Bloomsbury Area Guide

A proper room above a pub experience in central London. Come and enjoy comedy as it should bepint in one hand, all huddled around a stage in the corner of a room above a pub, enjoying the very best of Londons comedy circuit for an unbeatable price. Our shows are pay what you can meaning that you can reserve your ticket for just £5 and pay what you can at the end of the show. Your headliner Andrew White Online sensation Andrew White has been described by Joe Lycett as very exciting and very funny and by teachers as a pleasure to teach. An in demand live act, Andrew works for some of the best comedy promoters and festivals in the country and is a popular choice for tour support having opened for top acts like Catherine Bohart, Helen Bauer, Troy Hawke & Kiri Pritchard-McLean. "The talent is very obviously there...rampantly engaging" The List "A plethora of memorable gags... a relevant and witty comedian" Chortle

The interwar period was a golden age of the uncanny. Clairvoyants, fakirs, Theosophists, mind-readers, miracle-workers and jinn-summoners—all assured the masses that, just like the newly discovered invisible forces of electricity, radiation and magnetism, unseen spiritual powers commanded a realm of hidden human potential. This was a transnational movement of eccentrics, gurus and prophets, with East and West interacting in unexpected ways. Drawing on untapped sources in Arabic as well as European records, Raphael Cormack follows two of the most unusual and charismatic figures of this age: Tahra Bey, who took 1920s Paris by storm as an ‘Oriental’ missionary; and Dr Dahesh, who harnessed Western science to create a pan-religious faith in Lebanon. Travelling between Cairo, New York and Jerusalem, Paris, Istanbul and Rio de Janeiro, the two mystics reflected the desires and anxieties of a troubled age. These forgotten holy men, who embodied the allure of the unexplained at a time of dramatic change, speak to our own unstable world today. Raphael Cormack is an award-winning editor, translator and writer. The author of the widely acclaimed Midnight in Cairo, he is Assistant Professor of Modern Languages at Durham University. Presented by London Fortean Society. This is an all ages event. Under 16's must be accompanied by an adult.

'Motor-psycho' guitar action, ethnic drones and throat singing from this cult Japanese psychedelic group.

When autistic girls meet clinicians, they are often misdiagnosed with anxiety, depression, personality disorders, or are missed altogether. Autism’s ‘male spotlight’ means we are only now starting to redress this profound injustice. In this UnMasked talk, renowned brain scientist Gina Rippon delves into the emerging science of female autism, asking why it has been systematically ignored for so long. Generations of researchers, convinced autism was a male problem, simply didn’t bother looking for it in women. But it is now becoming increasingly clear that many autistic women and girls do not fit the traditional, male, model of autism. Instead, they camouflage and mask, hiding their autistic traits to accommodate a society that shuns them. Urgent and insightful, this is a searching examination of how sexism has biased our understanding of autism. Gina Rippon is Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Neuroimaging at the Aston Brain Centre, Birmingham. Her research involves state-of-the-art brain imaging techniques, investigating how the brain interacts with its world. She is an outspoken critic of outdated gender stereotypes in the field, and is the author of The Gendered Brain and The Lost Girls of Autism. Gina’s book will be available to buy in person from Newham Bookshop on the night.

Three sets exploring the friction between electronics, physical media, and acoustic performance. Laura Phillips presents an expanded film performance inspired by her time in Rome, telecommunication & automobile accidents. Joe Bates & Amalia Young build complex, glistening harmonies through instinctive processes, stacking strange chords between Joe's custom synth, the Hyasynth, and Amalia's violin. Lara Agar & Rosalie Warner use violin, voice, and electronics to create a careful constellation of sound. Laura Phillips is a non-smoking, Sagittarius, working with 16mm photochemical film processes and field recordings to explore the intersections of visual music, expanded film, and performance. Her work engages with themes of obsolescence, the commons, and information infrastructures. Her most accomplished feats include climbing Aran Fawddwy and making it past 35. She had played with numerous improvisation musicians and was a key part of Viridian Ensemble, an audio visual improv group. Last autumn she undertook a research residency at the British School at Rome, where she continued her practice through loitering & listening mapping the pastoral, the sonic, and the shifting hinterlands of the city. To writer Tim Rutherford-Johnson, Joe Bates's music evokes the court music of a short-lived empire, finding ceremony in looping phrases and novel tuning systems where strange chords sound like home. He works with choirs, orchestras, and chamber musicians, and builds new instruments from glass vessels, broken pianos, and circuit boards. Amalia Young is a violinist and improviser specialising in classical and experimental music. Her ensemble projects include concert and recording projects with Apartment House, work with the Kavinsky Trio, and the Komuna Collective, who have brought programmes of contemporary and avant-garde string quartet music to nightclubs in Oxford and London. Lara Agar's music blends electronic soundscapes and sampled material with traditional acoustic and classical instruments. Taking a homegrown and intuitive approach, Lara's interests lie in the accidental, the found, messiness of stuff, experimental music making, going with mistakes, (Beckett - Fail again, fail better), not knowing Rosalie Warner is a mezzo soprano and vocalist who moves between folk, opera, improvisation, contemporary, composition and more. She is a member of vocal ensemble HOWL, singer-composer collective Yolk, and SpiralArts, a cross generational and multi-disciplinary community of artists. HOWL recently released Night Creatures, written with Robert Macfarlane and Yuvan Aves, on Cosmo Sheldrake's Tardigrade Records.

Madame Claude is a five-piece ska band from Saddleworth and Tameside, England.