Am I Losing My Mind Or Just My Figure?

THE 20th Anniversary Bloomsbury Festival runs throughout October, with over 150 events across venues in Bloomsbury and Camden. This is festival director Rosemary Richards’ final year leading the festival of theatre, music, art, literature, science and family events. Many are free to attend.
Highlights include:

• Award-winning multi-media artist Lynn Dennison’s exhibition Home Truths explores the relationship between housing, home and health, and how homelessness and poor housing shape inequality. The work uses installation, collage, moving image and alternative photographic processes to highlight the hidden aspects of homelessness, as well as documenting the positive effects of secure, sustainable housing among residents of Passivhaus social homes. 10am to 7pm Oct 1-31, Holborn Library, WC1X Free.

• The novelist EM Forster’s famous maxim was “only connect.” A member of the Bloomsbury set who lived for years in Brunswick Square, Morgan Forster enacted this principle throughout his life. A lifelong believer in gay rights and a critic of restrictions based on race and class, he famously maintained a 30-year friendship with working-class policeman Bob Buckingham. Forster’s influence extended to the wider Buckingham family, including Bob’s nephew Jim, who pursued his passion for painting. Now in his 80s, Jim’s exhibition offers new insights into Forster’s legacy of connection, and into Bloomsbury’s working-class history. 10am to 7pm, 16 dates between Oct 1 to 31. Camden Archives and Local Studies Centre at Holborn Library, WC1X

• Kay Lynn Er’s Time Moves is a series of vignettes on what personal archives and ordinary objects reveal about us – a child and a collection of seashells, a carved wooden horse, a paper frog in a dusty shoebox, a collector finding the material to build a second body. 7pm, Oct 5-6, UCL Bloomsbury Theatre Studio, WC1H

• Dark Angels’ third poetry anthology, Family Matters, explores relationships within families between parents and children and beyond. Up to five of the collection’s 18 poets, including Rishi Dastidar and Galen O’Hanlon, will read discuss the value of human creativity in an increasingly technological world. 6.30pm, Oct 8, Goodenough College’ WC1N

• In Deep London: William Blake and the Mysteries of King’s Cross, poet Aidan Andrew Dun leads four walking tours through Bloomsbury exploring the works of Blake, Yeats, Rimbaud, Hardy and Shelley, all of whose lives were profoundly affected by King’s Cross St Pancras. Dun argues that Blake’s Golden Quatrain is key to decoding the area’s hidden history. 11am-12.30pm, Oct 9, 10, 22 & 25, Outside St Pancras Church, NW1

• The Dragon Café Singers (above) return to City Lit’s Mental Wealth Festival to perform tracks from their collaborative Spotify album In This Circle Is My Heart. This is not a traditional concert. The choir believe that singing together heals, connects, and strengthens our collective mental wealth and will teach the audience the choruses to their songs. You are warmly invited to become an active part of the music. No experience needed – just a willingness to share a joyful, welcoming vibe. 12.30pm, Oct 10, City Lit, WC2B. Free.

• Black Death, Spanish Flu, Cholera, the Grim Reaper’s greatest hits. Now it’s 2020 and a new plague has arrived . Katherine White and Barra Fitzgibbon’s Patient Soldier is set in an overwhelmed hospital that’s part battlefield, part comedy club, part confessional. This one-person play exposes the chaos and absurd humanity of those holding the line, and reminds us that even in the darkest moments, laughter and love endure. 6pm, Oct 11, City Lit’ WC2B

• In Neil Titley’s solo show Not Bloody Likely (above), Alexis Leighton plays the legendary star of Victorian Theatre, Mrs Patrick Campbell, the original Eliza Doolittle of GB Shaw’s Pygmalion. Set in a theatre dressing room in 1935, “Mrs Pat” looks back on a life of scandal, stardom, love, loss and personal tragedy. 2pm, Oct 18, Conway Hall, WC1R

• In his Ethical Matters talk, novelist and screenwriter Courttia Newland (above) reflects on what it means to be an artist operating in the margins: centring your own voice, reading beyond the white Western canon, and how success shapes historically excluded creatives. His book, The Art of Opposition, explores the work of oppositional artists including Percival Everett, Lou Mensah, Iain Banks, Jean Binta Breeze. 3pm, Oct 18, Conway Hall, WC1R

• A poem is a chrysalis; a prayer; a howl into the darkness. In Poetry: A Matter of Life and Death, Evie Prichard, co-author of The Poetry Pharmacy Book of Grief and Recover, joins Kit Griffiths, poet-in-Residence of Margate Pride, to discuss poetry’s ability to heal and transform. 6pm, Oct 16, Conway Hall, WC1R

• The centrepiece of What We Were and What We Are is the world premiere screening of documentary films made by first-time directors from the Sahrawi Refugee camps. Their work explores elders’ stories and how the Sahrawi culture has changed after 50 years of displacement. The event includes talks and a Q&A with the filmmakers and IRSAAN a Sahrawi-led health charity. 6.20pm, Oct 21, Bertha DocHouse, Curzon Bloomsbury, WC1N

• What is it about becoming 30 that gives everyone permission to ask when you’re going to reproduce? Sam Holland-Bunyan and Genevieve Labuschagne’s Am I Losing My Mind Or Just My Figure? follows Fin, whose world shifts when she unexpectedly falls pregnant, her zero-hour cycle-courier and freelance illustrator life suddenly colliding with societal expectations. 7.30pm, Oct 23 & 25, City Lit, WC2B

• Eliza Fenning, a local cook, was hanged in 1815 after a travesty of a trial. She was 22. She was accused of poisoning her employers with arsenic, though no one died and the use of arsenic was never proved. Her case was seen as a terrible miscarriage of justice. Thousands joined the procession from her funeral to her burial in St George’s Gardens. Debbie Radcliffe and Jules Date tell her story in Eliza’s Dumplings, set in the very church where her funeral took place. 3pm, Oct 24, St George the Martyr, WC1N. Free.

• Historian and long-standing local resident, Alec Forshaw, traces Bloomsbury’s development from the 17th to the 21st centuries: the Southampton and Bedford estates, the Foundling Hospital, the opening of the British Museum, the arrival of the railways, the growth of universities and hospitals and the 20th century upheavals and battles to conserve the area that continue to the present day. 2.30pm, Oct 25, City Lit, WC2B. Free

• Join Arts & Kuchipudi Dance Charity (AKDC) (above) for a Diwali celebration of creativity and classical Indian dance. The two-hour session opens with a drawing and painting workshop inspired by Diwali and Kuchipudi, followed by an intergenerational performance showcasing the form’s rhythm and storytelling. The audience is then invited to try Kuchipudi in an interactive dance-along – no experience needed, just enthusiasm. Masala Chai offers creativity, culture, community, and celebration. 2-4pm, Oct 31, Holy Cross Church, WC1H. Free.

• Book tickets at bloomsburyfestival.org.uk