
Festival at historic Powys building praised as 'fantastic'
As Llanfyllin's Workhouse Party returned for another year over the summer solstice weekend, organisers have since thanked everyone who helped plan the event as well as its supporters.
The event saw the Grade II listed building hosting an array of musical performers, workshops and activities, as the event returned for the second year in a row after it made a successful comeback in 2024 following a lengthy hiatus.
Campers flocked to the workhouse for three days of live music, DJs, creativity and connection at the venue, in what organisers called a 'fantastic showcase' and 'phenomenal mix of local talent and visiting artists'.
The main Courtyard Stage hosted a range of bands and showcased all genres, while the Garden and Regenerate stages played host to several DJ's.
Creative Stuff Newtown turned the Gallery into a warm and intimate sitting room space and open play workshops were provided by Arts Connection – Cyswllt Celf, while local food was provided by Meadows Café and The Curry Stall.
Praising those involved, a spokesperson for the organisers said: 'We had a lot of people come and help us out over the weekend to help build the party, whether they were helping park cars or helping to keep the site tidy.
'We just want to say a big thank you to them and the main crew for programming such a great line up.
'We're really looking forward to reflecting on this year and coming back next year with another fantastic event.'
Despite already hosting one musical event this summer, the Workhouse is not slowing down, as North Wales Opera Company are set to host concert at Llanfyllin's Workhouse on Saturday, July 19, as their A Night at the Opera event returns to the historic building.
Alongside operatic favourites from Tosca, La Boheme, and La Traviata the company will perform pieces by Gluck, Offenbach, Dvorak and Parisotti as well as numbers from The Sound of Music, The Mikado and Porgy and Bess.
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The Guardian
2 days ago
- The Guardian
Casa Susanna: inside a secret and empowering cross-dressing community in the 1960s
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The original flea market collection of photos was also augmented by collections from artist Cindy Sherman and Betsy Wollheim, a daughter of one of the members of the original Casa Susanna community, and AGO launched a formal exhibition of the photos in the winter of 2024. Now the Met shares its own version of this show, featuring some 160 photos as well as material from Transvestia, a zine made by the Casa Susanna community that published six issues per year. It is a tender and necessary look at trans identity from over half a century ago. Casa Susanna was the brainchild of two women: trans woman Susanna Valenti and her wife Marie Tornell. According to Fineman, the two came together over a meet-cute for the ages: one day a nervous Valenti – dressed as a man – came into Tornell's Manhattan wig shop, supposedly to purchase a wig for her sister, but the astute shopowner was having none of it. 'Marie clocked Susanna, said I know it's for you, it's ok, let me find something that will make you look beautiful. After that the two of them quickly fell in love.' The couple subsequently decided to create a dedicated place where others like Valenti could have the space to be their true selves. 'The two of them as a couple were so extraordinary and unique for their time,' said Fineman. 'I really wish I could have met them, they seem like such incredible people.' In the 60s, very few people who wished to author the story of their own gender were able to have Valenti's freedom. McCarthyism was rampant, and most of the Casa Susanna community supported families as married men – if others found out that they liked to dress as women, they stood to lose everything. 'Most of these people were married, were professionals, doctors, lawyers, mechanics,' said Fineman. 'They were mostly white middle class men with wives and families. They had a lot to lose if their cross-dressing were to be exposed. They lived in isolation and shame.' Casa Susanna participants went so far as to learn to process and print color film on their own, in order to avoid having their photos seen by consumer labs. In spite of that intense pressure – or maybe because of it – those depicted in the Casa Susanna photos radiate intense levity and happiness. 'There's a real sense of joy, a feeling of being so comfortable in their skin,' said Fineman. 'When they were in women's clothing and in the safe space that these resorts provided them they had a sense of freedom there that they couldn't have in their everyday lives.' These photos are striking for how closely they resemble photographs shared decades later by early stage trans women in Internet-based communities. There is a similar aspirational desire to embody an ideal of middle-class, white femininity, and a sense of playful, stolen moments, an all-too brief respite of freedom, self-expression, and community, against a smothering life of forced conformity to a gender that they know is wrong. Heartbreakingly, these photos show a stage of arrested development, a time when so many closeted trans women were unable to stop living a dual life as straight men. Behind all the smiles and casual poses one can sense individuals who yearn to be free but do not feel capable of pushing past the barriers imposed by society. 'Seeing photos of themselves dressed en femme was profoundly important for these people,' said Fineman. 'They talked about this in the magazine and in other places. It was seeing an image of themselves as a woman that reflected back their desired identity to them.' Importantly, Casa Susanna puts the lie to the frequent myth that there is something new about trans women, as well as the falsehood recently perpetrated by supreme court justice Amy Coney Barrett that the US has no significant history of discrimination against trans people. 'At the time there were masquerade laws, so these people could be arrested for cross-dressing in public,' said Fineman. 'They had to be very careful, even going outside of their homes. There are accounts in the magazine of them being arrested, which involved horrible humiliation and mistreatment at the hands of the police. They could even be sent to mental institutions for what was essentially conversion therapy.' Many in the Casa Susanna community had supportive wives who would often join them in the Catskills, sometimes even penning columns in Transvestia from their perspective. In 1965, one wife named Avis wrote a heartfelt column on her struggles to understand her spouse's identity, giving some sense of the depth of commitment of those who participated there. 'Wives would come with them to these retreats and help them create their look,' said Fineman. 'One picture that I really love that shows a couple wearing matching dresses that they obviously had had made. That was something really surprising.' Some members of the Casa Susanna community, such as Virginia Prince, founder and editor of Transvestia, eventually transitioned to a woman – she lived openly as herself from 1968 until her death in 2009. Some of these women still survive to this day, and several will be present at the Met for a panel in September. The museum will also host a screening of the 2022 PBS documentary Casa Susanna, directed by Sébastien Lifshitz. Fineman sees this exhibition as a gesture of inclusion to the trans community, as well as a way of making good the history that has been lost. Museums have a particular role to play, particularly now when so many other sectors of society are actively erasing trans lives. 'I hope this offers trans people a larger sense of affirmation and understanding,' she said. 'We have a role to make these pictures and history visible.' Casa Susanna is on display at the Met in New York until 25 January 2026


Scotsman
3 days ago
- Scotsman
EIF opera Orpheus and Eurydice to feature 'acrobats doing very dangerous things'
If you think opera staging is mannered and boring, wait until you see this production of Orpheus and Eurydice, writes Ken Walton Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Yaron Lifschitz has serious issues with opera. 'Some of it is excruciating,' he declares, which you'd reckon should worry the pants off the Edinburgh International Festival. After all, the affable founder and director of the Australian contemporary circus group Circa is the mastermind behind this year's flagship opera production of Gluck's Orpheus and Eurydice, and here he is, revealing his 'dirty secret – that I've no knowledge of Debussy past 20 minutes of Pelléas et Mélisande because I've never remained awake long enough to hear it. I get bored very easily.' The thing is, it's not so much opera that's the problem as its mannered traditions, Lifschitz argues. 'Opera at its core is a covers band, people doing other people's music, singing in a way they were told to sing, about stuff they were told to do with a great apparatus and significant amount of funding, devoted to essentially keeping the art fairly sclerotic, inured to change. It's not the operas that are boring, but the lack of compelling ways to do them.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Orpheus and Eurydice Received wisdom, he suggests, has stifled instinct. 'I love working on Monteverdi, for instance, and one of the things I used to ask was, how could there be a set way of singing this if it was the first of its kind? Back in the 17th century it would just have been people who sang as they felt inclined, so maybe we should just go back to that rather than everyone sounding like they went to the same academy for stifling joy and creativity. I have to say I was howled down by a bunch of people who'd been to that academy and in some cases ran it.' So yes, Lifschitz is a maverick, an inquisitive free spirit who has nonetheless proved his worth in imaginative cross-genre productions that challenge the norm, including this collaborative Orpheus and Eurydice. Unveiled in Brisbane in 2019, this summer's European premiere production at the Edinburgh Playhouse draws together the original combined resources of Circa and Opera Queensland with Opera Australia, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Scottish Opera Chorus, conducted by period music specialist Laurence Cummings. That Gluck himself was a reforming phenomenon, freeing 18th century opera of its stilted affectations and even adapting his most famous opera to suit opposing Viennese and Parisian tastes, clearly appealed to Lifschitz, and needless to say, he's taken brazen liberties. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The traditional frontline cast of three has been reduced to two, the role of Eurydice (Australian/British soprano Samantha Clarke) now conflated with that of Amor. The first sighting of Orpheus (countertenor Iestyn Davies) is in an asylum. 'My basic interpretation of the piece is that on their wedding night Eurydice dies, possibly at Orpheus's hands,' Lifschitz explains. Orpheus and Eurydice 'I'm not suggesting any ill will. Maybe they took the wrong substances to celebrate their wedding night; he wakes up in a mental institution and has no recollection of what happened. It becomes a process of memory, journeying into the Underworld. Every woman looks like her, every man is an extension of him and it probably doesn't end well. I don't want to give a spoiler, but it's opera: generally she dies, and he might.' What then of Circa's circus performers, whose virtuosic acrobatics – devised jointly by Lifschitz and fellow choreographer Bridie Hooper – provide an aligned counterpoint to the entire piece? They are, says the director, essential to his 'poetic' vision of the opera, part of 'a constant play with foregrounding and backgrounding' that respects both the polished classicism of Gluck's piece and its emotional volatility, 'that mixture of hope and fear that reminds us we're alive'. 'Working with the artists back in Brisbane on the physical embodiment of the production, the thing I keep coming back to is you have to feel a lot and show very little. Sometimes it just oozes out, sometimes the floodgates open and explode into acrobatics, but then it very quickly turns back into its classical form.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Of course, that's just the circus contingent. Is Lifschitz also expecting his singing cast to turn cartwheels? Opera Australia; Orpheus + Eurydice; Dress Rehearsal; JST; January 2024 'We're putting very experienced opera singers in fairly uncomfortable and difficult positions, very close to acrobats doing very complex and dangerous things,' he admits. How does that go down with Iestyn Davies, appearing in his first ever staged Orpheus? 'I've watched a video of the original production and know that late on in the show I have to stand on someone's shoulders,' says the English countertenor, who will eventually join the troupe for a final nine days of rehearsal. 'The biggest challenge for any singer in such a physical show is getting the breathing worked out.' Working with new people is healthy for the production, Lifschitz believes. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad 'Every staging is different. They're all based on the same choreography, the same ideas, but when only half the artists have performed this production before – as in Edinburgh – you use that opportunity to freshen things up.' Is there one thing he'd like audiences to take away from this Orpheus? 'That's something I've thought about very carefully,' he says. 'Circa brings a show to the Fringe every year – this year we're bringing Wolf – and we have a specific following. But for an International Festival production like this I feel we have to appeal to two different audiences simultaneously. 'I'd like an opera audience to come along and think 'Wow, this is so alive', where the operatic norms of music meeting dramaturgy exceed and challenge expectations. And I'd love circus audiences to go and sense that this is richer, touches bigger emotions, moves them even more profoundly than straight circus. I want everyone to walk out of the performance at the end of the day and think it would be difficult to figure this opera any other way. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad And the litmus test? 'Circus is written with one huge commandment – Thou Shalt Not Bore! When you come out of Orpheus you may love it, you may hate it, but you won't be bored.'


Times
6 days ago
- Times
Peter Brookes's Times cartoon: July 28, 2025
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