The line-up is impressive for A Passage to Bristol from acoustic to electric, from gospel/soul to Celtic and Didgeridoo. Return to Field are playing (winners of Evening Post Readers Band Competition 2006), new band It's Us! are playing (exploding out of Dads Cabs), Carole Douglas is filling the Hall with Amazing Grace, and the renowned Pindrop Club are teaching you how to listen afresh! There's Bollywood Dance, Somali Wedding songs, Gum Boot dance, and Tibetan Overtone Chant. World Jungle brings you the Jenako-Akumapa Dance Ensemble from Ghana - and there are too many riches to list in full here.

“Where did we come from?” is the question being asked at the Colston Hall. A Passage to Bristol is a gala celebration that will put a range of answers to this question on the stage. It’s an evening that explores the stories behind the amazing diversity of modern Bristol. Playback Theatre will present instant dramatizations of audience members’ stories. The event is sub-titled “the routes of Arrival and fruits of Belonging” – and it aims to capture the many strands that make up the city in an evening of huge variety and human interest. How did you come to Bristol? Were you born here? Or did you make your way from somewhere else? If you were born here, was your father or your grandmother? What stories do you remember them telling of arrival and the reasons that drove them?

As an important port city, Bristol has always attracted “in-comers” – from the surrounding counties of the South West, from Wales and Ireland, and from more exotic locations like the Italian John Cabot and the second-generation Frenchman, Brunel. What brought us or our forefathers here to Bristol? The city’s character is a rich mix of 89 nationalities and ethnic origins. Over the centuries Saxon and Norman, Welsh and Irish, Icelandic and Italian, Jewish and Huguenot have blended together, and been joined by more recent arrivals from every corner of Europe, Asia and Africa.

A Passage to Bristol brings together as many of these strands as possible in a celebration of the wealth of ingredients that have gone into the mixing bowl of our city’s identity. There will be a thousand different “journeys” sitting in the Colston Hall that night. All will have reached the same place at the same time, but each will have a different starting point and a different character. Your story may be surprisingly different to your next door neighbour’s! Playback Theatre is a magical way of putting people’s stories or memories up on the stage. It’s a spontaneous collaboration between performers and audience, with the actors listening to an individual’s anecdotes or memories and immediately recreating them for the whole audience with a style and shape that makes them universally moving or entertaining.

It’s a chance for Bristolians, old and new, to share their “passage to Bristol” – how and why they or their forebears came here. The rest of the evening is a dazzling array of talent from all around the city. There’s circus skills from Circomedia; Bollywood dance, Gumboot dance, and the Akumapa Dance Ensemble; Tibetan Overtone Chanting, and Somali Wedding ceremonials. There’ll be a feast of music from the likes of It’s Us and Return to Field; from HumDrumStrum, and the Pin Drop Club; from harp, guitar, sarod and kora. Magicians, puppets and carnival costumes will beguile you; and Watershed and Bristol Museums will be there collecting “Bristol Stories”.

Doors open at 5.45pm on Wednesday 30th April – with performers, displays and refreshments filling the bars and foyers. The stage show proper starts at 7pm with more displays and refreshments during the interval.

Tickets cost £5 from the Colston Hall box office: 0117 922 3686 – or in person from the Pierian Centre (27 Portland Square, St Pauls).

For more information call the Pierian Centre on 0117 924 4512 or This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it or go to www.pieriancentre.com