Comments Off on Re-discover Christmas at Exeter Phoenix
After a Christmas that nearly never was, we’re thrilled to welcome our visitors to savour the festive season to its fullest this year and get you feeling warm and fuzzy in the season of good will!
Choose from a rich choice of atmospheric music, cabaret and storytelling events, shows, workshops and opportunities for outright rambunctious celebrations await anyone who cares to swerve the high street to see what is going on under Exeter Phoenix’s roof – and beyond.
Re-discover the fun and variety the Christmas season has to offer, here at Exeter Phoenix!
Quirk Theatre’s heart-warmingly hilarious show Rhia & The Tree Of Lights invites the whole family to enjoy a fantastical adventure around our amazing Jurassic Coast. From a Deep-Time Disco to a boogie with a flamboyant sea slug, with vibrant, original music & traditional Indian stories, Rhia & The Tree of Lights is a festive show for the whole family – a meaningful alternative to the panto that takes you to the heart of what the season is all about.
The regular and much beloved SPORK! Poetry event returns this December with a Christmas special, promising a world class comedy rap jazz duo, powerful spoken word artists and the Exeter Railway Band serving another helping of carols for good measure.
For those seeking quirky glam and hearty alternative jollitude this month, the annual Steampunk Yule Ball event offers just the ticket: a ‘Carnivale’ themed spectacular, heaving with bands, DJs, performers and sideshows. Attendants are invited to dress and feel their best in the spirit of this unique night.
Jim Causley will be returning to present A Causley Christmas, a night of West Country carols performed with great musical skill and passion combined with the poetry of his famous relative Charles Causley whilst Carolling & Crumpets with John Kirkpatrick promises folk and folklore combined into an evening of exploration around pagan origins of seasonal themes and rituals.
Jim Causley: A Causley Christmas
John Kirkpatrick: Carolling & Crumpets
Festive films on offer for the season at Studio 74 will include the magical Italian Pinocchio (2019). Wildly unlike the Disney version, Matteo Garrone’s dark adaptation is packed with fantasy, adventure and beauty. Sometimes the old ones are the best and you can also sit back and savour It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) on the Studio 74 screen this Christmas.
Don’t forget to pop into the Exeter Phoenix-supported Maker Mart on Gandy Street, the perfect opportunity to pick up unusual, locally crafted gifts. At Exeter Phoenix and the Exeter Phoenix-supported Positive Light Projects on Sidwell Street, you could also consider making your own by joining the seasonal crafts and printmaking sessions on offer. Classes and workshops also make a lovely gift, if you’re not sure what your recipient will most enjoy you can contact the box office to arrange a Gift Voucher.
The Phoenix Café-Bar will as always offer the opportunity to relax with a warming beverage, or pop by for lunch. Our Festive Drinks menu is now available.
After your fill of Christmas, Exeter Phoenix are planning to see the year out with a bang: NYE Party: Show Must Go On! will be the perfect place to shake out the old and bring in the new with an exuberant circus vibe, bubbles and glitter. Bands, DJs and walkaround performers will be taking over the Exeter Phoenix. Fairground games, a quiz, darkly glamourous drag karaoke and a silent disco will see people into a hopefully very happy, healthy and brilliant new year.
Comments Off on A Window to the Future at Exeter Phoenix
This is our beautiful historic building. As well as being home to culture and creativity in Exeter, it is a rare survivor of the 1942 Blitz which decimated other areas of our city.
As you can see, it has a lot of windows; 106 in total. These fill our galleries, studios and workshops with light, but they are all single-glazed and metal framed, meaning they lose A LOT of heat. What a pane!
But that needn’t be the case – installing secondary glazing on our windows would preserve the look and feel of these special spaces, while eliminating draughts, retaining heat and reducing our energy consumption.
With so many windows to tackle, this is a costly job. But we now have the opportunity to double your donations and make this dream a reality thanks to M&S Energy’s Community Fund, who have chosen our project to receive up to £5,000 in match funding.
Materials for each window will cost £200, so if we are successful in achieving our £10,000 target then we will be able to reduce the amount of heat lost through our 50 most wasteful windows!
What’s more, Exeter Phoenix has pledged to cover the cost of installing the windows, making your donations go even further and have even greater impact.
If we can raise £1,000 by 30 or more donors by Fri 17 Dec, the M&S Energy Community Fund could grant the venue the additional funds needed to install the secondary glazing needed to make our venue greener. You can show your support to a greener future by donating here.
REWARDS
We’re offering a myriad of unique rewards as part of this fundraising campaign that will only be available to our fantastic donors, including a limited edition postcard, a laser-cut wooden Exeter Phoenix Christmas decoration and a private cinema screening!
Find out all about the wonderful rewards we’re offering as a thank you for your support here.
THANK YOU!
A huge thank you to you, our wonderful supporters. We very literally couldn’t be doing this without you.
We are over the moon to be bringing back our Sunday Roast Club from Sunday 21st November.
Choose either Roast Beef or a seasonal Nut Roast, served with roast potatoes, caramelized parsnips, cauliflower and broccoli cheese, spiced butternut squash puree, braised cabbage, carrots, Yorkshire puddings and buckets of gravy all for £11.50.
Add a delicious dessert for £3 too!
We will be serving each Sunday from 12pm until we are sold out, so book to avoid disappointment. Tables will be available either in the café bar, on the terrace or in our new heated marquee space. Just let us know any dietary restrictions and we will take care of the rest.
To book just contact us on cafébar@exeterphoenix.org.uk.
This Halloween Studio 74 has handed the keys over to our Young Audience panel who have curated a weekend of cannibals, wicked conventions and unexpected consequences.
While exploring ideas for the programme the Young Audience Panel began to pick apart our relationship with Halloween and horror. Here, the panel and Studio 74 Collaborators share their thoughts.
The Witches (1990)
Raw
ELLA MOORHOUSE – Young Audience panel
“This year, I’m going to bite the bullet and finally watch Takashi Miike’s Audition followed by vintage classic Cat People and hopefully make it out alive”.
Every Halloween, I tuck myself in for the night, dim the lights and watch a double-bill of some of the scariest, weirdest, funniest and beautiful horrors out there.
When I first decided on this mini scare fest, the year was 2017, I was home, alone, in a dark creaky Victorian cottage; naturally the perfect setting. It was the year I got obsessed with anything David Lynch breathed or touched, so of course the perfect line-up would be Eraserhead (1977) with a Lost Highway (1997) chaser.
Lynch’s first feature film, Eraserhead is a melancholy, confusing, dark and sorrowful meditation on fatherhood, identity, loneliness and aspirations; a classic ‘midnight movie’ in indie cinemas when it was first released. As baffling as Eraserhead is, it was Lost Highway that truly left me with chills. With a mysterious stalkerish man that lives in a wooden hut out in the desert, mistrustful identical twins, wrongful incarceration and crazed jazz solos, it’s an uncomfortably intimate look into the seedy underbelly of 90s America.
Last year, armed with a couple of San Miguels, and in the true height of lockdown extraness, a sourdough baked into the shape of a pumpkin, I revisited Italian giallo classic, Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977), the sumptuously shot cautionary tale of the prestigious dance school with many secrets to hide. Released in the same year, I ended the night with the weird and wacky cult favourite Hausu (1977), complete with evil cats, girl gangs and slightly dodgy green screens.
This year, I’m going to bite the bullet and finally watch Takashi Miike’s Audition (1999) followed by vintage classic Cat People (1942) and hopefully make it out alive.
“One thing that terrifies me to the core of my soul is Triplets, the now greenlit sequel to Twins”
In terms of films, one thing that terrifies me to the core of my soul is Triplets, the now greenlit sequel to Twins, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Danny DeVito and Tracy Morgan. I mean, just who is going to watch that? I generally have a fear of sequels coming out decades after the first, relatively well received film. That and films with Ryan Reynolds in them. Outside of film, I would say it’s the undefined fear of something stopping me doing what I love.
I think films that give me goosebumps aren’t normally blood and gore for me, but those that are steeped in some kind of reality. I felt a real sense of unease after watching Prisoners, for example.
Halloween isn’t really a thing in our house, so we don’t celebrate it. Our kids do love the Goosebumps books and films, though.
I’ll settle for watching something like Scream 2, which I believe is the high water mark for the franchise. The first Nightmare on Elm Street is incredible (I remember being way too young to watch it with my friends at the time – we watched it in the middle of the afternoon so we didn’t get too scared!), Dawn of the Dead is great too. Anything by Sam Raimi – Drag Me To Hell is actually amazing, talking goat and all. Also Audition by Takashi Miike, which I’ve seen just once in 2000 but has stayed with me for well over twenty years!
My wife hates Horror, so for ages I stopped watching them, but after stumbling on a few titles over the last couple of years, I forgot how much I appreciate the thematic tropes.
“The skins between worlds do indeed grow thin on Halloween.”
It seems funny to me now looking back, that a season that has become synonymous with me, my art, my everything, was once a season that I feared. Of course, back in the 1970’s and early 80’s in Britain Halloween was not celebrated to the extent that it is today. The occasional children’s party might pop up once in a while but I don’t remember ever dressing up, ever being visited by trick-or-treaters or even carving a pumpkin. No, it was something altogether different back then. Halloween was a night when the things that you feared every other night had the opportunity to edge just that little bit closer. It was the night of vintage Horror double bills on BBC2. It was a night when the skin between the worlds grew thin and night falling was not a time for celebration. Especially for a child that suffered from night terrors.
Although I’d always loved monsters, I was terrified of ghosts, having grown up in a family that never spoke of them lightly. The dead were close. The supernatural was not something to mock. So, it seems funny that I should ever dare to read Usborne’s Supernatural Guides after dark. Although their first ‘All about Ghosts’ had its fair share of chilling stories, illustrations and unexplained photographs, it was this illustration from the later ‘Haunted Houses Ghosts & Spectres’ that would scare me witless. Indeed, eventually I had to make sure I skipped that page to ward off visions of that blue floating face dripping blood hovering at the end of my own bed.
Things are different now. In time to ward off night terrors I came to embrace horror in all its guises, learn of the craft, of the authors and the anatomies of all those things that go bump in the night and make a friend of them. Halloween now is a time of celebration. It’s a time that my daughter Lily Wednesday (Lily as in Munster, Wednesday as in Addams of course) starts to eagerly plan for the moment October arrives and the night itself is full of games, spooky movies and all the confectionary you could possibly stomach.
But once the children are sleeping and the doorbell stops ringing, the house settles and slowly the old feelings often return. But with a slight difference. The skins between worlds do indeed grow thin on Halloween. Now, it’s the night wherein your world gets a glimpse of mine.
BORLEY RECTORY, directed by Ashley Thorpe is currently available on Netflix.
I grew up in Germany where Halloween was not really recognised and Trick or Treat was not a thing. However, that didn’t stop me and my brother doing our best to score sweets from our neighbours. Members of our community would not know what to make of two small boys standing on their door steps dressed in make shift ‘scary’ outfits demanding sweets.
LUKE HAGAN – Digital Coordinator
“I am not afraid to admit that the show got right under my skin.”
Cartoon Network released a mini-series a few year’s ago called OVER THE GARDEN WALL. It is for children but I am not afraid to admit that the show got right under my skin. It is animated with great music and it has a spooky 1920 feel to it. There is a cosy and sweet facade with a sense that something is deeply worrying and everyone of going to die. It has talking animals in. Naturally, watching it has become a bit of a Halloween tradition.
If I was scared of something even the word would set me off and I would insist that my parents only use the first letter. So I would say, “Don’t say witch! Say ‘W!”
Witches used to scare me the most and I swear to this day that looking out of my bedroom window I saw a witch flying. I still can’t find a reasonable explanation for what I saw.
CLAIRE HORROCKS – Film programmer
CLAIRE HORROCKS | Film programmer
I love horror and have always enjoyed the sensation of being scared or frightened. I have two older brothers, one of which delighted in sharing his video nasty collection, ghost stories and general obsessions with the unworldly. It takes a lot for films to frighten me but he and I used to flick through his book; A DICTIONARY OF GHOSTS. The pages were littered with old Victorian photos with ghostly children in the background and tales of the unexplained. Terrifying.
I have just finished reading The Witches to my seven-year-old so this Halloween I will be brining her to Studio 74 to watch THE WITCHES. She is just like me and doesn’t scare easy but I can’t help thinking Nicolas Roeg’s twisted interpretation of the Grand High Witch might have some effect.
JIN LEE | YOUNG AUDIENCE PANELLIST
“Are people interested in tangible, “this could happen to me” scenarios where there’s an implicit level of relatability with the film’s circumstances?”
On approaching the Halloween season at the cinema…
The aptly-titled, John Carpenter-birthed “Halloween” franchise might be a good guide as to what moviegoers seek in the Halloween season. It certainly ticks a lot of boxes: jump scares, violence, and some quasi-human, near-supernatural antagonist. But is that exactly what defines a “Halloween” film? Are people interested in tangible, “this could happen to me” scenarios where there’s an implicit level of relatability with the film’s circumstances? Or perhaps totally farfetched stories of an unknown and unpredictable threat are what hooks viewers in?
Then comes the consideration of if fear is even what’s sought after. Lots of “Halloween”-adjacent films, namely th
e animated films of Tim Burton and/or Henry Selick, tread light with horror tropes and instead lean on imagery traditionally associated with Halloween: ghosts, the undead, skeletons and whatnot. Maybe the focus should be on the dressing-up part of Halloween, emphasising an event that’s largely an entertainment source for most people?
This isn’t to say that one way or another of interpreting the cinematic definition of “Halloween” is better or worse than another. The intention here is to merely provide the lightest of food for thought before perusing any collection of films labelled suitable for “Halloween”; there certainly seems to be more nuance to what’s desired of cinemas during the Halloween period than at first glance.
With October half term looming, we’ve got some some fun family friendly performances, films, workshops and activities coming up, suitable for a variety of interests and ages!
World record-breaking beatboxer SK Shlomo makes mad music with his mouth. Become one of this sonic superhero’s sidekicks in a world of funny sounds, brilliant noises and cool music, whether you’re aged 1 or 101!
Flying with Strings is a new collaboration between Devon-based puppeteer Sarah Vigars and musician Louis Bingham. Inspired by the avian world of Britain, Europe and Africa, this interactive show and workshop features intricate string puppetry and live music.
Come along to see the puppets in action and learn about the world of birds, including the graceful swallow, the charismatic hoopoe and the colourful bee-eater. There will also be some puppets to have a play with too! Suitable for all ages.
Ariel was always here. Caliban was born here. And Stephano has just arrived. They all claim ‘this island’s mine’. But do any of them have that right? And what happens if they can’t agree?
Set in the extraordinary world of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Roustabout (creators of Luna & One Small Step ★★★★★) present a playful and daring exploration of the place we choose to call home.
Filled with magic, music and mayhem, this show encourages young people to ask: Where do I belong? Where is my home? Is it truly mine?
Sophia’s imaginary friend is called Mr. Whatsit. No matter where Sophia finds herself living, he’s always there with a new joke to tell and a new game to play.
But when Sophia moves into her new foster home, Mr Whatsit finds himself unimagined! Now Sophia has a new imaginary friend – the glamourous, grown up Margo.
Can Mr. Whatsit’s childish playfulness keep him from being unimagined for good? And with her imaginary friends competing against each other, will Sophia manage to find her forever home?
PaddleBoat Theatre Company present an interactive make-believe tale where the real and imaginary collide, and friends are never far away.
In this two day hands-on workshop you will use stop motion animation techniques to design, plan and shoot a short film using your favourite Lego from home.
Under the supervision of our professional animation and filmmaking tutors you will create a set for your very own story and bring your characters to life using visual and sound effects. The final films will be uploaded to our Youtube account after the workshop for you to share with your family and friends!
Nicholas Roeg’s beastly adaptation of Roald Dahl’s scariest book brings to life the account of one boy, his grandma and a whole lot of mice.
When Luke is orphaned he is sent to live with his Norwegian Grandmother, who shares tales of a grotesque breed who have claws, no toes and who disguise themselves as lovely ladies in a bid to catch children.
It is not long before Luke understands his grandmother’s yarns are true and her wise words are designed to protect him from the world of THE WITCHES.
Roeg’s signature creepy style brings Roald Dahl’s most terrifying characters to life and will leave any child thinking twice before they accept chocolate from a lovely lady again.
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