Brighton Festival
Thomas H. Green
Watching this band in action is a treat. They gel absolutely and play off one another in a manner that’s easy and mellow, yet also sparks by occasionally teetering on the edge of their virtuosic abilities. The songs played throughout the evening at Brighton Festival are protest classics and other socially aware fare, but the group’s leader-arrangers, singer Carleen Anderson and keyboard player Nikki Yeoh, have turned them, via jazz, into almost completely new pieces of music.Take an extended jam that combines “Oh, Freedom”, the anti-slavery spiritual made famous by activist-folk singer Odetta Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Bridget Christie tells us at the top of the show that she is a heterosexual, able-bodied, privileged white female – so why is she feeling so discontented? As she explains with great verbal dexterity in What Now?, it is living in a post-EU referendum world that has made her feel so discombobulated; left and right have no meaning any more, and – like so many British voters – she doesn’t know where her political home is.The Brexit vote has created some odd bedfellows, she says; it came as a big shock when lap-dancing club owner Peter Stringfellow said he was a fellow Remainer – because he didn’t Read more ...
Katie Colombus
It was no matter that journalist Daniel Hahn dropped out ill at the 11th hour of this "audience with" event. Author Philip Ardagh's deep knowledge and unflappable demeanour comfortably carried the hour-long talk about the inhabitants of Moominvalley. We heard detail of characters, themes, metaphors, changes from books to the TV cartoons and detail of Tove Jansson and her family, who wrote the original books.We coursed through the journey of a boy who saved his book tokens to buy the novels of Jansson, his favourite author, and eventually came to write a 380-page book about the world of the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The welcome to Glasgow audio-visual artist Robbie Thomson’s performance engenders a hefty sense of anticipation. It’s almost nervousness-inducing as we’re handed ear-plugs and warned about how very loud it’s going to be. Then, walking into the main hall from the bar, all is gloom. From 1849, for a century-and-a-half, this venue was a church and attached school, its claim to fame a dismissive mention in Jane Eyre. But this evening the stained glass windows are blacked out, blocking the evening sun. In the centre of the old building is a Faraday cage beside which, on a raised podium, Thomson is Read more ...
David Nice
First the good news: Cédric Tiberghien, master of tone colour, lucidity and expressive intent, playing the 24 Chopin Preludes plus the Bach C major and the C minor Nocturne in the red-gold dragons' den of the Royal Pavilion's Music Room. Then the not so good: Paul Kildea, ruffler of feathers during his brief Wigmore regency and in his sometimes speculative Britten biography, rushing and mumbling his way through excerpts from his new book, Chopin's Piano: A Journey through Romanticism.Much interesting material there, though even an experienced actor might have had difficulty making it all mesh Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The venom with which Abiodun Oyewole spits “America is a terrorist”, the key repeated line to “Rain of Terror”, has startling power. The piece is an unashamed diatribe against his nation. Beside him his partner Umar Bin Hassan rhythmically hisses the word “terrorist” again and again while, behind, percussionist Donn Babatunde provides minimal backing on a set of three congas. “Take a black woman, a pregnant black woman, cut her belly open and let the foetus fall out, stomp the baby in the ground.” Oyewole is raging and it feels good. There is no meta here, just pure countercultural fury Read more ...
David Shrigley/Brett Goodroad, Brighton Festival review - showcases puncturing the medium's pretence
Mark Sheerin
In his 1991 novel Mao II, Don DeLillo called the literary medium “a democratic shout”. His oft-quoted claim is that any man or woman on the street could strike it lucky, find their voice, and write a great book. Not only does everyone carry round a novel, but those novels are potentially brilliant. Well, it’s not a Pulitzer nomination but in Brighton right now, any ordinary Joe can walk in off the street and find their art put on the wall at the city’s foremost gallery. Fabrica’s installation, which goes by the name of Life Model II, is certainly a democratic shout.This former chapel in the Read more ...
Katie Colombus
I first heard – or rather saw on paper – the work of Lemn Sissay in an English literature lecture hall in the late '90s. As a fresh faced first year uni student, coming firmly from the school of Pablo Neruda, it was quite a departure from my norm.It soon became clear that this was poetry to be heard, not read. It’s taken me 20 years, but my path has finally bought me here, to Sissay’s set at the Brighton Festival.Opening with Morning Breaks, a moving, rousing poem about learning to fly when you didn’t even know that’s what was happening, he jokes about the kinds of characters in the audience Read more ...
Cuckmere: A Portrait/Environment 2.0, Brighton Festival review - landscape, politics and art collide
Nick Hasted
Sitting between the South Downs and the sea, Brighton’s borders are defined by nature. The Downs’ 2010 designation as a National Park also legislatively limits urban encroachment. The typically beautiful Sussex village of Falmer is on the city’s edge, supporting while doing its best to ignore two universities and a football stadium, with a pond and church at its theoretical heart but an A-road to London gouged through its middle, requiring a bridge between pond and pub.Falmer is also home to Sussex University’s Attenborough Centre, where patrons can ponder the intertwining of rural Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Problem is Brighton is down in the Festival programme as an “alt-rock/pop pantomime”, with actors involved and the inference it’s some sort of musical featuring “instruments specially created by David Shrigley for the performance”. This turns out to be seriously over-selling it. In fact, Problem in Brighton is a rock band put together to play an hour of songs created in league with the maverick artist and Festival Guest Director. Putting any expectations aside, it’s a patchy show.The band – four men, two women – initially arrive on stage one by one, in regulation black cowboy shirts with Read more ...
Katie Colombus
They say that behind every successful man is a strong woman. The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk is as much – if not more so – the championing of the unsung hero in this story of the famous early modernist artist, Marc Chagall. His wife, Bella – early muse, sharer of world views and buckets of milk and mother of their daughter Ida, is paid tribute to, for her devotion and dedication to her husband's art.The birth of surrealism is played out on a small stage, made up of geometric shapes from the hyper-colour backdrop, wooden structure set and the angles at which the actors lean, holding onto ropes to Read more ...
theartsdesk
Brighton Festival is the UK’s leading annual celebration of the arts, with events taking place in venues both familiar and unusual across Brighton & Hove for three weeks every May. This year, the Festival boasts an eclectic line-up spanning music, theatre, dance, visual art, film, comedy, debate and spoken word, with visual artist David Shrigley as Guest Director.Enter this competition by entering your details here for a chance to win a fantastic break for two over the closing weekend of Brighton Festival (Fri 25 – Sun 27 May).The prize package includes:A two-night stay at Sooty’s Read more ...