Welsh Arts Review 2013

Provocative visual arts.

Striking new dance.

And music on a world stage.

Welcome to the Welsh Arts Review 2013.

In tonight's programme, the biggest world music expo comes to Wales.

We have an incredibly rich and deep cultural heritage,

especially in music.

Rhys Ifans talks politics.

Political writing is at its best

when it mocks its target.

And Wales loses one of its much-loved writers.

She's not just Elaine Morgan, she's "Our Elaine".

This October, WOMEX came to Wales for the first time,

a fabulous world music festival.

60 acts from around the globe

brought their distinctive sounds to the capital.

HE SINGS IN OWN LANGUAGE

Like the Olympics for world music,

over four days musicians from West Africa, South America

and Europe showcased their talents.

SHE SINGS LIVELY SONG

And for our own musicians, there were exciting new collaborations,

the entrancing fusion of sound from Catrin Finch on the Welsh harp

with Senegalese musician Seckou Keita on the West African kora.

And folk singer Gwyneth Glyn and Tauseef Akhtar,

with their ensemble Ghazalaw,

a blend of traditional Welsh folk and Indian song.

THEIR VOICES BLEND TOGETHER

This is such a great opportunity

to establish the heritage

of Welsh traditional music on stage

on such a big platform for the first time.

So as soon as we got the go-ahead

for the opening concert in the world music expo,

it was important to establish this old traditional Welsh sound.

The opening ceremony was curated by Wales's very own Cerys Matthews.

Her aim was to put Wales on the world music map.

But the show wasn't everybody's cup of tea.

I think Cerys Matthews did a really interesting thing with

the opening ceremony, and obviously it was a Marmite moment,

people loved or hated it. I think it was fantastic.

When she explained to me that it was

the equivalent of the Welsh Riverdance, that we can sum up

in one easy performance

what we've achieved as a nation,

and what we're about, and the music of our forefathers,

I think it was perfect.

SHE SINGS IN WELSH

I've been playing Georgia Ruth's music for a long time

and know her as this harpist.

To suddenly see that voice as a kind of naked thing on stage

was spectacularly brave and absolutely stunning,

and trusting these really traditional old Welsh melodies

to stand out in their own right.

There's a long deep history of tradition and music

and of keeping a language alive,

and I think that's something that...

In the other WOMEXes I went to, there wasn't

this sense of preservation of tradition

and especially of language.

I think what is brilliant is that you could feel that the country

is behind WOMEX itself.

It's not just this precinct, or this part of the city.

You could feel the culture, the culture of the Welsh.

You know, I'm Zulu,

so I know what it means to have your own cultural identity

and to be recognised as a force in the bigger scheme of things,

and I think Wales has really done something amazing.

THEY SING IN WELSH

We have an incredibly rich and deep cultural heritage,

especially in music, over all in anything, I think, music.

And we need to be really proud of that, really solid in our love

of our cultural heritage,

and use that and then do whatever you want with it,

morph it, do whatever you want, but we need to be very proud of it,

and share it with the world.

THEY SING IN WELSH

The outcasts of American society, criminals, prostitutes

and gang members, photographed for police mugshots.

Welsh Artist of the Year Sarah Ball recreates their images

in her beautifully crafted paintings.

It's an absolute drive in my life, really. I think...

I can't imagine not painting.

Must be a very hard thing to judge, Welsh Artist, on one piece.

And if you didn't know that I'd been working

for the last three years on this,

then just seeing the one painting,

I don't know, I think it must be really hard.

For me, I think it just will help to cement my practice here, really,

because I don't think a lot of people know my work here,

so I think it will help to get the work seen and...

but I guess...

I mean, it's just amazing. It's fantastic.

The work that won is a very early piece,

one of the very first mugshots that I made.

And all I know about her is that she was a gang member

in New York in the 1920s.

And, yeah, she was blind in one eye.

It all begins to come together when the eyes are painted in,

and you can really capture... an emotion.

I think some of them look very defiant

and others look bewildered or frightened or...

Erm...so I think the eyes are the giveaway, actually.

From a little studio back in 1983,

they turned a small troupe of dancers

into an internationally recognised company.

This year, National Dance Company Wales

celebrated 30 years of ambition.

This year also saw the departure of the company's founders.

Originally named Diversions,

Roy Campbell-Moore and Ann Sholem's artistic vision

brought the company international recognition,

and in 1999 it was awarded national status.

Also celebrating a birthday this year is Shani Rhys James.

She marked her 60th birthday

with an exhibition at Aberystwyth Arts Centre

called The Rivalry Of Flowers.

The exhibition deals with the idea that we use objects to fill

the void in our lives.

Ostentatious wallpaper,

the beautiful chandelier or the ideal home

symbolise for Shani the things that oppress women's free spirit.

So after so many years, does she still feel the need to paint?

For me, painting is a way of making sense of my life, really.

It gives me a point in living.

It makes me make... It's my contribution, you know. I'm a dot.

If you're saying a bee makes half a teaspoon of honey

in the whole of his life,

then maybe this is my half a teaspoon of honey.

2013's been a fantastic year for Tim Price.

His play, The Radicalisation Of Bradley Manning, won a major award,

and now his teenage hero, Rhys Ifans, is about to star

in his one-man show Protest Song at the National Theatre in London.

The National Theatre and Tim approached me

with an early version of this script,

and I'd seen Tim's show Praxis

in the East End in London last year

and was absolutely blown away by the production.

That kind of tipped me and I thought, right, I'm going to do this.

Written in collaboration with Neon Neon

and National Theatre Wales, Praxis Makes Perfect

is about the life of Giangiacomo Feltrinelli,

an Italian millionaire, communist

and publisher of some of the greatest literary works

of the 20th century.

Tim's political voice is very direct, but it's also very funny.

I think political writing is at its best when it mocks its targets.

And Tim's very good at that.

Tim's part of a really exciting generation of writers

that's coming up in Wales at the moment.

I do think that we're in a bit of a golden age

for theatre writing in Wales.

He created The Radicalisation Of Bradley Manning, which

we first premiered in 2012 and this year went to the Edinburgh Festival

and won the James Tait Black award as the best new play in the UK.

The first time you pick a lock,

you learn that the only barriers in the world are psychological.

You hold the key to your life, not...corporations,

not your parents, not university administrators.

And the more people that start to think like that...

The bigger things we can reverse-engineer.

It was while he was writing this play that Tim met rough sleepers

and activists protesting at St Paul's Cathedral,

who'd provide inspiration for his new play, Protest Song.

Danny's a homeless person from South Wales who's been sleeping rough

in and around and on the steps of St Paul's for seven years,

and he wakes up one morning and there are 500 tents

and 3,000 protesters on what is ostensibly his front garden.

I don't want to give too much away,

but if you imagine...you know, a very, very, very lonely,

broken man for six years suddenly acquires real friends, you know,

who really value him as a human being,

and value what he has to offer.

And, erm...

..there's a sense of permanence to that.

And when that is taken away...

..what state does it leave someone like Danny,

are they better off or worse off?

And Protest Song will be at London's National Theatre until 11 January.

On 2 February 1963, members of the Welsh Language Society

stopped traffic when they occupied Trefechan Bridge in Aberystwyth.

Their aim was to raise awareness about the lack of official status

for the Welsh language.

Well, 50 years on, Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru,

the Welsh-language national theatre company,

marked the event with an outdoor multimedia performance,

Y Bont, or The Bridge.

We were very keen to actually give the audience

an experience that in some way reflected the experience

of those protesters 50 years earlier who had taken to the streets.

So actually taking the audience to the post office,

taking them to the bridge, taking them to a cafe where they had

congregated that day in order to talk about their tactics for the day.

And actually give a sense of excitement and thrill,

and getting the audience to engage with the town of Aberystwyth

and the streets and the particular locations

hopefully allowed the audience to actually appreciate

a piece of work, a piece of theatre,

that commemorated this event

in a very experiential and very, very empathetic way, a very direct way,

as opposed to sitting in a theatre and watching a play.

And actually, there was a really interesting moment

at the end of that production, where...

there was an impromptu singing of the national anthem,

totally not sort of designed by us,

but the audience were moved to sing the national anthem on the bridge at

the end of the production, which was a really beautiful moment, actually.

MAN MAKES ANNOUNCEMENT IN WELSH

# It starts off with a silence

# A growing need for sound... #

And what a year it's been for Georgia Ruth.

Her stunning debut album, Week of Pines,

won the Welsh Music Prize

and since then, she's played to the world at Womex

and to thousands of people at the Radio 2 Live in Hyde Park Festival.

# The week of pines... #

Yeah, it won the Welsh Music Prize,

to my absolute amazement.

I was not expecting that.

Really shocked and, in fact, I don't think it's still...

It hasn't set in properly yet.

Also on the shortlist this year was Sweet Baboo...

# Let's go swimming wild, let's go...#

..Gruff Rhys's Neon Neon...

# There's a winner, a loser and a middle man... #

..and Euros Childs.

# This must be love cos... #

Given the success of the first album,

is Georgia nervous about the second?

I have started to write and I'm quite cautious

when I tell people this now, because you're waiting for them to say,

"Oh, will it be the same and will you have this element the same?"

I think I'm the kind of person who is quite over-analytical of my own work.

Not necessarily in a good way.

Actually, definitely not in a good way.

I think I'm prone to over-thinking, so I'm just trying at the moment

to give myself some space away from the first album,

just to let it sink in

and not to do anything rash and try turn myself into Kylie Minogue,

cos that'd be terrible for everyone.

So, yeah, it's just taking some time and kind of working out

what I want to do with the next one, but it is coming.

It will come.

CROWD CHEERS Thank you very much.

A colossal, oversized table, a mosaic-clad dentist

and scent of expensive perfume.

Bedwyr Williams' Starry Messenger

wowed the crowds at the Venice Biennale.

Venice - architectural marvel, city of culture

and home to the world's biggest contemporary art show.

An unmissable artist's rendezvous, the Venice Biennale is the place

to make your name and the opportunity to exhibit to the world.

Bedwyr Williams' Starry Messenger provoked and teased,

reducing man and the universe to mere particles.

Venice is the city where Galileo presented his telescope

initially, his first telescope.

It's also a place where they have this type of flooring

called terrazzo.

We have it all over the world, but it was invented there

and that's a kind of flooring that's a composite of leftover materials.

Bits, fragments.

You can disappear into it, because terrazzo's like a little universe.

It's like a cross-section of a galaxy or something.

Bedwyr Williams has the most fantastic, elliptical view of life.

The show in Venice, because of the layout of the building,

you do go on this kind of incredible,

bonkers journey through the canyons of Bedwyr's mind.

A lot of terrazzo everywhere.

Terrazzo is a big thing for Bedwyr cos it kind of encapsulates

a universe in ground stone and glass.

Laid out over a number of rooms,

Bedwyr played around with our sense of scale...

There's an amazing glass table with objects that look apparently random

but I gather were very, very carefully placed.

..our senses...

You go through a courtyard.

You might not even notice but there's the sound of crickets

and one of them farts as you go through

and then you come out to the smell of a very specific perfume.

I can't remember what it's called, but it's very expensive.

All you get is a kind of pure Bedwyr experience from start to finish.

We're a nation of poets, and it's certainly been the poets' year.

Rhian Edwards won the overall Wales Book of the Year title

with her debut poetry collection, Clueless Dogs.

We caught up with the Bridgend writer who says walking

is the key to her success.

There's no real formula to it.

Usually a line comes to me

and then I build on it, usually walking and trying the idea.

Most of my poetry is quite musical, because I'm a musician as well,

and I think also walking somehow dictates a certain tempo

and musical rhythm to the poetry.

That's where I really workshop the poem

and then it's really just sitting down at the desk and reshaping it

and butchering it and filleting it and moving it around the page.

The fantastic thing about Rhian Edwards is that she's been

known in the live poetry circuit, if you like, for a number of years.

She won the John Tripp Award for spoken poetry

a couple of years ago,

but to actually win this achievement for a collection,

a published collection,

as well as winning accolades for her performance

really sees the marrying of these two crafts, the written craft

and the spoken craft of poetry.

White light weighs heavy,

bullying bright as squash courts

I fix a dirty look on the electric clock.

The walled minutes stagger their blinks.

Wheel-footed suitcases scurry about me like clueless dogs

while flip flops tick-tock against the polished rink of the concourse...

But she wasn't always going to be a writer.

A chance encounter with a group of poets

led to an invitation to a poetry night.

I thought it was amazing that somewhere actually existed

where not only people wanted to perform,

but people wanted to listen to poetry.

It was completely beyond my ken.

So the following week I went along

and I expected to be very intimidated.

I'd always had sort of closeted literary ambitions,

but never quite had the guts to fulfil them, you know?

And I just came out that night and thought, "I can do this."

So I wrote a poem.

And she certainly can.

At the Wales Book of the Year Awards,

she won the poetry category, the People's Choice Award

and the overall English-language Wales Book of the Year title.

The winner of the Welsh-language Wales Book of the Year Award

was Heini Gruffudd for his book Yr Erlid, The Persecution,

a harrowing tale of his German mother's life

during the Second World War.

OPERA SINGING

BBC Cardiff Singer of the World returned to our screens this year,

and it was the incredible voice of the American mezzo-soprano

Jamie Barton that dominated the competition.

Her vocal range and captivating performance

enchanted the audience as well as the judges.

The first prize

and the most amazing prize

goes...

..to Jamie Barton.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

COMMENTATOR: She's done it.

Only the second time in the competition's history,

a singer has won

both the song prize and the main prize.

And there were exciting new productions this year from WNO.

This was the first time Donizetti's Tudor Trilogy of operas

had been performed together in Britain.

I think that there was a lot of feeling that it was shocking

to have a modern perspective on a historical opera,

but I have to say I thought it was quite well done...

..with the exception of the middle opera, Maria Stuarda.

I must say I took exception to the way that they played around

with history and the religious background.

I didn't like that.

But the whole idea of a concept of three operas together,

I think it worked well.

I think the idea of the design being carried through...

Yes, perhaps crazy to have a totally contemporary look

for an Elizabethan era,

but I think it's important that sometimes opera is confronted

with a new way of thinking

and I would defend the director's right to do that.

And WNO scored great success with an award-winning production

of Wagner's Lohengrin.

For the Wagner anniversary, WNO's production of Lohengrin

not only sounded fantastic, with some really exceptional singing,

but looked fantastic.

Antony McDonald's production

was in some senses relatively traditional,

but it was beautifully blocked.

Everything about it suggested that he knew the music inside out

and the iconic image of the appearance of the swan at the end,

where you have an androgynous boy with a single wing coming forward,

the reappearance of the swan,

that was absolutely fantastic.

And moving away from traditional opera

was Jonathan Harvey's Wagner Dream,

an opera in three languages, which included the spoken word.

The Wagner Dream was very, very well received.

There was a sense of the audience being part of something

which was really gripping, really involving.

People come out almost surprised by their own reaction to it.

I think that this really,

I hope, points the way forward for the company because I think

that it is in this kind of work that the company's reputation will rest.

Lampeter, small market town,

and this year host to international textile superstar Kaffe Fassett.

He teamed up with Jen Jones from the Welsh Quilt Museum to produce

a visually captivating exhibition.

I think the mixture in this exhibition is just phenomenal,

because I am so much about colour

that to have my quilts, with their multicoloured aspects,

absolutely echoed by these wholecloth,

old Welsh quilts is just beautiful,

and I love it that the old world meets the new world in that way.

I never intended to collect Welsh quilts,

but I was catapulted into it

and it became a random salvage operation, really.

The quilts and blankets were actually being discarded

and used in the most improbable ways.

They put them on sick animals, on tractors

and, worst of all, they were put on the bonfires.

Thanks to Jen and her salvage operation,

the Welsh quilt museum has over 350 traditional Welsh quilts.

I would say that Welsh quilts certainly influence me.

I love the rough and readiness of them.

Certainly, a lot of ideas that happen in those quilts

have fed into my imagination and my making of quilts.

The most wonderful part of this very rich experience

of showing in Lampeter was coming up the stairs

and being greeted by this amazing, blushing pink and orange quilt

with pink and orange Welsh quilts below it

and then seeing the whole room like a choir of angels,

these great fabrics floating around the ceiling,

was just unbelievable joy.

I was just ecstatic to come

and experience this kind of an exhibition.

This year, the National Eisteddfod was held in Denbigh.

Y Lle Celf, or The Art Place in English,

is its annual art exhibition.

In just over a week,

more than 40,000 people walked through its doors.

It's a fabulous showcase of Welsh art,

with over 400 submissions each year

and each winner taking home a £5,000 prize.

This year, the special exhibition

focused on the town's former mental hospital.

Artist Simon Proffitt

and comedian and ex-psychiatric nurse Eilir Jones

worked with the public to create

a thought-provoking installation piece.

Barmouth-born Theresa Nguyen's stunning silverwork

took the gold medal in the craft and design category.

The inspiration came from just the way that leaves

respond to the sun and so it's got quite a flowing movement to it

and then, just where the head almost looks up,

here you have this kind of bloom of leaves

and it kind of spirals in its formation at the top.

But the show wasn't without controversy.

Josephine Sowden's video piece, The Lilies of the Field,

won the fine art gold medal, but some felt her use of spoken English

broke the Eisteddfod's Welsh-language rule.

SPEAKING FAST: Of course, everything would be perfect if I'd got that job

but she did. Everything good always happens to her. Course she got that job. Nothing good ever happens to me.

She walks down the drive and hugs me, smelling of toffee apples.

"You know that daughter I never had?", she'll say. "I wonder..."

SHE CONTINUES VERY RAPIDLY

On the third date it was the Museum of Modern Art.

Saw a Matisse and started to cry. "It's my favourite", I say.

He touches my cheek softly and hands me a special...

SHE MAKES CLICKING SOUND

'It's crazy. It still hasn't sunk in for me. It's... It..

'I think it's amazing for me, because I'm not from Wales, and to come to

'Wales, I've felt like it's such an amazing place for art, and it's...'

I think it just offers so many opportunities,

so for them to give me the award when I'm not Welsh, it means

so much and it means I want to stay and keep my practice in Wales.

I was in a dress, a black velvet dress with sequins at the hem. What?!

She hugged me tightly and told me I'm the daughter she never had.

The voices in the head that she picks up on that

kind of stand of anxiety that a lot of young women have

all the time,

and the things that are coming at you from all

sides about how you live your life, how you behave,

and she's been picked up very early, almost at graduation,

she was picked up Bloomberg for the New Contemporaries.

We have so few new artists from Wales who actually manage to

make it into that show, which is

a massive launch pad, usually, for emerging artists.

Ah...

Professional dancers are youthful, athletic,

and often their careers are over by 40.

Not so for Cardiff-based company Striking Attitudes, where the

average age is 60.

Artistic director Caroline Lamb tells us,

"The younger dancer has much to learn."

ACOUSTIC GUITAR MELODY

Striking Attitudes, in the last ten years, we've particularly

concentrated on the concept of the older dancer,

and promoting the older dancer as something that's very viable

still, vital, interesting to watch, because of course, as an older dancer

you can't do the kind of things that you could do when you were 20.

By the time you're 40 plus,

it becomes hard to do a lot of those things.

So, although the company is not about athleticism or bravado,

it's actually about something much deeper.

The company's Once Upon A Time In The Dark, Dark Wood was

a collaboration between Striking Attitudes

and three younger choreographers.

Responding to ideas about what the dark wood conjures

up in our minds, the piece brought together work from two

generations in an innovative performance.

MOURNFUL BRASS MELODY

And to mark the centenary of the Senghenydd mining disaster,

the company performed Each For All And All For Each,

a site-specific piece, in Senghenydd itself.

There are a lot of classes around the country for older dancers,

but often they're about aerobics or keeping fit. This is not what we do.

We try to do that as well, but it is primarily about being creative,

and I think that's what's very exciting,

that as you get older, you know, probably those opportunities

diminish, but here we try to promote that and we try to offer that.

MUSIC CONTINUES

Writer, feminist and aquatic ape theorist Elaine Morgan sadly

passed away this year.

We reflect on one of Wales's truly great writers.

Elaine Morgan was born into a typical mining family in 1920.

A girl with ambition, she'd become a BAFTA-winning television writer,

feminist icon and scientific rebel.

There was a time when the writer was king, and she was one of the stars.

If you saw that name on a script then you really wanted to do it.

Her television dramas took her work into every home,

but it was a book she wrote that brought her to worldwide attention.

The Descent Of Woman was an evolutionary bombshell,

but it's also a seminal feminist work.

It had a profound impact on millions of people around the world.

This was a book that was translated into over 25 languages, and you read

one page of this book and it's no surprise why it had such an impact.

Written as an alternative to what she felt were male-centric

accounts of evolution, the book took America by storm.

She was championed by the feminist movement

but rubbished by many from the scientific community.

There she was, a writer, a playwright,

a distinguished television playwright,

and was suddenly moving into this area.

And so, when someone comes along

who hasn't got ostensible scientific qualifications,

or hasn't been through the mill, hasn't done the hard work,

there is resentment.

But that didn't stop Elaine.

She went on to publish several more books on evolutionary theory,

including her most notorious, The Aquatic Ape.

She punctures these myths with this blistering wit,

which is just an absolute joy to read.

In 2003, Helene began to write a weekly column for the Western Mail

and, at the grand age of 91, was awarded Columnist Of The Year.

She was appointed OBE in 2009 and, in the same year,

was elected a fellow of the Royal Society Of Literature.

She has that honour that the people have bestowed upon her.

She's not just Elaine Morgan, she's "our Elaine".

Regarded as one of Wales's great writers,

she died on 12th July this year, aged 92.

Described as so good they made it twice, Hinterland or Y Gwyll -

its Welsh version shown S4C this year -

is a detective drama starring Richard Harrington.

We caught up with the director, Marc Evans,

who describes the strange, dark world

new-cop-on-the-scene Mathias is about to enter.

BELL PINGS

The world of Hinterland, really, is pretty much the Wales that exists

but it's a selective Wales.

It's a selective view of Wales.

So Aberystwyth, especially Aberystwyth in the winter...

Aberystwyth's a very vibrant town in reality,

cos it's got a university,

it's got a huge student population, for example.

But, at the edges of Aberystwyth,

Aberystwyth falls into the countryside and it falls into the sea

and there's huge tracts of land which are very depopulated

and very interesting cos they open a door

into a Wales that sort of has disappeared a little bit.

I identify a lot with that kind of place because, in some ways,

perhaps it's a Welsh thing, you feel as if you're revisiting the past

a little bit when you come to these places.

And, even though Hinterland is a show,

it isn't a show that's set in the past.

It's not a show in which we visit the supermarket very often.

It lives in these places which are on the edges of society.

You know, to a certain extent, that's where criminality can thrive

or at least go undetected.

IN WELSH:

Building on the success of foreign-language crime dramas,

Hinterland was filmed in English and Welsh.

Who's Johnny Cash?

That's Daniel.

Local preacher and friend of Helen Jenkins, the woman who lives here.

Mrs?

Miss.

Mid-60s, devout chapel-goer.

No children, no close family.

Wasn't at chapel this morning. He came to check to see if she was OK.

Found the door wide open and the carnage inside.

I'll need to speak to him.

He already knows that, sir.

Shooting in two languages is, frankly, a pain in the bum

in terms of the fact you shoot everything twice.

There's no getting around that

because there's times when you'd rather be lavishing time on...

you know, other shots

but what you're doing is replicating something

you shot for the Welsh or English version, whichever you shot first.

Why?

The thing that's made the show possible

is how agile the actors are in both languages.

The actors we're using are obviously all Welsh-speaking

cos there's a Welsh-speaking version of the show.

But they live in a bilingual world as actors

and so they jump from one language to the other

and, you know, it's never a straight translation.

So the actors have to do something very difficult, which is...

replicate the scene...

..but in a slightly different way.

Already picked up by the Danish broadcaster

behind the hit crime series, The Killing,

Hinterland will be shown on BBC Wales on 4th January.

Have you ever fancied running away with the circus?

Well, now's your chance.

After enormous success this year with an incredible show, Bianco,

Cardiff-based NoFit State Circus

is about to take over a new building

and possibly the world.

This is Four Elms, a converted church in the heart of Cardiff

and the new home for NoFit State Circus.

The building will provide the company with a permanent base

to create spectacular shows,

such as this year's critically-acclaimed Bianco.

Bianco does not have a narrative

in the way that you would have in a piece of theatre.

What it has is an emotional arc and emotional drive.

It's a choreographed performance.

It's more akin to the dance in that sense,

in the sense there isn't a narrative

but there's a choreographic arc to it.

And it takes the audience on a journey.

It's a promenade production, which means that, as an audience member,

you are right up close with the performers.

Forget about all of your images of circus, forget about clowns,

forget about horses and dogs and red noses. Forget about spangles.

That's not the world.

This is the world of real magic.

# Bend to the will that takes you at night

# Say it's all right... #

A couple of years ago, NoFit State took a production to Montreal.

Montreal really is the home of contemporary circus

around the world and I described it to them

as being like the local village priest

being invited to take Mass at the Vatican.

Perth's another one like that. The Australian...

The world of contemporary circus in Australia is REALLY strong.

There are enormous numbers of really wonderful Australian companies

who come to Europe, come to Britain, come to Wales very, very often.

And now we're going to them.

We're taking a production that comes from Wales and we're taking it

to one of the biggest international arts festivals in Australia.

And, actually, we're on the front cover of the programme.

Which is amazing!

# Say it's all right

# Say it's all right

# Say it's all right

# Say it's all right... #

If you want to, and if you are inspired

and if you are excited by the work,

then we will go with you on a journey

that takes you from being an eight-year-old

on a Saturday morning youth circus,

all the way to being a performer,

a professional performer on one of our major international tours.

And there are people in the company who have made that journey.

# Say it's all right. #

Well, that's just about it for 2013.

But there's still much to look forward to next year.

Artes Mundi returns here to Cardiff,

Hinterland will hit the UK TV screens

and there'll be plenty of artists

celebrating Dylan Thomas's centenary.

Until then, have a very happy new year.

# And so begins

# A week of pines. #