Wiltshire Creative – the new organisation that brings together Salisbury Arts Centre, Salisbury International Arts Festival and Salisbury Playhouse – today announces its first season of programming for 2018/19, marking a landmark moment for the arts in Salisbury and the South of England.
Highlights include the regional premiere of Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s Her Naked Skin, an epic drama of political and personal ambition marking the centenary of women’s suffrage in Britain, and the European stage premiere of Agatha Christie’s The Mirror Crack’d, adapted by Rachel Wagstaff and directed by Melly Still, in a co-production with Wales Millennium Centre.
Salisbury International Arts Festival will return from Saturday 25 May to Saturday 8 June 2019 at venues across the city. One of our leading classical composers, Jonathan Dove has been appointed Guest Festival Director for 2019 – the year that he celebrates his 60th birthday. He will curate a thrilling programme of work, capturing the highlights of his varied and illustrious career.
Alongside Dove’s music, the 2019 Festival will mark two anniversaries of global significance. In 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first men to walk on the moon and in 1989 the Berlin wall came down, heralding the collapse of the Soviet bloc. The Festival will reflect on both inspirational moments and their contemporary resonances. The full Festival programme will be announced early in 2019.
A Wiltshire Tale is a piece of spoken word and song commissioned by Wiltshire Creative, from Marlborough-based singer-songwriter Nick Harper who journeys through the history, landscape and stories of this magical county. The show will be seen at venues across the South West as well as at Salisbury Arts Centre.
Other stage highlights include Silence by Nicola Werenowska, a new play about three generations of a Polish/British family, co-produced with the Mercury Theatre Colchester and Unity Theatre Liverpool, and a new production of Mike Leigh’s comic masterpiece Abigail’s Party, co-produced with Derby Theatre, the Queen’s Theatre Hornchurch and Les Theatres de la Ville Luxembourg.
The August Bank Holiday weekend will play host to Lift Off! as fireworks, music, circus, theatre and dance explode in the city – a free party for residents and visitors to celebrate the new arts organisation and its first season of work. Working with Without Walls, the UK’s largest commissioner of outdoor art, Wiltshire Creative has commissioned a new dance piece from the Rosie Kay Dance Company and circus from Ockham’s Razor, to be performed during the weekend. Boots on the Ground, from Tangled Feet Theatre, will be an interactive theatre piece marking the 100th anniversary of the armistice, performed in the heart of Salisbury. The Salisbury Festival Chorus will perform Howard Moody’s opera PUSH, which tells the story of Simon Gronowski, who, as a boy, was pushed by his mother off a train bound for Auschwitz and survived.
