Results tagged “Tempestade” from Birmingham Post - Lifestyle Blog

It lasted a bare hour, but the world premiere show by Theatre of Glass has kept us talking for days.

Tempestade is very loosely based on chunks of The Tempest, the Shakespeare text which has been referenced by several items and events at the Stourbridge International Festival of Glass, which finishes today (Monday, Aug 25) with a knees-up on the Nile.

But Tempestade has about as much to do with the Elizabethan narrative as the melody of Greensleeves has to do with the Thomas Tallis Fantasia. It's a starting point for a riff, a brave and fascinating experiment which struck me as having a lot to do with the methodology of free improvisation in music.

As anyone (by definition, those of you without a life) who has skimmed more than one of my blogs will realise, I am a person of narrow interests. I am obsessed with all the visual arts and theatre (particularly puppets), ukuleles, wine, food and bicycles, but most of all by my grandchildren.

Next week I get the chance to combine several of these at what promises to be one of the great cultural events of the year in the West Midlands. The Stourbridge International Festival of Glass can justly claim, in only its third incarnation, to be putting the Black Country on the international map.