The Wandsworth Arts Festival, one of the most exciting events in the arts calendar, gets underway his weekend and is bigger than ever before.

This year marks the festival's 10th anniversary of the festival and 26 venues will host everything from drama and film to poetry, paintings, children's events and much more besides.

The festival runs from November 2 to the 27.

Renowned singer Ustad Fida Hussein Khan will perform, preceded by a literary event featuring Mahmood Jamal, editor of The Penguin Book of Modern Urdu Poetry.

Battersea Arts Centre is one of the main venues for this year's festival and next week it hosts a film and drama week.

Talking Birds gets the film week underway with Hypnogogia and Joy Ridden. Hypnogogia is a prologue and epilogue to your evening, a 21st century elegy to a city for two performers and 11 television sets.

In Joy Ridden, the violent impact of a head-on collision creates the most peculiar of love stories. Two misfits are thrown into automotive purgatory to live out a thousand miles of fears of fantasies.

Yet the highpoint of the film festival promises to be Earth Houses, a new film by Hing Tsang. Funded by the Wandsworth Film Awards, it is a unique and intimate look at some of the changes in south eastern China.

Part personal journey and part impressionistic portrait, Earth House deals with the perennial themes of emigration and the "home".

Drama for the first week includes Blow Up Dallas, Woza Albert and a TV and drama workshop led by Peter Duncan.

Blow Up Dallas is a funny satire based on some of the glamorous series' famous characters. Pamela Ewing has slept for a year. She has had a bad dream where her husband was killed and her mother-in-law was replaced by an impostor what does it all mean?

Woza Albert is an unusual play about the apartheid system's absurd suppression of black South Africans.

The Putney Arts Theatre are also getting in on the act when Swanbank Music stage Me And My Girl.

This classic musical tells the story of working class Bill Snibson who finds himself the new Earl Of Hareford. Can he adjust to the genteel lifestyle and keep his girlfriend Sally?

Providing some first week laughs are the Magdalene Players who will be staging the Ray Cooney farce It Runs In The Family at St Mary Magdalene Church Hall.

If you are looking for something more cerebral then the festival's offering of classical music could be for you.

Tomorrow, the Thornington Players will present two of Mozart's most popular and beautiful works to begin and end the concert, the 39th Symphony and the radiant Piano Concerto in A Major. Sandwiched between them is Alison Buchanan who will be performing Les Nuits d'ete (Summer Nights), Berlioz's song cycle exploring romantic love.

Infinite Riches present A Recital next Thursday, which will include works by Poulnec, Gershwin, Dylan Thomas and William Blake.

Six days of dance begin at the BAC on Monday, November 12, with some of the best new dance and choreography from both home and abroad.

November 6, 2001 10:30