Festival Previews Video Blog

When we think of festivals in Switzerland we immediately think of the famous Montreux Jazz Festival. Yet Switzerland has masses of festivals held in towns and villages all over the country.

Antony and his band 7 Dollar Taxi contacted us during the Brighton Fringe to tell us about the Open-Air Hoch-Ybrig. The Open-air Hoch-Ybrig or Hoch-Ybrig Open-Air Festival starts this Friday (13th June and runs through to Monday 16th June). With over 10,000 festival-goers, this is the biggest festival featuring Swiss bands. The festival is located in the idyllic mountainous Alps about 1,000 metres above sea level. Hoch-Ybrig rocks for three days with the line-up seeing a lot of mainstream pop bands taking the stage.

7 $ Taxi are performing their brilliant song, “Do the Robot” which you can check out below. I have asked them to keep me posted about other festivals they are performing at in Switzerland over the summer months. So watch this space…

Yesterday we popped along to the Press Launch of the 2008 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. This year’s Fringe will have 2,088 shows featuring 31,320 performances in 247 venues from 46 countries!

Jon Morgan, Director of the Fringe took to the floor to summarise the panoply of talent about to be unleashed for our delight. The spread of shows reflects the usual feast of Theatre, Music, Musicals & Opera, Comedy, Exhibitions, Children’s shows and Dance and Physical Theatre. Topical and world issues are high on the theatrical and comedy agenda along with our growing preoccupation with the digital age.

However there are undercurrents to such a large festival. An interesting article in The Herald newspaper and The Times newspaper revealed the inevitable behaviour of large groupings. Such behaviour is not unexpected; whenever things get too large you don’t have enough things in common and you lose that close-knit sense of community that once bound you so tightly together. A splinter group forms and we see it coming from the largest venues first: Assembly, Gilded Balloon, Pleasance and the Underbelly. While it is something the Fringe may wish to prevent, when it happens it is usually beneficial. From an eclectic mix of theatrical genres, specialties will always challenge given sufficient numbers. Condensing specialities invigorates quality! This is normal, this is life!

For centuries women have endured the pains and pleasures of fashion. Just the other day a friend sent me a couple of images which instantly brought to mind the ancient Chinese practice of foot binding.

Dating from the Sung Dynasty 960-1279 AD, this bizarre practice allegedly started because a Prince of the Sung Dynasty had a foot fetish for tiny feet. Women in their millions were crippled into submission, their quality of life destroyed on a sexual whim. It wasn’t until 1915 that Dr Sun Yat-Sen, China’s modern founder known to millions as “The Father of the Chinese Revolution” declared the practice illegal. Even then it took years before such embedded doctrines worked their way out of the generational system.

By the looks of these shoes it’s reverse “Lotus Gait”, a term used to describe women with deformed feet who avoided placing weight on the front and tended to walk on their heels.

The cruel reality of a perverse fashion!