Win tickets for Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake 3D premiere, plus live Q&A

Four free tickets to exclusive premiere screening and live session in Soho

Matthew Bourne, creator of the famous male swans of his modern reinvention of Swan Lake, is to launch the nationwide screening of a spectacular new 3D film of his creation, along with a live Q&A - and we have free tickets to be won for this exclusive event. UPDATE: Competition now expired.

2012 Tony Award nominations

Shortlist throws seven nods to Guvnors, blanks Paige/Grandage/Bean and more

Things didn’t go well for Eva Perons past and present at this morning’s announcement from New York of the nominations for Broadway’s 2012 Tony Awards, honouring the best of the 2011/12 theatre season, and Richard Bean will surely be wondering how it is that critics’ darling One Man, Two Guvnors failed to get a Best Play nod while nonetheless scooping up seven mentions in other categories – among the highest for a non-musical. 

iPads and smartphones go live with hip-hop dancing

BBC and Arts Council open new digital web channel tomorrow for experiment with arts

A new publicly funded UK web channel for performing arts opens tomorrow morning, preparing for a major launch this weekend streaming top international streetdancers to the web audience and publishing John Peel's notes on his record collection. The channel, called The Space, is funded by the Arts Council England in partnership with the BBC, and will run for six months over and through the Olympics period as an on-demand channel to put performance out via smartphones, tablets and computers.

theASHtray: Walliams on Dahl, Gill vs. Beard, and a new (old) play by Eugene O'Neill

Yeah butt, no butt: our columnist sifts through the fag-ends of the cultural week

There’s something in the water at the commissioning editors’ local, I think, resulting, of late, in a rash of rather good arts-n-culture biopics. This week, it was the turn of Roald Dahl, the Big Friendly Giant who made an absolute shit-load of cash telling really not-very-bedtime stories to young children.

Full programme announced for London 2012 Festival


12,000 events featuring 25,000 artists from all 204 participating Olympic nations 


The full programme is announced today for the London 2012 Festival, from 21 June-9 September, celebrating the London 2012 Olympics and Paralympics.

Among more than 25,000 artists from all 204 participating nations, star names include theatre stars Cate Blanchett, Alan Ayckbourn, Mike Leigh and Julie Walters, musicians Damon Albarn, Daniel Barenboim, Gustavo Dudamel, Gilberto Gil, Zakir Hussain, Yoko Ono, Simon Rattle, Rihanna and Scissor Sisters, visual artists Ai Wei Wei, Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst and Anish Kapoor, and TV characters Stephen Fry, Wallace and Gromit and Dr Who.

Gravenhurst: Interview & Video Exclusive

GRAVENHURST: A video exclusive from the Bristolian multi-instrumentalist, producer and songwriter

Director Jenny Coan's atmospheric use of archive footage for Gravenshurst's new single

Gravenhurst is Nick Talbot, a Bristolian multi-instrumentalist, producer and songwriter who recently completed his sixth album, The Ghost in Daylight. Ahead of its release on Warp Records next week theartsdesk premieres the unsettling film made for its lead single “The Prize”. Directed by Jenny Coan, Talbot says the video “suggests a journey towards an unknown destination”.

20x12: Composers Go Olympic

Announcing the Southbank Centre's festival for contemporary composition

Southbank Centre’s current season has included weekends devoted to three contemporary giants: Pierre Boulez, Conlon Nancarrow and George Benjamin. But it closes with a festival devoted to not to one contemporary composer but 20. The New Music 20x12 weekend, initiated by the PRS for Music Foundation, is a Olympic celebration of the range and diversity of new British composition. Indeed, the only thing all 20 pieces will have in common is that – you’ve guessed it - they will last 12 minutes.

Ballet industry demands end to "too-thin" dancers

Ballerina Tamara Rojo heads speakers at launch of new NHS initiative

Ballerina Tamara Rojo, director-designate of English National Ballet, is making waves even before she takes up her position in September. Next Monday she is a keynote speaker at a day of events at the Royal Society of Medicine launching the first-ever NHS treatment centre for injured dancers and rejecting the pressure for extreme thinness in performers.

Globe to Globe: Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare's Globe

VENUS AND ADONIS: The World Shakespeare Festival begins triumphantly with a poem in six languages from a South African township

The World Shakespeare Festival begins triumphantly with a poem in six languages from a South African township

"Shakespeare’s Coming Home," boasts the strapline of a highly ambitious strand of London 2012’s Cultural Olympiad. Between now and 9 June, 37 productions of the complete canon by Shakespeare (with apologies to Two Noble Kinsmen fans) will be seen at Shakespeare’s Globe by 37 different theatre companies from all over the world. Hence the catchy title, Globe to Globe, which forms only a part of a World Shakespeare Festival continuing until September and taking place all over England and Wales, from Stratford-upon-Avon to the National Eisteddfod.