Breaking Bard: Shakespeare Lives!

This April marked the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth and the residents of Wingfield and Randolph Roads have brought the bard to the Art Trail, with window displays inspired by the plays and poetry and yesterday's marvellous celebration of poetry and music overseen by Silvana Gambini outside her Wingfield Road house. The crowd enjoyed a selection of sonnets read by local residents before Per Kelt took to the stage (or rather, driveway), playing their fantastic medieval speed folk. Stepan Honc (on guitar) and Pavlina Bastlova (vocals and recorder) performed traditional songs from France, Spain and Czech Republic - bringing the old Romance languages Occitan and Galician to Walthamstow - all at an infectious tempo that got the children dancing (and the adults wishing they could).

They performed a beautiful rendition of the Willow Song from Othello (set to their own music), before Kate finished the event by reading Shakespeare's Sonnet 116:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no; it is an ever-fixed mark, 
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks 
Within his bending sickle's compass come; 
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, 
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
   If this be error and upon me proved,
   I never writ, nor no man ever loved. 


The window displays continue throughout the festival - see if you can spot which plays they're from!

And if you missed Per Kelt, they play regularly in London. Find out more here: http://www.perkelt.com/PerKelt_UK.php.