Axis Festival:
Stoke on Trent made a big leap this weekend with their first ever major arts festival.
They got all kinds of great musicians; Get Cape Wear Cape Fly, The Guillemots, The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and organised some fun workshop days, with a Wish Tree, Labyrinth and Costume making!
As the now leading contemporary arts centre we decided to get our audience involved too…
It was a bit of a slow start seeing as we were advertised in the brochure for Friday instead of Saturday; but not to complain as actually the Graffiti artists chickened out and Dan Hopkins had to cancel his projection performance due to good, and therefore bad, lighting. This left resident artist Chris Simcox to down tools for his performance piece, but never fear we will be holding these events on our next show opening instead.
We kept our fingers crossed for the ‘After Party’ planned to start after Get Cape, Wear Cape, Fly. And true AirSpace Style, resident DJ Raskutarnus warmed us up as people began to arrive early. The donations bar was busy straight away and with the addition of interest in the projection showing in the spare room of ‘The Making of Out of Space’, Labyrinth Art’s Zombie Film the atmosphere was building up nicely for the new found local talent of From The Captain. From The Captain are an upbeat rock band, they mix a hint of heavy metal with melodic vocals and bang it out for dancing fun. Then things hotted up with performances from Silhouette, a local Burlesque group revealing their talent for the AirSpace crowd. To finish DJ Raskutarnus wooed the dancers with his funky beats until we drank the bar dry. A brilliant night for all and we just had the cleaning up to do in the morning.
www.myspace.com/fromthecaptainstoke
www.myspace.com/silhouette_burlesque
