Every single year in the UK, 30,000 people suffer a sudden cardiac arrest. Sadly, just less than 1-in-10 survive.
Simon Kirby, MP for Brighton Kemptown & Peacehaven visited The Oliver King Foundation at their launch event in Westminster today (October 19) as part of European Restart a Heart Day.
The Oliver King Foundation set up following the tragic death of 12-year-old Oliver King from a sudden cardiac arrest, which kills 12 young people every single week. Oliver was winning a swimming race at school.
In 2012 footballer Fabrice Muamba was shocked 16 times by a lifesaving defibrillator in front of the nation on live TV.
Early access to a defibrillator is vital as every minute that passes, chances of survival drop by 10%.
Simon Kirby MP
After signing up to become a Defibrillator Champion for Brighton Kemptown & Peacehaven, Simon said: “I am proud to become a lifesaving Defibrillator Champion for Brighton Kemptown & Peacehaven. It is vital that we take action to prevent any loss of life where one can be saved.”
Global LGBT association seeks industry leaders for 2017 educational programming.
The International Gay & Lesbian Travel Association (IGLTA) will hold its 34th Annual Global Convention in St. Petersburg, Florida on May 4-6 2017.
This is the premier global networking and educational event for the LGBT tourism industry and features the only appointment-driven LGBT buyer-supplier marketplace of its kind.
U.S. Travel Association President/CEO Roger Dow will deliver a welcome keynote address tom the delegates.
Each year, IGLTA strives to add greater diversity to its roster of speakers and session topics at the conference, covering everything from LGBT social media strategies to business development in key geographic regions and market trends.
Notable past speakers include David Scowsill, President/CEO of the World Travel and Tourism Council; Dr. Mario Hardy, CEO of the Pacific Asia Travel Association; and Cape Town LGBT activist Ndumie Funda, whose organization, Luleki Sizwe, assists lesbian victims of hate crimes.
“Our number one priority is to provide our convention attendees with the tools they need to grow their LGBT business,”says board chair Juan Julia, who sits on the convention education task force. “In St. Petersburg, we will include some Spanish-language content to better serve our members throughout Latin America. We encourage speaker applications in English or Spanish from industry leaders who will deliver dynamic presentations with a global perspective on the LGBT market.”
To apply to present an educational session at IGLTA’s 34th Annual Global Convention, click here:
Organisers of one of the North East’s largest free festivals are looking for a range of experienced volunteers to join its board.
Northern Pride, which delivers a range of events across the year including the highly successful Newcastle Pride in July, is undergoing a restructure and is now asking for people with an interest in LGBT issues to get involved.
The dramatic rise in the numbers attending the annual Pride event, making it one of the largest LGBT festivals in the country, has led to the decision to make some changes.
Mark Nichols
Mark Nichols, chairman of Northern Pride, said the restructure was necessary to help drive the event to the next level.
He said:“This year we had more than 70,000 people attend Newcastle Pride, along with record numbers taking part in the parade.”
“We are confident the event is going to grow and for it to continue to do that we need a board which will oversee the charity and an organising committee which will run Newcastle Pride.”
Volunteer board members are required with an interest in LGBT issues particularly with specialist knowledge in logistics and operations, marketing, legal and human resources, health and wellbeing and community engagement.
The organising committee requires people who are also knowledgeable about logistics, marketing, entertainment/artists, finance, fundraising, health and wellbeing and someone who can also oversee the operation of the various zones during the Pride weekend.
Newcastle Pride provides a huge boost to the local North East economy, with this year’s event bringing in an estimated staggering £10.4m worth of revenue.
The deadline for applications is November 25 at 5pm, with interviews for the voluntary roles taking place on the evenings of December 12 and 13 in Newcastle.
There is also the opportunity for anyone considering applying to find out more at an informal evening being held at Newcastle’s Dance City on November 4 at 6.30pm.
This will include refreshments and also a free ticket to see a performance at 7.30pm of award-winning choreographer James Wilton’sLeviathan.
All male dance company BalletBoyz has made a triumphant return to Brighton with Life – a two-part show looking at life, death and some of the tones in between.
The programme consists of two commissioned pieces from choreographers known for very different approaches and styles.
The evening opened with Rabbit by Danish choreographer Pontus Lidberg, who has set his new work to Gorecki’s quirky and musically puzzling Little Requiem for a Polka.
As the curtain rises on a dreamlike scene, a bell tolls and in the foreground a young man dances yearningly but with a classical restraint.
In the background, facing away and seemingly oblivious, a similarly attired character gently sways to and fro on a swing. He could be a looking-glass reflection of the dancer but for one thing – he has a rabbit’s head.
It’s a surreal, intriguing and visually beautiful tableau, and as the young man begins to engage with the rabbit character through dance there’s a sense of mournfulness, loneliness and of a failure to connect.
This sense of disconnect is heightened as more dancers join in, and as the rabbits multiply and the music becomes faster and more discordant, there’s something dark and menacing about the rabbit men’s lively dance. To me Rabbit hinted at a sense of narrative – something allegorical but at the same time deeply intangible, as the strangest dreams often are.
In Fiction, the second part of the programme, the so-called ‘controversial’ choreographer Javier de Frutos has created a dance playing with the premise his own fictional death.
Set to an original, fizzing score by musical luminary Ben Foskett, the piece opens with the BalletBoyz rehearsing on stage. As they work through some ideas the news is suddenly broken of their choreographer’s untimely if somewhat slapstick demise.
De Frutos commissioned dance critic Ismene Brown to write a supposed obituary which is then used as a stop-start, spoken soundtrack, overlaying the musical score. What follows is a dance about the making of a dance, and De Frutos’ own tongue in cheek obituary and homage to his art and method. It’s also an insight into the challenges of the creative process, as well as a broader exploration of the consequences of death.
It’s relentlessly hectic, claustrophobic and at times violent as the dancers direct each other to jump, twist, lift and contort in a crowded and restrictive space where the ballet barre is at once a support and an obstacle to creativity.
The process is shown to be both organic and mechanical, with dancers one moment human and emotional, and the next resembling piano hammers, or cogs in some kind of complex machinery. The effect is at times overwhelming and confusing but more often thrilling and occasionally very funny.
Ultimately things quieten until one person remains alone on stage. The upbeat chorus of Donna Summer’sLast Dance kicks in, and in a sublime final vignette the lone figure dances ecstatically to the music before crashing to the ground, exhausted, perhaps even dead. Disco meets the Rite of Spring.
It’s a joyous, heart-warming, show stopping moment which suggests that the notoriety and controversy surrounding De Frutos is, like the stop-start spoken soundtrack, all so much noise.
As ever, much praise goes to the BalletBoyz dancers, a true ensemble company whose talent has helped create two very different works that sit so well together and provide the audience with a spectacular night’s entertainment.
BalletBoyz Life UK tour continues until the end November 19.
Magda Szubanski is one of the stars of the cult show Kath & Kim; a hugely popular writer and performer, and – more recently- a vocal advocate on LGBT issues. In her memoir Reckoning, she explores the complex legacy of her father, an assassin for the Polish Resistance who helped Jews escape Nazi persecution and reveals her own journey coming to terms with her sexuality and finding her own sources of courage.
Szubanski’s Reckoning is a seriously curious book, I was expected the ‘rise to fame story’ of Australia’s favourite funny woman and some reflections on growing up lesbian in a dull Sydney Suburb but instead got a hugely life affirming journey stuffed full of moral reflections deep philosophical ideas on the nature of redemption and evil and an introduction into the family of Szubanski which illumined as much as entertained and enthralled me as much as it instilled a huge sense of respect for how people carry on after life deals them a hand I would struggle with.
Reckoning is operatic in its scope and emotional range, the book gripped me from the off, not only is the narrative driven with an energy and natural grace but her prose is elegant and creative, wrapping itself around you and staying with you long after the book is shut for the night. Some authors have a voice that imposes, Szubanski’s engenders respect and it’s so refreshing to read a memoir that is only slightly about the fame and achievements of the author and much more about the growing up with an extraordinary family embedded itself firmly into everydayness.
Szubanski’s ability to reflect and find meaning in the contradictions of her relationships with her father and mother also allow us insight into their own lives, one she endows with respect and a distance that allows us to see them as complex people with difficult pasts. We feel their journey and hence that of their daughters as she comes to terms with her own sexuality and the inheritance of family, the stories and truths, the mysteries and actions. The very stuff our families are made of, that makes us and what then we use to make of ourselves.
Szubanski’s Reckoning is as surprising as the performer herself, known for diverse and daft roles and enjoying a familiarity with the Australian public that many other people would kill for, her modesty seems to arm her for an ability to tell ( and extract) the truth with a careful disregard for the consequences. The parts of the books around her own coming out are funny and juxtaposed with her mother’s worries about the reactions of her own, elderly friends. It’s a kind perspective. She takes on her journey into teenage years via nutty nuns and oddly divergent experience of schooling, we meet her crushes and friends and also learn about the internal strife and struggle that lead to years of unhappiness, as many of therapy and some sort of ultimate acceptance. Szubanski is the ultimate proof that hope is as cheap as despair.
I was expected a funny women memoir, a climb to fame, a coming out showbiz book, stuffed with anecdote and humorous asides but with no real substance, how more wrong could I have been. The book is certainly stuffed with funny anecdote, brilliantly described family moments of awkwardness, madness and laugh out loud funniness, but’s its driven through with this constant quiet sotto voce, asking, asking, asking. Wanting to know the answers and understand. The Polish for that, she tells us at the beginning of the book is rozumiesz. ‘Many conversations in Polish,’ she writes, ‘begin with that word.’
Utterly superb, an eye opening book, even if you’re a hard hearted non laughing idiot who’s not interested in the perfectly pitched comedic work of Szubanski this profound and delicately entertaining book on a women’s struggle to illuminate and understand a stunning family history that reflects the full range of the 20th centuries own terrible times is gripping from the very first sentence.
Magda Szubanski is in Brighton next month, on the 2nd November to talk about and sign books in Waterstones in North Street. If you would like to attend see the website here, there is a charge for the event.
Dental Health Spa donates mobility scooter to the Brighton & Hove LGBT Community Safety Forum (B&H LGBT CSF) initiative Accessibility Matters to support work they deliver across the city during Brighton & Hove Pride.
Accessibility Matters is the only volunteer led LGBT project in Brighton & Hove that delivers effective front line services to Disabled LGBT Communities in the city and is an initiative of the Brighton & Hove LGBT Community Safety Forum (B&H LGBT CSF).
The mobility scooter was presented to Billie Lewis, Chair of the Forum, by award-winning dental hygienist Christina Chatfield during a Macmillan Coffee morning fundraising day at the Dental Spa, located on Queens Road in central Brighton, on Friday, September 30.
Christina with songbird Sally Schofield
The Dental Health Team, supported by Karen Neeson of Forever Living took to the streets to sell cakes they had baked and invite passers-by into the Spa for coffee, tea and a ditty from songbird Sally Schofield.
Sales from the cakes amounted to £282 and with an additional £100 donation from Dental Health Spa a total of £382 was raised for MacMillan.
Accessibility Matters was created by the B&H LGBT CSF to address the needs of older, blind disabled, and deaf members of the LGBT+ communities in the city, to encourage and empower them to take part in community and social life on a par with their non-disabled peers.
Billie Lewis, Volunteer Chair of the LGBT CSF, said:“The donation of the mobility scooter is such a generous and thoughtful idea. We really are very grateful to everyone at the Dental Health Spa for deciding that our project would be chosen to benefit from it. It will be used throughout the year as we assist disabled LGBT people around the city.”
Christina, added:“The LGBT CSF do a fantastic job making Pride accessible for everyone and I could not think of a more worthy organisation to donate my mother mobility scooter to.”
For more information about Dental Health Spa, click here:
Back after twenty years, Mark Ravenhill writes of the original production of his quote-unquote-controversial play that;
“The quickest selling performance was Valentine’s Day, packed with young couples out on a date. We received one letter of complaint…a young man from Crawley had brought his girlfriend because he’d been told the play would be like Trainspotting…but he hadn’t been told that the play included gays, so could he please have his money back?”
That original Royal Court production twenty years ago scarred me too, not for life, but at least through Christmas. As a young, recently-out-and-dying-to-be-cool Londoner, I suggested the play to my then workmates after a cursory skim of Time Out, believing it would confirm that gays were indeed arbiters of all things modish, even ones like me who didn’t initially appear so. Cut to the rimming scene ten minutes in, and the younger me was reassessing that evening’s choice, especially for the elders in our group for whom arse-licking had only ever been a metaphor.
So a revival at the Lyric in Hammersmith, despite my trauma, feels curiously overdue. There is a positive start – the cast, out of character, emerge to sell off seats on the stage to the highest bidder, ramming home the consumerist theme with the requisite absence of shame.The 90’s references are everywhere, but pleasantly so; the garish sale signs that adorn the set could have been lifted from The Works or Our Price and serve as one of several nostalgic nudges during the evening.
The main issue, for me at least, is that ten minutes in I’m actually yearning for the rimming to get a bit of peace, the scenes until that point having established little else than my contempt for the three unsympathetic protagonists; Mark is the older (but not old) predator with a fear of intimacy, a penchant for drugs and a jaded flat in which Robbie and Lulu also reside, naïve rather than dumb friends/possessions with whom he now shares little more than ready-meals after initially buying them (the friends, not the ready-meals) in a supermarket (kind of).
There are plenty of comic moments, and some of them land, though I found the frenetic pace of the dialogue meant a lot didn’t register. The humour is also largely informed by an overriding bleakness and futility, a hopeless existence where love is dead and everything is reduced to a transaction. The overall effect is of the bloke from Marathon Man giving you a clove every now and again after drilling your teeth.
The three’s abject existence is interrupted by Gary, puckishly played by David Moorst, who befriends Mark and brings him perilously close to experiencing happiness, and also by Brian, a psychopathic drug dealer played by Ashley McGuire (brilliant casting), who Robbie and Lulu end up in hock to and facing grim repercussions. The ending plays out against a desolate landscape of transactional sex, joyless drug taking and lives resigned to the absence of hope, highlighted by Mark, asking semi-rhtorically if there are any emotions left.
There is a determined effort from the production to layer some levity to the script. Frequent nudity and a soundtrack featuring The Shamen and Lemon Jelly serve to lighten the mood, and a curious but welcome diversion is the playful ending featuring a choir singing Take That, no doubt a nod to the cast being named after them. It feels completely incongruous to what’s gone before as cast members dance with the audience, but I welcomed the light relief.
Final word goes to the author, a lot of whose work I truly love:
“Did we ever give the man from Crawley his money back? No we effing didn’t.”
Shopping and Fucking plays at the Lyric Hammersmith till November 5.
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