The 2017 Hilton Arts Festival took place on the weekend of the 15th of September. Now in its 25th year, the Festival continues to provide a platform for a wide variety of artistic disciplines. Michael Broderick reports with beautiful photos by Jonathan Burton.
It is unique in that it doesn’t differentiate between Main and Fringe theatre productions and there are no venues dedicated to a single production for any length of time beyond their technical rehearsal time and actual performances. The Festival technicians are most often turning around big productions in very short time frames. In this way, the three-day Festival manages to cram an extraordinary amount of entertainment into a very short time period.
Sue Clarence, the Festival Director and founder, always ensures that the bar is set extremely high and that audiences are entertained, challenged and inspired by the Festival program. Black Coffee Productions once again excelled as the Festival’s technical supplier and DWR Distribution were proud to be involved in the way of technical support during the run of the Festival. DWR also equipped every venue with a MA Lighting dot2 Console and the ease of use and reliability of these consoles prevented the short technical rehearsals from getting bogged down with programming issues.