Brighton Festival
Katie Colombus
There is a sense of loyalty from the Brighton audience awaiting Hofesh Shechter’s new work. They have seen his company here in 2009, for the Brighton Festival commission of The Art of Not Looking Back, and the infamous Political Mother premiered here for the Festival in 2010.There was a feeling that people were waiting to be wowed – and they were not disappointed. The piece opens with a person being shot against a dark wall, which then divides into two. Immediately my thoughts are drawn to the divisive Israel/Palestinian conflict, a theme which the Israeli-born choreographer has dabbled in Read more ...
Katie Colombus
This Brighton Festival opener is a perfect fit for day one, coming shortly after the Children's Parade and coasting on the gorgeous, beachy day outside the Brighthelm Centre. I have come from said beach, armed with my own Boy. He's 3. His opinion here is probably more vaild than mine, although he's a little short on the vocabulary.Children are invited to sit at the front of the stage on cushions and blankets, it's a warm and welcoming atmosphere to an inclusive show. Attention is caught by the cast members (Xavier Pathy-Barker, James Aiden Kay, Nick Tigg, Carol Walton and Edward Liddall) Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Yorkshire theatre company IOU have a tool in their armoury that most of their peers do not. It’s an open-topped bus with tiered seating, as pictured above, built in Halifax and the only one of its type, replete with headphone sets for every seat. It is at the heart of Rear View, their show which takes to the streets of Brighton and puts the participant right at the blurred connecting point between art and reality. It’s a unique experience.Rear View starts at a barge venue in Brighton Marina. The Marina is a gaudy, ugly place of clunky, mismatched modern buildings and tacky, American-style Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
When an acquaintance heard my first review of the Brighton Festival was a circus event they snorted, “Oh dear.” It’s strange; for a couple of decades there’s been a default setting among broad swathes of otherwise artistically-inclined Boho sorts: that circus is embarrassing and naff. Think of all those sniping jokes about jugglers at festivals and circus skills workshops. It’s all rather bizarre, especially pondered in the post-performance glow of Wales-based collective NoFit State Circus’s fantastic new show Lexicon. It’s hard to see what could possibly be naff about the human body doing Read more ...
Neil Bartlett
Director, playwright and novelist Neil Bartlett has been making theatre and causing trouble since the 1980s. He made his name with a series of controversial stark naked performances staged in clubs and warehouses, then went on to become the groundbreaking Artistic Director of the Lyric Hammersmith in London in 1994. Since leaving the Lyric in 2005, he’s worked with collaborators as different as the National, Duckie, the Bristol Old Vic, Artangel, and the Edinburgh International Festival. Four of his previous Brighton Festival shows have been at the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
This weekend sees the Brighton Festival 2018 kick off. Anyone visiting the city on Saturday 5 May would find this hard to miss as the famous Children’s Parade makes its way around the streets, a joyous dash of colour and creativity. This year’s theme, in honour of Brighton Festival guest director David Shrigley, is “Paintings”. Thus every school in the area has been assigned a famous painting on which to base their parade presentation. The results are guaranteed to be an eye-boggling public showcase.After the success last year in taking the Festival to outlying areas of Brighton, Your Place Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
David Shrigley (b. 1968) is an artist whose work has become broadly popular via a wide range of formats. At first glance, his stark pen-on-paper drawings seem akin to humorous newspaper cartoons – and, indeed, he’s contributed to The Guardian for years – but there's another layer to his work, something odder, slyer, psychologically attuned to the relationship between the subconscious and the ruthlessness of the human condition.As well as a long series of books and multiple exhibitions all around the world, including forthcoming ones this year in Shanghai, Stockholm and on the Greek island of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Gob Squad is a “seven-headed” Anglo-German arts collective who specialise in multimedia performance. Beginning in Nottingham in 1994 and now based in Berlin, their work ranges from site-specific to installation and film but, more recently, mainly theatre. They major in using technology to “make connections with places outside the theatre or to create different spaces inside the theatre where we can talk to the audience in quite intimate ways”. Recent works include War and Peace and My Square Lady. For the Brighton Festival they're presenting Gob Squad’s Creation (Pictures for Dorian), based Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Brett Goodroad (b. 1979) is an artist and painter based in San Francisco. Born and raised in rural Montana, in 2012 he received the Tournesol Award, overseen by Sausalito’s Headland Center for the Arts. The Award recognises one Bay Area painter each year and financially assisted Goodroad and gave him studio space, allowing him to develop his distinctive, figurative, abstract style. He has since exhibited extensively in California as well as New York and Vermont. His monograph, A Sequence in Love was published in 2016 and in May he will be exhibiting at the Phoenix Gallery in Brighton as part Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Seth Kriebel, 45, is a performer, much of whose work involves audience participation. He is bringing the show A House Repeated to the Brighton Festival 2018 between 6th and 11th May. Of American origin, born and raised near Philadelphia, Kriebel moved to the UK in 2001 and, over the last few years, has achieved increasing profile and success with shows such as Beowulf, The Unbuilt Room and We This Way.THOMAS H GREEN: Was your background in the States arts-orientated?SETH KRIEBEL: This is always difficult to try and contextualise for a British audience. Where I’m from is roughly equivalent to Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Malcolm Middleton (b.1973) is a Scottish singer-songwriter whose music has a devoted fanbase. Instead of the faux-vulnerable, non-specific, sub-Jeff Buckley flannel touted by many of his contemporaries and younger peers, Middleton’s work is grounded in the physical grit of the everyday, boasting a social realism underpinned by mordant humour and, often, heartbreaking emotion.Middleton first came to the attention of music fans as a member of pithy indie observational duo Arab Strap with Aidan Moffat. By the time they wound down in 2006, he had already launched a solo career defined by literate Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
There are too many awestruck cultural histories of Paris to even begin to count. The Anglophone world has always been justly dazzled by its own cohorts of Paris-based writers and artists, as well as by the seemingly effortless superiority of French intellectual life. The ranks of the natives, as well as the city’s other cultural immigrants – the French have an uncanny skill at adopting those they wish to – have proved no less fascinating.In Left Bank: Art, Passion and the Rebirth of Paris 1940-1950 Agnès Poirier has chosen an unusual decade on which to concentrate. This is a truly Read more ...