Lots Road, London SW10 0QH
Finish: Holland Park, High Street Kensington, London W8 6LU
Tickets: £8 per adult/£4 per child
www.bikeminded.org/events/bike-tours
Suitable for adults and children over 11. Come with your bike, an appreciation of tea parties and a desire to get lost in Wonderland
InTRANSIT and RBKC Bikeminded invite you to join a tour of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland produced by Exquisite Folly Theatre. Explore the beautiful nooks and crannies of Kensington and Chelsea whilst following Alice on bicycles, in a tour that uses storytelling and puppetry to create a most unusual, immersive and interactive show. Forget what you think you know about Alice, this is Wonderland with a darker twist. Freshly adapted and devised by Equisite Folly Theatre, this production becomes curiouser and curiouser as it goes on.
RBKCParkour
When: Saturday 21 July, 2.00 – 4.00pm
Where: Portobello Pop-Up Cinema, 3 Acklam Road, W10 5TY
Tickets: Free drop-in event
Parkour is a discipline that deals with ways to get from one place to another. Originating in France, its main purpose is to traverse mainly urban landscapes by running, climbing and jumping.
'RBKCParkour’ is an interactive film art installation with gaming inspired functionality that simulates the experience of being a freerunner. This film is not a passive experience but enables the viewer to create their unique user interpretation. It is both a personal and collective experience. 'RBKCParkour' will showcase the architecture of Kensington and Chelsea in a unique and dynamic way. Come and see Parkour bring architecture to life.
Karen Palmer is a freerunner and an award winning artist. Her work explores the physiological aspects of being a freerunner and is fascinated by the psyche of the parkour experience. Her practice has evolved into interactive art in the public realm, as she strive's to simulate this experience. She has created a dynamic visual language through fusing the disciplines she has worked within, documentary, music video, short film, experimental and interactivity.
“Juke Box Theatre”- A Show in a Shop Window
When: Monday 23 July, 5-7 pm and 8-10 pm
Tuesday 24 July, 5-7 pm and 8-10 pm
Wednesday 25 July, 5-7 pm and 8-10 pm
(There will be a show every half-hour)
Where: 225 Kensington Church Street, London SW8 7LX
Tickets: £5 at the door. No booking. First come, first served.
Come inside. Choose what would you like to see, hear and feel. Stay outside. Watch a play without words.
Following the acclaimed production of La Peau de Chagrin in and around the Holland Park’s Orangery for InTRANSIT 2011, Marianne Badrichani and her company transform a shop window into a stage with the street as a backdrop, passersby as extras and the audience selecting the scenes.
The choice is up to you. Let yourself be surprised.
"Beautiful, cinematic. A triumph of both place and delivery" Keith Clancy, ECT
Ragtime Parlour
When: Wednesday 25 July, 7.00 – 11.00pm
Where: 20th Century Theatre, 291 Westbourne Grove, London W11 2QA
Tickets: £12.00 per person
Come on a trip back in time with London's finest early jazz and ragtime musicians. Singing sensation Patricia Hammond, "The Canadian Nightingale" lends her meltingly lyrical voice to the songs of the 1910s, 20s and 30s, and the Ragtime Parlour Band will make you get up and dance with their Prohibition-era hot jazz.
London's best Vintage hair and makeup team Ginger & Greene will be there to transform you into a film noir heroine, 1920s flapper or 30s sophisticate.
For those who enjoyed Academy Award winning film "the Artist", Emily O'Hara's Lucky Dog Picture House will be showing "Cops" by Buster Keaton, accompanied by live piano improvisation. It is rumoured that Felix the Cat may also make an appearance.
All this in the theatre that saw the world premiere of Oscar Wilde's "Salome", and the 17-year-old Laurence Olivier's acting debut.
Do not miss this unforgettable event!
Dressing in vintage-style clothes is encouraged, but not mandatory.
Curious at Worlds End
When: Thursday 26, Friday 27 and Saturday 28 July, 8.30 – 10.30pm
Where: Chelsea Theatre, World’s End Place, Kings Road, SW10 0DR
Tickets: £8 (£5 Concessions, £2 World’s End Residents)
Book Online at www.chelseatheatre.org.uk or by calling 020 73521967
…a pedestrian cabaret that is anything but ordinary
Welcome to an evening of strong currents, potent drinks and local legend served up by Helen Paris, Leslie Hill and Claudia Barton from Curious with swirling support from a live band.
The romantic but spatially challenged cruise director Miss Paris guides the evening with reckless abandon, as sultry chanteuse Cloudy Shoreline lures us closer with her Siren Song and the philosophical Purser Hill flairs her famous ‘oblivion’ cocktails while inviting us to contemplate the World’s End.
Over the course of the evening, portraits of World’s End residents taken by acclaimed photographer Hugo Glendenning are slowly unveiled, accompanied by torch singer Cloudy Shoreline and the Slipstream Band. Remember…
The end of the world is neither here nor there
You will always be recalled by the way you wore your hair
Explore, Map, Investigate!
InTRANSIT in association with Rethinking Cities offers a series of specially created exploratory trails across Kensington and Chelsea.
Trail 1: Map Ramble
When: Saturday 21 July, 11.00 – 1.00pm
Where: Kensington Park with map drawing at Kensington Palace. Meeting point – Education Room at Kensington Palace
Tickets: Free. Booking essential (Limited to 70 places). Family Friendly
Join us on an exploratory investigation of Kensington Park in which people come together to draw a collaborative map of their discoveries. Part self-guided walk, part social networking event, part voyage of discovery, part reappraisal of places and spaces, a Map Ramble is above all a lot of fun. After a couple of hours of Map Rambling, participants share their discoveries, discussing issues that have been triggered by their journeys. A key part of the Map Ramble is bringing participants together to map the routes and spaces they have walked and the landmarks they have discovered.
Time Out 2007: “Highly recommended” and “Best of the Day”
Trail 2: Nature Safari
When: Wednesday 25 July, 4.30 – 7.30pm
Where: Portobello Green garden, Thorpe Close, W10 5XL
Tickets: Free. Family friendly
If you think nature belongs in the countryside, that towns and cities are man-made deserts for wildlife, on this safari you will find out the truth. Well even those deserts have their special creatures, and the city is far from a desert - especially damp English suburban neighbourhoods!
We will head off into the depths of the urban jungle in Portobello Green, using our eyes and ears to explore the open environment and uncover its secret life. Informal but inspiring, meandering yet focused. Find out what the city offers to those who live wild. We’ll be thinking about security and urban food chains: looking for connections between our lives and the animals and plants that find a life alongside our busy streets.
Geoff Sample is a naturalist and author,specialising in wildlife sound, and Andrew Stuck is a consultant on walking and the city environment. Come and share their enthusiasm!
Trail 3: Ruskin Walk
When: Thursday 26 July, 6.15 – 7.45pm
Where: Meet outside Leighton House Museum, 12 Holland Park Road, W14
Tickets: £5.00 per person. Booking essential (30 places available). Adult event
Stepping out with the vision of Victorian polymath pre-Raphaelite promoter and social reformer, John Ruskin, you will be using his critical techniques to explore the local neighbourhood around Leighton House Museum. Ruskin played a pivotal role in bringing the pre-Raphaelites to fame and fortune.
Martin Fidler, creator of the Ruskin Walk, and Andrew Stuck, will provide each participant with a hand assembled visual journal in which to record their discoveries along the route.
The Kings Road Music & Fashion Trail
(Download free interactive film clips from – www.rbkc.gov.uk/intransit)
The King's Road Music & Fashion Trail is a series of five downloadable film clips celebrating the historical and cultural significance of key locations in the King's Road - one of the most famous thoroughfares in the world where successive waves of stylistic and musical revolutions have been created over the decades.
Appealing to pop culture fans and casual visitors alike, the Trail centres on three-minute filmed documentaries presenting the histories of buildings which once housed such iconic stores as the world's first boutique - Mary Quant's shop Bazaar -Granny Takes A Trip, whose customers included The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin, and Johnson's The Modern Outfitters, which was frequented by Madness, George Michael and The Clash.
Hosted on the RKBC website, the films are packed with archive and contemporary footage, stills and interviews and are accessed by QR codes on maps distributed to the hundreds of thousands of visitors who pay homage to the King's Road every year.
The Kings Road Music & Fashion trail is the work of Frederique Cifuentes, a former artist-in-residence at Leighton House and recipient of the RBKC Arts Grants Awards. Frederique currently has a major exhibition taking place at the Brunei Gallery (http://www.soas.ac.uk/gallery/disappearingheritage/)
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