Review: Divinity and dance music at The Rave Space
Rave Space Review

Festival critic Michelle Dee’s closing Heads Up duty this season saw her exploring Will Dickie’s The Rave Space. After a hectic Heads Up schedule that has seen the Ensemble 52 led festival provide the theatrical highlights to the Wow (Women of the World) Hull Festival, with world-leading artists deliver a series of challenging workshops and curating […]

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Blog: We are loved
We Are Loved Blogpost

With March 2017’s Heads Up Festival over and out, Dave Windass attempts to make sense of it all, helped by memorable closer The Rave Space. So it’s around 36 hours since Heads Up Festival’s eighth season drew to a close. And, as is the usual case around about this time, I’m still attempting to process what […]

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Review: Groundbreaking sound art confronts experience of brain trauma
Reassembled Review

Festival critic Michelle Dee comes to terms with Shannon Yee’s Reassembled, Slightly Askew. “Shannon. Shannon. Can you hear me?” Many people recoil in horror when you begin to describe it. Before seeing Reassembled, Slightly Askew, I’d been carrying a phrase around in my head, something like, “people going to see Reassembled need their head testing.” […]

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Review: Plunger Bailey and amyl nitrate
Neil Shand by Jerome Whittingham

You may not have heard of the name Neil Shand, but if you were one of the millions who have enjoyed comedy shows, on radio and television, during the last fifty years, you are almost sure to have enjoyed his work. In a special one-off event introduced by filmmaker Dave Lee, Neil sat down with […]

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Review: Blazon’s Icons
Icons Review

With all the feminist power surging through the city centre at WOW Hull Michelle Dee headed into the Ferens Studio to find her own inner warrior at Blazon’s Icons, a contemporary re-telling of the Amazonian warrior myths. The term Amazonian warrior conjures up an image of a fiercely proud tribe of buxom fighting women, a bit handy […]

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Review: Theatre Ad Infinitum’s Bucket List

Festival blogger Michelle Dee renews her acquaintance with Theatre Ad Infinitum at Heads Up. Bucket List is an extraordinary tale set on the Mexico border which charts the untold repercussions of the NAFTA agreement; a government policy that opened up free trade between the United States, Canada and Mexico. Performed by one of the country’s […]

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Review: Heads Up workshops stir body and soul

Alongside the specially chosen live performances Heads Up Festival also likes to offer workshops and classes while the companies and artists are here in Hull. Festival blogger Michelle Dee took her place alongside actors, dancers, choreographers and absolute beginners to embark on a journey of discovery. It is very rare to feel completely at one with your […]

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Review: Indigo Moon’s puppet show with political punch

As a crowd gathers in the west end of Hull, we find Michelle Dee drawn to a theatre space secreted away on a Hull estate to experience a puppet show pitting Shakespeare versus Molière. Presented and performed by collaborating companies Indigo Moon Theatre (UK) and Compagnie Via Cane (France) with (Anna Ingleby) and Jean-Frederic Noa […]

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Blog: Shakespeare versus Molière

Dave Windass returned to his old stomping ground and a show he first saw in its development version to experience an important puppet show for our times. A former school in an area to the west of the city of Hull once plagued so much by groups of louts that the only solution to the breakdown […]

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Blog: Finding Your Voice workshop with Tom Penn

In Hull and hitting Heads Up Festival with Neverland, Tom Penn took the time to lead a vocal workshop. One of the festival’s producers – Dave Windass (not known for his dulcet tones) – joined the participants in order to find his voice. I was chatting to Tom Penn about 90 minutes before the Finding Your Voice workshop […]

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