Brighton Festival
Thomas H. Green
The Nature of Why is not so much a concert as a multi-discipline happening. To assess it is to relate a human experience rather than just an aesthetic appreciation of the new orchestral work by Goldfrapp’s Will Gregory which is at its heart. On the surface, it’s an hour-long piece in nine short movements, interspersed with old BBC recordings of the Nobel Prize-winning American physicist Richard Feynman explaining how magnetism is unexplainable in layman’s terms. As a participant, however, there’s much more to it than that.The event takes place at the Brighton Dome’s main concert hall and the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The last thing many were expecting from Rokia Traoré’s opening appearance at this year’s Brighton Festival was an Afro-psychedelic head-fry, yet she and her four-piece band prove thoroughly capable of swirling our minds right off out of it. When she returns at the end of the concert and announces she’s going to play one last song. A voice shouts out, “Make it a long one!” Happily, it is. The final number, “Köté Don”, is a culmination of the evening’s ethos, dragging listeners away once more into precisely estimated - yet elastic - patterns of rockin’, revolving minimalism.Dating back 16 Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Flight is a show by experimental Scottish theatre company Vox Motus, adapted from the novel Hinterland by Caroline Brothers. It’s about two Afghan child refugees making their way across Europe to the fabled land of “London” and is based very directly on her own interviews with asylum seekers as a journalist. So far, so narrartively straightforward but Flight is unlike anything most people will have seen. It is as much art installation as it is theatre, perhaps more so, yet it’s a tale beautifully, economically told and is profoundly moving.In a recent artsdesk interview Candice Edmunds, one Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Will Gregory (b.1959) is best known as one half of the alt-pop duo Goldfrapp but has a long career in music that dips into many areas. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s he was a working musician who toured with multiple bands, notably, Tears for Fears, as well as playing on sessions for albums by artists ranging from The Cure to Portishead. He is a multi-instrumentalist valued for his saxophone and woodwind playing (from Moondog and Michael Nyman to Peter Gabriel and it’s him on Spiritualized’s Lazer Guided Melodies), but as much for his general studio and arrangement abilities.Since 1999 Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
“I think we need to get rid of labels, certainly World Music,” insists Soumik Datta, who is both composer and musician, and has lived in the UK since the age of 11. “It is possible to be a musician in the Indian tradition, as well as an electronic musician, as well as a contemporary musician... When it’s convenient, the music industry warps things to make them fit, but otherwise all the pigeonholing and the taxonomies are really unhelpful to a lot of artists out there.”Datta plays the sarod. This 19-string instrument has a tremendous range and provides enough complex rhythms and glissando Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Nicôle Lecky’s one woman show Superhoe has added fire to the reputation of an already fast-rising actress and writer. Based around Sasha, a Plaistow girl who aspires to pop stardom, it’s a clear-eyed, very modern play, filled with its central character’s motor-mouthed bravado and examining the Instagram generation’s relationship with sexual objectification. It comes to the Brighton Festival in May.Raised in London, Lecky, 28, is of mixed British-Jamaican descent. Since training at the Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts she has gone on to appear in TV shows such as Death on Paradise, Fresh Meat Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Brighton Festival begins in May. Since 2014 theartsdesk has had a media partnership with this lively, multi-faceted event which takes place over three weeks. This year the Guest Director is the Malian musician Rokia Traoré, who inhabits a position previously filled by cultural figures such as Brian Eno, David Shrigley, Kate Tempest, Anish Kapoor and Vanessa Redgrave.Overseeing the whole event every year since 2008, however, is Brighton Festival CEO Andrew Comben. A singer and horn player in a previous life, the 45-year-old Comben is now a full-time driving force within the festival Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“When we graduated we were seeing lot of theatre as a literary form,” explains Candice Edmunds of the theatre company Vox Motus, “But we were really excited by it as a visual form and everything we make, from our earliest scratch pieces up to Flight, has really been an experimentation into how much we can substitute dialogue and the written word for theatrical visuals.”Edmunds, together with fellow Artistic Director, Jamie Harrison, founded Vox Motus in 2004 after graduating from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Based in Glasgow, they’ve built a hefty reputation with theatre heavily Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The striking cover for the Brighton Festival 2019 programme shouts out loud who this year’s Guest Director is. Silhouetted in flowers, in stunning artwork by Simon Prades, is the unmistakeable profile of Malian musician Rokia Traoré. Taking place between 4th and 26th May at a host of south coast venues, this year’s Festival, which launched its schedule of events this morning, looks to be a multi-faceted extravaganza with true international reach. Once again, theartsdesk is proud to be a media partner.“I set out to bring new voices to the city to tell their stories,” Traoré explained, “ Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Before starting this review a decision was taken: that the over-used description of singer-songwriter Malcolm Middleton as a “Scottish miserablist” would not appear. However, this has proved impossible. Middleton is renowned, to the coterie who enjoy his music, for songs ripe with dejection but the first half of his set tonight is especially heavy with stark soul-searching. From the opening number, “Gut Feeling”, which contains the line, “I’ve got rows of wankers in my head shouting my gut feeling down”, to a song called “Love is a Momentary Lapse in Self-Loathing”, he assays a stark, poetic Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Calixto Bieito has a reputation as a radical theatre-maker, and by any standards The String Quartet’s Guide to Sex and Anxiety is an unusual, genre-breaking piece; Bieito has described it as “like a symphonic poem for a quartet of musicians, and a quartet of voices”. A mesmerising 90-minute melange on the subjects of its title – anxiety seems marginally the dominant emotion, somehow preceding sex – it’s a collaborative effort between the Heath Quartet (with whom Bieito worked on his ENO Fidelio five years ago) and four actors, Cathy Tyson, Mairead McKinley, Miltos Yerolemou and Nick Harris. Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
As the Brighton Festival 2018 draws towards its closing weekend, its Guest Director, the artist David Shrigley, has committed to an illustrated talk about his work that “will contain numerous rambling anecdotes but not be in the slightest bit boring”. In the programme, he claims to have promised this signed in his own blood. Such drastic assurance proves unnecessary. His talk his sardonically funny, sometimes causing waves of raucous laughter and applause to sweep across the packed Dome Concert Hall.The format is simple. Accompanied by a woman signing, who Shrigley often tells not to Read more ...