Autumn Season of Evolving City Celebrates a World of Culture in Oxford

Monday 12 September, 2005

The autumn season of Evolving City has a strong international flavour, bringing a host of artists, performers and filmmakers from across Europe to join nationally known and local artists in a mouth-watering feast of cultural activity. A packed programme of events taking place throughout the last three months of 2005 will highlight Oxford's links with Europe, see one of the city's famous landmarks transformed by the work of some of Britain's most eminent artists, and bring three new festivals to Oxfordshire. A spellbinding promenade performance through the historic streets of Oxford will bring the year to an end.

The Coordinator of Evolving City, Rachel Martin, said: "There is a huge amount to look forward to in this final part of the programme. Throughout 2005 Evolving City has been celebrating the diversity of Oxford's cultural life, and highlighting the ways in which Oxford and Oxfordshire are changing. In this third and final season of the programme the focus is on Oxford's relationship with Europe and the world. Oxford Inspires is delighted at the creative partnerships Evolving City has helped to forge with Oxford's twin cities and with artists from across Europe."

A strand of the programme called Arrivals will focus on the new states that joined the EU in 2004. The work of visual artists from Lithuania and Latvia will form the basis of Modern Art Oxford's programme, while the Oxford Playhouse will welcome one of Europe's outstanding theatre directors, Rimas Tuminas, and the State Small Theatre of Vilnius's production of Lermontov's Masquerade. Oxford Contemporary Music has joined forces with well-known musical figures—Radio 3's Fiona Talkington, the composer Gavin Bryars and the DJ and composer Max Reinhardt—to bring Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian musicians to the city. The Oxdox International Documentary Film Festival will screen more than 80 of the best documentary films from Europe and around the world, many of them never before seen in the UK.

Singers, musicians and dancers from Oxford's twin cities in Europe will join local performers in the rarely performed Mass composed by Leonard Bernstein in memory of President John Kennedy.

The work of some of the UK's most eminent artists will also be on show, as the Arctic comes to Oxford, in the process transforming one of Oxford's most famous landmarks, the Clarendon Quad of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford*. The Ice Garden has been developed by Produced with OOMF! and Cape Farewell—The Art of Climate Change, and will tell the chilling story of the Arctic's ice and its current disappearance. Ice works, soundscapes and fleeting projections are just some of the pieces that will give rise to this fragile garden of the far North. Admission to The Ice Garden, and many other events in Evolving City, is free.

Throughout the year Evolving City has been helping to develop and highlight the talent of local artists. This part of the programme is no exception, containing no fewer than three festivals new to Oxfordshire. The Synergy Season, presented by ITHACA, is the county's first Disability Arts festival, showcasing work in visual, performing and media artforms by disabled people in venues across Oxfordshire. Two disused hangars at the former Upper Heyford RAF base will be host to <re:action>, Oxfordshire's first Youth Arts festival. Local band talent, walkabout theatre, dance, fashion shows and multi-media experiences are just some of the ways in which the county's young people will be expressing their creativity over the two days of this exciting event. Oxford's rich indigenous mix will be celebrated in Oxfordshire's first-ever multicultural arts showcase. In MultipliCity local artists and community groups will communicate their history and experience through traditional and contemporary arts. The programme will be centred on Oxford's Pegasus Theatre and the OVADA Gallery in Gloucester Green.

The finale of the Evolving City year will be "If on a Winter's Night…", a special free event produced for Oxford Inspires by Simon Chatterton and featuring Quidams, one of Europe's most exciting performance companies. With Oxford's historic streets as a backdrop, the centrepiece of this spellbinding pre-Christmas show will be Rêve d'Herbert, in which five ethereal creatures travel in search of light, finding themselves transformed through their journey into huge, luminous, translucent beings. Accompanying Quidams on their journey will be a parade of hundreds of glowing lanterns made by local people. "If on a Winter's Night …" has been made possible through sponsorship from Arts & Business and BMW Group Plant Oxford, whose employees and their families will be involved in artists' workshops leading up to the event. BMW employees will also be involved in the stewarding and organisation of parts of the event.

Funded with lottery money from the Millennium Commission and Arts Council England through the Urban Cultural Programme, Evolving City is coordinated by Oxford Inspires, the cultural development agency for Oxford and Oxfordshire, which last year put together the successful bid for £600,000 to fund the programme. Funding from the cultural organisations whose projects make up the programme has more than doubled that amount, and with additional contributions from Arts Council England, South East, Oxford City Council, Oxfordshire County Council, SEEDA and Evolving City sponsors, the total value of the programme is over £1.6 million.

* Venue subject to final confirmation

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