Congratulations from the Riverside Arts Cen-tre to our very own Kathryn Cameron-Webb, whose company, The KH Dance Acade-my won the top award at a ceremony held on the 11th November 2021 at The Holiday Inn for “The Best Healthy Business” in Spelthorne. Kathryn found our great facility 9 years ago, and seized the opportunity to set up her Dancing School in Lower Sunbury. Since then KHDA has grown to teaching a wide range of students from 18 months through to older adults in RAD Ballet, ISTD Tap & Modern, Street, Musical Theatre, Fitness and Zumba Gold. KHDA now has a fabulous team of teachers preparing students for exams, dance shows and pantomimes. There must be something about dance at Riverside because the leader of our ballroom and ballet dance classes Clare Fisher’s company Ballero, was run-ner up in the best start-up company category. And whilst we are mentioning awards, Riverside Play-ers won various commendations in the recent Spelthorne and Runnymede drama festival, both for their on-stage and on-line entries. Particularly highly commended in several categories was the team involved in “Hold Still” a new play written by Carrie Millinger. One person who did not re-ceive an award but surely must qualify for a gold medal was Helen Heslop who arranged a “Playathon” which raised around £6000 to help replenish the coffers of Riverside, so drastically affected by the Covid lockdown. Heather organised any number of pianists, violinists, flautists, guitar-ists and even some child dancers from On-StageNow, of all abilities and ages to be sponsored to perform their musical piece in front of an audi-ence. Thank you to Helen and all those wonderful performers. Earlier this autumn we held our week of show-case events demon-strating the wealth of talent that regu-larly appears at Riverside. Classical and Jazz Musicians, Quiz Masters, Actors, Come-dians, Magicians, Singers, Dancers, and Impres-sionists. The audiences were not so large in num-bers as we had hoped, but the participants had great fun in getting back on stage after an 18 months break, the watchers saw great entertainment and the newly re-furbished bar did great business. Oh, it was so good to be back! Enough about the past; what about the future? Par-ticipation in our various groups is, apart from the odd exception back to, and in many cases way beyond, that prior to lockdown as people pick up the threads of their leisure activities. Check our website or our Riverside presents advertisements elsewhere in this edition to see the many pastimes you can pursue at Riverside and make a vow to join one of them in the new terms starting in the New Year. We even have three new possibilities for you which have started pilot classes. Yoga on Tuesday mornings, a sewing class (cotton not seeds) on Wednesday evenings and pottery class for children on Saturday and Sunday mornings. And if you just want to watch, we have the Youth Theatre’s production of “Twelfth Night” in De-cember followed by a Christmas fun production of song dance and glitter by Zodiac. Naturally there will be the traditional January pantomime from Riverside Players. This year, (or rather next year!) it will be “Old King Cole”. In addition to these there will be regular Jazz concerts, a coffee con-cert, featuring actress Carole Boyd, plus the monthly comedy club evenings and even a silent disco (no, I don’t know what that is either!) I think it was the News of the World that used to say ‘all human life is here’ – well that certainly applies to Riverside. At this time of the year we would like to thank the local community for their support over the past 18 months. We hope that this festive season will be a joyous one for you and your families and that the New Year will bring you happiness, prosperity and above all, good health.
Congratulations from the Riverside Arts Centre
