Culture
Cultural events include the annual Buxton Festival and the International Gilbert and Sullivan Festival, among other festivals and performances held in the Opera House and other venues. The Buxton Museum & Art Gallery offers year-round exhibitions.
The Buxton Festival, founded in 1979, runs for about three weeks in July at various venues including the Opera House. The programme includes literary events in the mornings, concerts and recitals in the afternoon, and operas, many of them rarely-performed, in the evenings. There has been an increase in the quality of the operatic programme in recent years, after decades when, according to critic Rupert Christiansen, the festival featured "work of such mediocre quality that I just longed for someone to put it out of its misery." Running alongside it is the Buxton Festival Fringe, known as a warm-up for the Edinburgh Fringe. The Buxton fringe features drama, music, dance, comedy, music, poetry, art exhibitions and films in various venues around the town. In 2009 there were over 500 events from over 140 entrants.
The International Gilbert and Sullivan Festival, founded in 1994, runs for over three weeks from the end of July through most of August. It is an adjudicated competition, held in the Opera House, comprising over a dozen amateur G&S troupes, while professional performances are given on the weekends. There are dozens of fringe events in the adjoining Pavilion Arts Centre and elsewhere, during the daytime and as an alternative to the evening operas in the Opera House. The week-long Four Four Time music festival is held every February and features a variety of rock, pop, folk, blues, jazz and world music.
The Opera House has a year-long programme of drama, concerts, comedy and other events. In September 2010, following a £2.5 million reconstruction, the former Paxton Suite in the Pavilion Gardens re-opened as a performance venue called the Pavilion Arts Centre. The centre, located behind the Opera House, includes a 369-seat auditorium. The stage area can be converted into a separate 93-seat studio theatre.
The Buxton Museum & Art Gallery has a permanent collection of local artefacts, geological and archaeological samples (including the William Boyd Dawkins collection) and 19th and 20th century paintings, including works by Brangwyn, Chagall, Chahine and their contemporaries. There are also regular exhibitions by local and regional artists and various other events. The Pavilion Gardens hosts regular arts, crafts, antiques and jewellery fairs.
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—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)
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—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)