A six-day festival comes to the City of London this week
A bespoke one-off experiential festival opens in the heart of London this week, with a mix of short indoor and outdoor events celebrating the centenary of T S Eliot’s five part epic poem The Waste Land.
30 actors, writers, and musicians will take part in the world’s largest celebration of the poem, which takes place across 22 churches in the City of London - all within walking distance of each other.
A highly spiritual and humanist poem, The Waste Land grew out of a reaction to recent global catastrophes of that period: The Great War and its impact, the Spanish Flu pandemic, and the rise of the Suffragette movement.
Set in the City of London where Eliot worked while he was writing it, the poem is multicultural and multilingual, and in it changed poetry forever.
The festival, called f r a g m e n t s, features a cross disciplinary line-up of classical, folk & world music, fado & flamenco, talks & readings and free sound, video and film installations, and is led by performances by Tamsin Greig and Toby Jones, Sam Lee, Erland Cooper, and the 2022 T S Eliot Prize winner Joelle Taylor.
Audiences will balance a rotation of 15-minute performances followed by 15 or less minutes walking through the streets of old London encountering hidden and extraordinary beautiful church interiors.
Music ranges from Indian Raga to Ragtime, the Syrian Qunan to Kaustinen folk, Sufi to spirituals music and western classical and baroque music to contemporary minimalism & hip-hop.
Audiences can book one of five walking route options in any of the 5 x 3 hour f r a g m e n t slots getting the opportunity to watch and listen up to 7 short 15 minute event bursts.
You can get 10% off tickets when booking through us by using the code TTN at checkout. Buy tickets here, and find out more below.
