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Brighton and Hove Older People’s Festival 2017

Monday saw the launch of the second Brighton and Hove Older Peoples Festival.

Impact Initiatives, supported by a grant from Brighton and Hove City Council, launched an eclectic mix of 96 events and celebrations in venues across the City.

The Festival is based on the UN International day of Older Persons whose theme this year is Stepping into the future: tapping the talents, contributions and participation of older people in society.

Caroline Ridley CEO of Impact Initiatives, said: “Brighton and Hove have never been shy of hosting a Festival and last year the OPF was a great success so here we are again with an even bigger and bolder programme for 2017.”

A key part of the Festival is the Rejuvenation photography project which has been put together by award-winning Brighton based photographer Maria Scard and is on display at Brighton Railway Station and the Hop 50+. This highlights the contributions older people make to the City and has already reached a large audience with many stopping at the station to take selfies with the images and taking time to read the quotes which go alongside them

Govia Thameslink Railway’s Station Manager at Brighton, Anthony Dowsett, said: “We’re genuinely thrilled to host the exhibition at Brighton station. We need to recognise the over-50s in our City and there’s no better place to do it than here.”

The Older People’s Festival runs from September 25 to October 8 in venues across Brighton and Hove.

For more information about the Older People’s Festival, click here:

Changes at the top for Sussex Beacon

A management restructure to cut costs at the Sussex Beacon, sees both its Chief Executive, Simon Dowe and Clinical Services Director Jason Warriner stepping down from their roles at the charity by mutual agreement with the Board of Trustees.

While both Simon and Jason are respected experts in their fields and have been effective, professional and hard-working, Trustees say funding losses at the Sussex Beacon have meant it is impossible for the charity to keep the roles they fulfil in place.

Simon Dowe
Simon Dowe

Simon will remain at the Beacon until the end of the year and will help the transition through the Autumn. Jason will continue to be employed by The Sussex Beacon until the end of November.

After facing potential closure due to funding cuts earlier this year, work will be ongoing in the coming months to secure the future of the organisation.

Meanwhile, Trustees at the Sussex Beacon say they will continue to work on a strategy to ensure the organisation continues to meet the needs of local people living with HIV and their plans to appoint a specialist Executive Director to work with staff to guide the charity through the period of transition in the year ahead.

Jason Warringer
Jason Warringer

Plans are also in place to ensure that clinical services remain safe and high quality.

While the charity’s Trustees are in the early stages of developing a new strategy for survival, they say they will be working with stakeholders/ funders to ensure The Sussex Beacon continues to meet the needs of local people living with HIV.

Earlier this year national charity Terrence Higgins Trust (THT) offered support to the The Sussex Beacon and the two organisations will be working closely together with THT providing help with areas including IT, finance, and back office support.

Lynette Lowndes
Lynette Lowndes

Lynette Lowndes, Chair of Trustees at The Sussex Beacon, said: “While we’re still providing high quality, personalised care for people with HIV, behind the scenes there’s a lot going on. Trustees are working on a new strategy, aiming to make the charity as financially robust as possible. Simon and Jason will be missed, they have both worked incredibly hard for The Sussex Beacon, including contributing significantly to us being rated ‘outstanding’ by the Care Quality Commission. We’re so grateful to them, but we’ve agreed the restructure is essential as we try to ensure the charity is financially stable over the coming years.”

She continued: “I know that things are difficult for our staff and volunteers at the moment. They are doing a fantastic job, despite the recent uncertainty and we’ll do all we can to support them through this period of transition. We don’t want the charity to remain as it is, struggling from month to month and living with the threat of closure. We want to ensure we make changes that will allow The Sussex Beacon to keep its doors open, providing vital support to those who need us.”

The Sussex Beacon provides specialist support and care for people living with HIV through both inpatient and outpatient services. It helps hundreds of people living with HIV in Sussex each year and was rated ‘outstanding’ by the Care Quality Commission last September.

For further information about The Sussex Beacon, click here:

 

OPERA REVIEW: Aida @ENO

Aida

ENO

Directed by Phelim McDermott

Set in Ancient Egypt, Aida is a timeless story of love and betrayal against the backdrop of war. The story is a roller coaster of emotions told through Verdi’s powerful music. Aida is an Ethiopian princess held captive in Egypt, in love with a General, Radames, and he with her. When he is chosen to lead a war with Ethiopia, we follow the conflict of Aida’s love for both Radames and for her country

Director Phelim McDermott, who last directed the astonishing Akhnaten for ENO, joins again with theatre production group Improbable’s in this new production. This opera is written on a grand scale but here they make it feel oddly domestic and claustrophobic, pulling the focus well.

Welsh tenor Gwyn Hughes Jones gave us a real heroic Radamès, full and resounding and committed to the very end, he was wonderful although trapped behind his Gilbert and Sullivan epaulettes and wooed Latonia Moore’s Aida in the most convincing way, Morre was excellent, pure, fine and focused her humility and precision combined to give a fully engaging performance which held to it’s very last breath.  What a debut! Her acting is a refined as her singing and she made me care about Aida in a very real way.  Mezzo Michelle DeYoung was fine as Amneris although was dressed like a meringue in the first half and seemed uncomfortable with the clunky English translation but her cursing saw her open up and thrill the packed coliseum audience with her full throated wrath.

Eleanor Dennis gave us a stratospherically high high-priestess which was compelling and utterly passionate and the only time the opera really took wing and dragged me under its epic thundering, she was superb and it all came together in chorus, music, costume, lighting, set and acrobats in a superb moment which delivered an astonishing pinnacle.

Robert Winslade Anderson (replacing Brindley Sherratt) brought a subtlety to Ramfis which I enjoyed and Musa Ngqungwana gave us a superb Amonasro. Keri-Lynn Wilson conducts Verdi’s powerful score of military marches giving way to emotional gentle simplicity and along with the orchestra provided a consistent start to this new season.  Her narrative thrust gave a real momentum to the opera, often lacking on stage but the pit gave us all the pomp and grandeur they had without sacrificing the achingly tender softness.  Lynn-Wildon did the ENO proud last night.  The chorus, as always, excelled and although they didn’t have much to do in the way of acting apart from creeping slowly around, their excellent singing lifted the evening.

This translation is almost as old as the story and it’s a lost opportunity not to have a new fresh take on it, it’s seriously clunky in parts and reduced the quality of the emotional subtlety that something more careful would produce. Tom Pye’s monumental sets grew on me as the evening went on and the excellent lighting from Bruno Poet’s although smothered in mist and shadow was pretty impressive and suggestive of ageless ritual and timeless space within the restrictions of the pallets.

Read the synopsis here:

Aida’s grand march, always an opportunity for the director and designer to go to town was a bewildering combination of jingoistic march, as dictated by the music and funeral hero worshiping,  nicely picking up the threads of costume and attitude to blend it to the eternal need of absolute authority to have willing sacrifices to place on their pedestals of war triumph. It takes it lead from a military reception of the ‘glorious’ dead with their family forced to appear in the procession of glory while flags are folded from black polished coffins and then presented with honours.  The costumes at this point had gone over the top and looked like Dune had gone on holiday with Blackadder but the trumpets brought the attention to detail back and although the detail was all about distraction, tumbling, twirling, female soldiers from acrobatic group Mimbre with modern guns and acrobatics, flag waving and mourning, coffins and crowd control, I shut my eyes and allowed the music to win the battle.  When I opened them to peep out the DUP shaman priests were marching on stage with sculls on their head and I sighed and shut them again, the trumpets were outstanding.

The second half feels far more coherent and the narrative tension is firmly in control, with the action tightly focused on the main protagonists and the sets grow into feeling supportive of the action. The whole opera is lit in a most crepuscular way and although it hints at darkness, shadow and death there’s only a few shafts of light, the opening and closing of the curtains suggests dawn, beams of light or openings into and out of secrets worlds, but over all this is a gloomy opera, focused with western obsession with ancient Egypt being obsessed with death and the shades, dance and even costumes echo this focus.

Ironically  the final scene in the closed tomb is lit the brightest and as Aida and her doomed lover face their end it’s a beautiful, quiet and perfectly judged ending to what was a slightly bumpy start, but a tremendous effort and overall well worth checking out.  With a tweak and a polish this may well be a banker for the ENO.

For more info or to book tickets see the ENO website here:

Until 2nd December 2017

English National Opera

London Colliseum

St Martins Lane

London

‘Out to swim’ swimmers win national medals

Ten swimmers from Out to Swim competed in what is known as the UK Gay Games – GLLAM (Gay & Lesbian London Aquatics Meet) at the London Olympic Swimming Pool on September 9.

Left to right - Chris, Josh, Martin and John
Left to right – Chris, Josh, Martin and John

Teams from all over the UK took part plus teams from Paris, Lisbon, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Copenhagen and Berlin.

Brighton swimmers managed to bring back 10 medals with a number of fantastic swims in the 2012 Olympic Pool.

Tom Daley
Tom Daley

Individual medal winners were, John Moore (3 Gold), Josh Smith (2 Gold and 1 Silver), Chris Millard (Silver and Bronze) and Jason Knight (Silver).

John, Josh and Chris then joined Martin Schellert to win a Bronze in the medley relay.

The winning swimmers may have got some inspiration or encouragement from Tom Daley who was training with the GB Diving squad in the adjacent diving pool.

Out to Swim, an Aquatics Club for adults based in London and Brighton was founded 25 years ago by a small band of enterprising swimmers from the LGBT+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transexual) communities. Most of the members are LGBT+, although all adults with an interest in aquatic sport are welcomed, including disabled swimmers.

All they ask is that members show equal respect to each other, irrespective of any difference in age, sexual orientation, gender, faith, ethnic origin, nationality, or on any other grounds.

Out to Swim offer participation in many aquatic disciplines, including poolopen waterwater polo and Artistic (Synchronised) Swimming. Although entirely optional, many of the members find competing in the Water Polo leagues and at swim meets helps give focus to their training goals as well as building team spirit.
They are one of the biggest masters aquatics clubs in the UK offering training sessions with experienced coaches every day of the week in London while catering for a wide range of abilities, offering lessons and development sessions across all disciplines for those who are still learning, as well as challenging sets for experienced athletes.

Their Brighton branch – Out To Swim South – offers 3 swim training sessions a week and is still growing!

For more information about the Brighton Branch of Out to Swim, click here:

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