The Bollington Festival is a festival which takes place every four or five years in the small town of Bollington in the Pennine foothills near Macclesfield, Cheshire in England.
Bollington is a small town and civil parish in Cheshire, England, to the east of Prestbury. In the Middle Ages it was part of the Earl of Chester's manor of Macclesfield, and the ancient parish of Prestbury. In 2011, it had a population of 8,310.
Macclesfield is a market town and civil parish in Cheshire, England. The town lies around 18 miles south of Manchester city centre.
Cheshire is a county in North West England, bordering Merseyside and Greater Manchester to the north, Derbyshire to the east, Staffordshire and Shropshire to the south, and Flintshire and Wrexham County Borough in Wales to the west. Cheshire's county town is the City of Chester (118,200); the largest town is Warrington (209,700). Other major towns include Crewe (71,722), Ellesmere Port (55,715), Macclesfield (52,044), Runcorn (61,789), Widnes (61,464) and Winsford (32,610), Northwich (19,924)
The festival was the idea of John Coope, a doctor. Dr John set out in the 1960s to create in the village a sense of community to counteract what he saw as a drift away from the collective towards the individual, and his work continued until his death on Christmas Day 2008. The 2005 festival was the first in which he played no major role.[citation needed]
Coope believed that a community should be alive and kicking and, above all, an active place where people join together to achieve more than they can as lone operators. His legacy is in the organisations he launched, revived and often led: the brass band; the drama group; the festival players; the light opera group; the civic society; and the festival choir. He was also the driving force in the creation of an arts centre (few English towns of 7,000 people have one), a regular venue for string quartets, jazz, stand-up comedy, plays, pantomimes, as well as talks and lectures.
A brass band is a musical ensemble generally consisting entirely of brass instruments, most often with a percussion section. Ensembles that include brass and woodwind instruments can in certain traditions also be termed brass bands, but may more correctly termed military bands, concert bands, or "brass and reed" bands.
Comic opera is a sung dramatic work of a light or comic nature, usually with a happy ending and often including spoken dialogue.
An art centre or arts center is distinct from an art gallery or art museum. An arts centre is a functional community centre with a specific remit to encourage arts practice and to provide facilities such as theatre space, gallery space, venues for musical performance, workshop areas, educational facilities, technical equipment, etc.
2009 Festival
The 2009 festival boasted 94 events in 18 days, and its principal venue was a 550-seat marquee, with comfortable seats, lighting rig and full sound system, erected on the town’s recreation ground. Events ranged from a dog show to opera. Celebrations began with the official opening on May 8 by broadcaster Jenni Murray and ended with the traditional torchlight procession up White Nancy, the local hill-top folly, on the last night on May 25.[citation needed]
A conformation show, also referred to as a breed show, is a kind of dog show in which a judge familiar with a specific dog breed evaluates individual purebred dogs for how well the dogs conform to the established breed type for their breed, as described in a breed's individual breed standard.
Dame Jennifer Susan "Jenni" Murray, is an English journalist and broadcaster, best known for presenting BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour since 1987.
White Nancy is a structure at the top of the northern extremity of Kerridge Hill, predominantly in the Parish of Rainow, overlooking the village of Kerridge and the town of Bollington, Cheshire, England. Since 1966 it has been recorded in the National Heritage List for England as a designated Grade II listed building. Its profile forms the logo for the town of Bollington. As to the origin of the name White Nancy, there are several theories: it may have been named after one of the Gaskell daughters, Nancy, or maybe after the horse that is said to have hauled the table top up the hill. However, much the most likely origin is that the hill once had upon it an Ordnance marker, as installed by mapping surveyors. Early maps noted the location as Northern Nancy.
The music programme was aimed at all tastes: a concert version of Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess and two performances of Jonathan Doves’s opera Tobias and the Angel; a symphony concert; jazz with the Big Chris Barber Band, the Royal Northern College of Music Jazz Collective and Dave Mott; and folk with the New Rope String Band. The Upbeat Beatles sang with the Festival Orchestra and 17-year-old singer-songwriter Joni Fuller had a solo.[citation needed]
Porgy and Bess is an English-language opera by the American composer George Gershwin, with a libretto written by author DuBose Heyward and lyricist Ira Gershwin. It was adapted from Dorothy Heyward and DuBose Heyward's play Porgy, itself an adaptation of DuBose Heyward's 1925 novel of the same name.
Joni Amelia Fuller is an English singer/songwriter, pianist, violinist and composer from Lancashire. She is the founder of Your Strings Attached.
The aZZiZ company of drummers and dancers brought traditional music from South Africa, Ghana, Zimbabwe and Senegal, and Kim Schwartz and David Benitez demonstrated the sultry art of tango. There were also two big comedy nights: plays from (Dr Faustus, Wind In the Willows and Weekend Breaks by John Godber, and poetry with Carol Ann Duffy, Michael Symmons Roberts and Jackie Kay. There were also evenings with Barrie Rutter, founder of pioneering theatre company Northern Broadsides, and Sir Mark Elder, music director of the Hallé. Exhibitions included the work of artists working in and around Bollington – a map guided visitors round their studios. Up to 50 pictures by Guardian photographer Don McPhee were on show in the Arts Centre.[citation needed]
South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the southernmost country in Africa. It is bounded to the south by 2,798 kilometres (1,739 mi) of coastline of Southern Africa stretching along the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans; to the north by the neighbouring countries of Namibia, Botswana, and Zimbabwe; and to the east and northeast by Mozambique and Eswatini (Swaziland); and it surrounds the enclaved country of Lesotho. South Africa is the largest country in Southern Africa and the 24th-largest country in the world by land area and, with over 58 million people, is also the world's 24th-most populous nation. It is the southernmost country on the mainland of the Old World or the Eastern Hemisphere. About 80 percent of South Africans are of Bantu ancestry, divided among a variety of ethnic groups speaking different African languages, nine of which have official status. The remaining population consists of Africa's largest communities of European, Asian (Indian), and multiracial (Coloured) ancestry.
The Wind in the Willows is a children's novel by Scottish novelist Kenneth Grahame, first published in 1908. Alternately slow-moving and fast-paced, it focuses on four anthropomorphised animals in a pastoral version of Edwardian England. The novel is notable for its mixture of mysticism, adventure, morality, and camaraderie, and celebrated for its evocation of the nature of the Thames Valley.
Dame Carol Ann Duffy is a Scottish poet and playwright. She is a professor of contemporary poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, and was appointed Britain's Poet Laureate in May 2009, resigning in 2019. She is the first woman, the first Scot, and the first openly gay poet to hold the position.
There was also a major science strand (measure the speed of light with a microwave oven), a fell race and many events aimed at children.[citation needed]
Sources
The Bollington Festival
Joni Fuller
The Chris Barber Band
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