festivals
bella.todd
Site-specific theatre spread from artists’ studios to police cells with the realisation that all the city (and a wee chunk of neighbouring Newhaven) is a stage. Dreamthinkspeak’s Before I Sleep (pictured below), a promenade Festival commission based on The Cherry Orchard, was staged in the derelict Co-op building on London Road. Four floors and 70,000 square feet of disused department store became the canvas for an extraordinary journey from aristocratic isolationism to mass consumerism via the developer’s axe (and several secret portals in cupboards and behind curtains through which the Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Fairport Convention in the abstract seem romantic and timely. Their Sixties folk-rock is being rediscovered by many of our best emerging songwriters; the late Sandy Denny is still written about; and their most famous graduate, Richard Thompson next month curates Meltdown 2010. However, in the concrete, the Fairports are a somewhat more problematic proposition. Over 19 incarnations in 43 years, they have recorded almost 50 albums. To top it all they are loved by their fans with a level of detail normally reserved for sci-fi gatherings. This all makes getting your head around Fairport Read more ...
David Nice
Silence. Near-darkness. Oozy weeds of orchestral strings twist in the mind of Edward Fairfax Vere (John Mark Ainsley), remembering the tragic events of 1797 when he was Captain of the HMS Indomitable. From that awe-inspiring start through to one of the most upsetting of onstage murders, perhaps the greatest parade of major and minor chords in all opera and beyond to some kind of redemption, Michael Grandage's Glyndebourne production - his first in the operatic sphere - of Britten's grandest opera moves with a simplicity and grace which fit this tight little craft of an opera house very well Read more ...
neil.smith
This slot is always one of the trickiest to fill satisfactorily, though last year’s choice – Pixar’s delightful animation Up – was inspired. Coming on the same day as the film’s release date, alas, Robin’s rain-lashed, Ridley-less premiere felt like a non-event from the get-go, putting the festival on the back foot before it had even begun. Ground was made up the following day thanks to an out of competition showing of Oliver Stone’s belated Wall Street sequel, Money Never Sleeps, a film that, while rather undermined by its perverse determination to de-fang Michael Douglas’s rapacious Gordon Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
One of the hottest tickets at this year's Brighton festival is Godfrey Reggio's 1983 film Koyaanisqatsi accompanied by live soundtrack performance from the Philip Glass Ensemble. Sold out for weeks beforehand, there are touts outside but most of the middle-aged Bohemian audience seem to have bought their tickets well in advance. The reason it's such a draw is that Koyaanisqatsi is a cult whose enthusiasts are multifarious.To the classical modernist it's a masterpiece of post-serialist synthesizer composition, meticulously synchronized to startling imagery. To the ecologically minded it's a Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Brian Eno’s on the phone. He’s been up all night. But he does want to talk to theartsdesk about his Afro-beat concert in Brighton as part of the Brighton Festival he is curating which this evening sees Seun Kuti - the son of Fela Kuti, who has basically inherited his legendary father’s band - and Tony Allen’s band on the same bill. Tony Allen was the drummer with Fela’s band and co-creator of the Afro-beat sound which seems to become more popular with each passing year (Fela died in 1997).Brian says that he became obsessed with Afro-beat in about 1972. “I thought at that time it was the most Read more ...
David Nice
Everything happens so quickly in India. It seems like only yesterday that homosexuality was legalised; and now Bombay has just hosted the first Kashish-Mumbai International Queer Film Festival. As one of its very literary organisers pointed out, his country used to be so open to all forms of worship and sensuality; it's the home of the Kama Sutra, after all. It was time to reclaim gay love, he said, and give Indians of all kinds the chance to learn about it through the farthest-reaching medium. And it worked - even if many younger folk had to tell their parents they were 'just off to Read more ...
james.woodall
First, the name. There’s no family link between the 57-year-old German composer and Hitler’s Doctor Death. This Goebbels cuts an impressive figure. Solidly built, with thick white hair and slightly cherubic features, and speaking fluent English, he’s above all accessible and unpretentious. Today, in Germany especially, but also abroad - in the States and Britain, where his renown is growing - the name Heiner Goebbels evokes not hatred but magical stage ambiences, lyrical and parodic song, strange music and hypnotic dance: new wonders from a new Germany.In our conversation, which takes place Read more ...
paul.mcgee
One of the recurring themes in BBC4's recent documentary, Krautrock: The Rebirth Of Germany, was the importance placed by so many of its participants upon transcending Germany's then-recent past. Move on several decades, and you now have a country with a rich, varied and unique musical culture that not only has a global reach and influence, but which can also afford the luxury of being able to look back at itself and even have a little fun at its own expense.The Berlin Sounds evening at this year's Ether festival highlighted all this and more, bringing together both veteran and modern Read more ...
sheila.johnston
One evening in 1970, Princess Anne ventured forth from her manor to attend a screening of Bronco Bullfrog at the Mile End ABC. Three decades later, the same cinema, now called the Genesis, hosted a screening of Barney Platts-Mills' debut feature last night in equally ceremonious circumstances: the launch of the East End Film Festival. Rarely seen, indeed almost lost (the original 35-mm negative was salvaged from a rubbish bin at the film lab), Bronco Bullfrog, which will be released nationally on 11 June, emerges as a minor revelation.Bronco Bullfrog might have been made in 1969, but Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Sometimes the back story doesn’t lead you to where you expect it might. Sometimes that turns out to be a good thing. Dan Arborise was born in Borneo to Polish parents, which opens up all sorts of musical possibilities, most of them probably far less exciting than they sound, but in reality his music is as English as sweet summer rain.I missed his first album, Around in Circles, released in 2006, but last year’s follow-up Of Tide and Trail made me sit up and take notice. This was woozy, trippy folk with a dash of west-country weirdness, a tinge of the acid-fried out-there-ness of Ozric Read more ...
fisun.guner
During my two-day whistlestop tour of various galleries and arts venues across Glasgow, I’m afraid I didn’t spot one white bike. There are, apparently, 50 of them that punters are free to use for the two-week duration of the city’s second biennial International Festival of Visual Art. It’s a scheme that pays homage to the original Witte Fietsenplan (White Bike Plan) by radical Sixties Dutch movement Provos. Set up as a statement against consumerism, pollution and congestion, the action was predictably short-lived: most of the bikes were either stolen or trashed.But Glasgow is an optimistic Read more ...