At A Glance...
Pexava Salsa
Last Thursday Monthly
Gil and Shelley’s Pexava Salsa Social, with international championship competitors and professional teachers and performers. Salsa lessons, shows, club dancing and more!
The last Thursday of the month, your salsa weekend starts early! Experience an amazing central salsa venue with great salsa people.
Fantastic, spacious wooden dancefloor, special touches provided by dancers for dancers, the best salsa DJs on rotation, regular shows, cheap soft drinks.
19.15-20.15 Intermediate/Advanced class: with Gil & Shelley (please note: classes are suitable for experienced salsa dancers only; please see our Pexava website for our beginners courses in other locations).
20.15-23.30 Salsa Social: Dance your socks off on a wonderful floor with lovely people! Shows at 22.30 for “Showtime events”.
Tickets: £8 on the door including free class.
Event Page
MusicUpClose
25 September - 30 October 2012
If you have ever said ‘I love music, but I’m not musical’ – this is for you!
A brand new project devised by Simon Callaghan, sound collective and Conway Hall, in collaboration with Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, Greenwich.
MusicUpClose is a new series of performing events based at Conway Hall. Professional musicians and postgraduate students from Trinity Laban will be helping to illuminate not only specific pieces of classical music, but also the way in which they think about music and performing.
This series is designed for those who have an interest or even a passion for music – but feel they don’t know how it works. If you have ever said ‘I love music, but I’m not musical’ – this is for you!
The interactive series will be presented in a non-patronising fashion, excluding unnecessary technical terms, and will allow the audience to ask questions and explore what goes on in the minds of players during rehearsals and performances. The locations will be intimate and the performers will be – as the title suggests – up close.
Our first series will take place over six weeks and will use Beethoven as a starting point for our exploration of numerous topics. In the final event, a large chamber orchestra will perform Beethoven’s iconic Symphony No.5.
Tickets for each session are priced at £10, or £55 for all six sessions.
They can be purchased in advance for each event, any remaining spaces will be sold on the door that evening.
Session One: Tone Deaf?
Tuesday 25 September 2012, 19.00 – 20.30
Session Two: I Got Rhythm!
Tuesday 2 October 2012, 19.00 – 20.30
Session Three: An Unanswered Question: how do composers ‘compose’?
Tuesday 9 October 2012, 19.00 – 20.30
Session Four: Variations on a theme…
Tuesday 16 October 2012, 19.00 – 20.30
Session Five: Conductors – What’s the Point?
Tuesday 23 October 2012, 19.00 – 20.30
Session Six: Inside the Music!
Tuesday 30 October 2012, 19.00 – 20.30
Carablanca Tango Club
5, 12, 19, 26 October
19.30 - 00.00
Carablanca is London's longest-running tango club. The friendly, informal atmosphere ensures that beginners and visitors mix easily with the regular dancers.
The dance evening is an Argentine milonga, preceded by a class. There are also classes for beginners in a separate room. Music is traditional Argentine tango, milonga and vals, played in tandas with cortinas by guest DJs.
TICKETS: price £10 for a class or dancing, £12 for both, paid on entry.
Artea Quartet
Sun 7 Oct, 2012, 18.30
The Artea Quartet was formed in September 2001 at the Royal Academy of Music and is comprised of:
- Thomas Gould violin
- Rhys Watkins violin
- Benjamin Roskams viola
- Ashok Klouda ‘cello
- Haydn: Quartet in C Op.54/2
- Webern: Langsamer Satz
- Schubert: Quartet in D minor D810 ‘Death and the Maiden’
£8 tickets, £4 for full-time students (free entry for under-16s)
Doors open at 17.30
Sunday Lecture - Free Speech! Libel Reform in the last chance saloon
Sun 7 Oct 2012, 11.00
After 3 years and support from 100 civil society organisations and 60,000 people the Libel Reform Campaign has secured a parliamentary bill to reform the law of libel. This huge achievement spurred on by the cause célèbre of Simon Singh, Hardeep Singh and Dr. Pete Wilmshurst is testament to the ability of campaigns to make a change. However, the bill still fails to provide a decent public interest defence, doesn’t tackle the ability of corporations to bully people using the law of libel and doesn’t contain any detail on provisions to help internet hosts and intermediaries.
Mike Harris from Index on Censorship will explain the problem, how the campaign has spurred people on to find a solution, and how the Bill can be improved.
Open to all. No need to book in advance.
MusicUpClose - Session 3
9 Oct 2012, 19.00
An Unanswered Question: how do composers ‘compose’?
How do composers think up all this music? Where do their ideas come from? Is composing akin to writing a novel with a plot, a structure, and pacing? Was contemporary music received in a similar way to the modern day at the time Beethoven was composing? Put your questions to two living composers.
19.00 - 20.30 (followed by drinks)
Tempest Trio
Sun 14 Oct, 2012, 18.30
Combining technical mastery, expressive depth, and performance experience, pianist Alon Goldstein, violinist Ilya Kaler and 'cellist Amit Peled have joined forces to form one of the most exciting trios on the international scene. Each virtuoso member of the ensemble has a successful solo career; together, they bring vitality to the concert stage with their dynamic musical interplay and collaborative spirit.
The Tempest Trio has performed in cities throughout the US including Chicago, Baltimore, Seattle, Palm Beach, Spartanburg SC and Washington DC. The trio have performed at the Seattle Chamber Music Festival and the prestigious Four Arts Society invited them to be the featured ensemble in a Beethoven festival as well as the Triple Concerto with the Palm Beach Symphony.
- Ilya Kaler violin
- Amit Peled ‘cello
- Alon Goldstein piano
- Beethoven: Trio in B flat Op.11
- Bloch: Three Nocturnes
- Brahms: Trio in B Op.8
£8 tickets, £4 for full-time students (free entry for under-16s)
Doors open at 17.30
Sunday Lecture - A Scientific Odyssey across America
Sun 14 Oct 2012, 11.00
In May 2012, Neil Denny embarked upon a month long, 6614 mile road trip across America.
The journey was to produce a series of interviews which present a wide-ranging overview of science and skepticism from an American perspective. While Many in Europe consider America to be the home of conspiracy theories, creationism and climate scepticism, the USA is also a scientific powerhouse. However many of those involved in science in the US are also fighting encroaching irrationality.
To be an atheist in America is still considered to be a brave and transgressive act. Creationists continue to push for the teaching of "intelligent design" alongside evolution in science classes. Campaigners are fighting to protect the right to legal and safe abortion, for the use of stem cells in medical research, and are fighting against the growing anti-vaccination movement.
Driving from San Francisco to Boston and calling in at Phoenix, Santa Fe, Chicago, Philadelphia and New York along the way. Neil recorded 39 interviews with scientists and science writers including Ann Druyan, Leonard Susskind, Kip Thorne, Priya Natarajan, Paul Davies, George Church, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Mary Roach, Edward Stone and Sara Seager.
He recorded interviews at some major sites of scientific interest, including NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, The Los Alamos National Laboratory, and The American Museum of Natural History. He also spent a less scientific day visiting Kentucky’s Creation Museum.
Neil Denny is the presenter and producer of the Little Atoms Radio Show on Resonance FM, which was shortlisted for a Physics.org Best Podcast Award in 2010 and has interviewed over 200 guests from the worlds of science, journalism, politics, religion, academia, human rights and the arts. He is a 2012 Travelling Fellow of the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust.
Open to all. No need to book in advance.
The School of Life Sunday Sermon: Edmund De Waal on Tact
Sun 14 Oct 2012, 11.00
Join Edmund de Waal for a journey along the fine line that separates the tactful from the tactless.
The potter and writer Edmund de Waal is among the most subtle and eloquent of artists at work today. His international bestseller The Hare with the Amber Eyes (2010) is celebrated as one of the most extraordinary memoirs ever written. What lies at its core is his masterful handling of details and silences: a rare kind of tact with a particular power.
De Waal warns that tact is a dangerous virtue. As a wise man once said, tact ‘is the ability to make a person see lightening without letting him feel the bolt.’ One poorly judged move and we’re in trouble. We need to be at our most diplomatic when the stakes are high. But, in our fast-paced high-pressure culture, where we fire off blunt messages without a second glance, we're at risk of losing this vital art.
De Waal will share with us what he has discovered about the art of tact from a adulthood spent exploring the delicacy of porcelain alongside the difficulty of the unsaid. He will draw on examples from the fields of poetry, music and the visual arts, as well as everyday life, to take us on a life-enhancing journey along the fine line that separates the tactful from the tactless.
Edmund de Waal is a leading ceramicist and the author of the international bestseller The Hare with the Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance (2010), for which he won the Costa Biography Award and the RSL Ondaatje Prize. He recently created major ceramic installations for the V&A and Tate Britain. His current exhibition, at Waddesdon Manor until 28 October, examines collecting, and how objects are kept together, lost, stolen or dispersed.
TICKETS: £15.00
MusicUpClose - Session 4
16 Oct 2012, 19.00
Variations on a theme…
Many composers wrote ‘variations’. What exactly does this mean? How is the music varied? With the same ideas being repeated, how do composers avoid the music becoming boring? Beethoven’s take on the variation form will be used as a starting point for this discourse.
19.00 - 20.30 (followed by drinks)
