A Brontë Burlesque

The Radical Brontës Festival returns this weekend (yesterday Luis Buñuel's Abismos de Pasión was projected on the Bradford National Museum of Photography, Film & TV) with new events.

Today, Friday 22 September, the Festival goes really Radical. It presents a very interesting show-performance-party not for the faint of heart or the purists out there. This is how Joolz Denby, Artistic Advisor for the Radical Brontës Festival, when we contacted her some days ago, described the show for us:

The Burlesque is really a celebratory party which again, is designed to put the Bronte name in front of a group of younger folk who wouldn’t normally give them a second thought. It’s not meant to be a serious event, but a fun, Gothic-style club night with a Bronte-Victoriana theme. It will be held in a 19th Century Mill building in Bradford, hosted by a very famous underground club night, Kulu. It also features a specially commissioned soundtrack ‘Wuthering Heights’ composed and created by Justin Sullivan of New Model Army (I do the readings). This soundtrack is really wonderful in itself and I’m thrilled with it. I am also pleased that one of the people working at the club said to Justin the other day ‘I never thought owt about the Brontes until I saw this night was going to be on & I heard your music for it, but I’m going to have a go at that book now’. That, as far as I’m concerned, is better than gold to me.

My aim throughout the Radical Brontës Festival has been to bring the Brontës not to those who already know and love them as your BronteBlog does, but to those who have dismissed them without reading them or knowing their lives. This is an awareness-raising exercise, not a traditional Bronte-Fest. I would prefer to ‘convert’ 2 young people than satisfy 200 Brontephiles. I don’t class myself as a Bronte expert, but as a great reader and lover of their work, especially Wuthering Heights, which has been a seminal text in my life.

The press release gives all the details:

Brontë Burlesque: The Darkest Most Beautiful Night of the Year

September 22 September 2006, The Mill Thornton Road, Bradford

On Friday September 22 from 8.00pm to 2.00am, The Mill on Thornton Road in Bradford will be transformed in to a freewheeling, multimedia evocation of the dark Victorian underworld directed by the internationally acclaimed Bradford-based novelist, artist and poet, Joolz Denby.

Brontë Burlesque: The Darkest Most Beautiful Night of the Year, combines fashion show, dance night, vintage fashion fair, art installation and live performance in a dramatic, neo-Gothic, multi-sensory insight into the dark and fascinating world which the Brontës grew-up in. This event is hosted by legendary underground dance club Kulu, features live music from top young Bradford-based rock band, the much-talked about New York Alcoholic Anxiety Attack and a specially created musical and spoken word soundtrack by Justin Sullivan of New Model Army and Joolz Denby. (...)

A wildly hedonistic evening of divinely decadent vintage glamour, Brontë Burlesque actively encourages the audience to participate by dressing up in their own Gothic-Victoriana outfits to revel in the darkly sumptuous delights of all things Victorian. Fashion shows will take place every hour with corsetted burlesque dancers, psychedelic projections, and superb trance/chillout music spun by Kulu’s top DJs.

We also notice that Ken Russell and the BBC will film the whole event. And if you know Ken Russell's works, you know that you will love every minute of it... or you will hate it with all your heart. By the way, you can enter the party if you go in fancy dress (victorian, of course) :P.

EDIT:
BBC-Bradford publishes thirty pictures of the event. In the one on the right, Joolz Denby and a ... fan :P.



Categories: Music, Wuthering_Heights, Weirdo