Africa
howard.male
After only a couple of songs there are shouts from the audience to turn Mulatu up. But these people have missed the point. The clue is in the name of the instrument he's playing: the vibraphone, or vibes for short. The word "vibe" has long been slang for “a good feeling” or a mood, and that’s precisely what its role was in last night’s concert; to add some of that ambient mysteriousness intrinsic to the five-note Ethiopian scale. Mulato Astatke, the supernaturally calm 67-year-old, delicately bounced his three wooden mallets off its aluminium bars, and an enraptured Barbican audience was Read more ...
howard.male
If you have fond childhood memories of either the Born Free book or movie, you might want to stay away. From the opening moments of this documentary, the knowledge that lion-loving conservationist George Adamson was fatally shot in the back on a dirt road in Kenya will immediately stop John Barry’s epic and optimistic theme song from swelling to life in your head. But that’s only the beginning of a systematic dismantling of the Born Free myth from a documentary which, ironically, was made to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the publication of Joy Adamson’s unexpected bestseller.With the Read more ...
judith.flanders
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre is making one of its regular stops in Europe (the company tours commitedly: not only in the USA, but more than two months of each year are spent bringing their bravura dance style to the world). It is to their enduring credit, then, that their performances look as fresh and as spontaneous as they do.In Hymn, artistic director Judith Jamison’s tribute to Ailey, her mentor and the company’s founder, she tells, in voice-over, of loving "spectacle, yes", but also "social statements, yes", wanting to transmit not only Ailey’s own "blood memories", his lines Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Alvin Ailey dancers have been dancing about survival, grit, positivity and joy in the Lord for half a century now, and even though the parents of last night’s dancers may not have been born when Ailey did the unthinkable and launched a black dance company in the dark days of 1958 America, the company still evidently has an urge to rejoice running in its veins.The regular returns of AAADC to Britain - and there’s a big nationwide tour this time - are constant wake-up calls to the spirit. How can you sit down-in-the-mouth about anything at all when you’re watching a girl haughtily unfolding her Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
As there's something of a forest theme this weekend on theartsdesk, with the Royal Opera House's If-A-Tree festival curated by Joanna McGregor with Scanner, and a report from this year's Borneo Rainforest World Music Festival, and here, a diary of an extraordinary trip I took in 2003 to sample the culture and music of the Pygmies deep in the heart of the Central African Republic.Day 1: The Beauty Contest
The Miss Bangui beauty contest takes place at the Palais de l'Assemblée, an edifice built by North Koreans, where the Central African Republic's parliament used to meet. Since democracy was Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Television seeks out the stories thrown up by real life. On the one hand there is the obsessive interest in the private lives of the great and good (and not so good) from Margot Fonteyn to Tony Blair. Other dramatists eagerly accept the responsibility to hold a mirror up to society in all its ills from the Ipswich murders to the travails of 19th-century lesbians. But the task that all writers have to face, whoever’s story is being told, is to make the narrative dramatic. A tale of contemporary slavery ought not to struggle there.It’s taken seven years for the awful story of Mende Nazer to be Read more ...
kate.connolly
It is tempting to playfully twist the German language a little to come up with a word that best describes the avant garde German theatre and film director Christoph Schlingensief. A “Wachrüttler”, literally a shaker-upper or rouser, is probably the best title to describe a man who seemed to put every vein and sinew of his body into shaking German society awake. The loss of Schlingensief, who died of lung cancer last Saturday aged 49, has left a gaping hole in the German arts world. One of the most controversial characters of cultural life here, Schlingensief made an enduring impression even Read more ...
howard.male
“One afternoon back in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, I met four scientists in a bar, they were on their way to West Africa to study a parasitic worm that attacks the eyeballs of human beings and turns them into blind men.” And so begin the sleeve notes of C W Stoneking’s second album, Jungle Blues. Last night this teller of tall and fevered tales washed up in deepest Brixton, to perform to a motley crowd in the gloomy but brightly painted Windmill pub. It was an unlikely juxtaposition which nevertheless worked rather well.Because the truth of the matter is that wherever Mr Stoneking landed, he and Read more ...
howard.male
Back in June of this year, the international successful Malian blues band gave what felt at the time like a curiously muted performance at the World Cup Kick-off Celebration Concert in Johannesburg. But perhaps it was the effect of having their laidback hypnotic grooves juxtaposed to the in-your-face emoting and hip-gyrating of the likes of Shakira and Alicia Keys that seemed to somewhat mystify the stadium audience. Because this is a band that seem to have little interest in doing any more than just playing their music, and humbly hoping that people will climb aboard without them having to Read more ...
howard.male
I must confess that when I first heard about Staff Benda Bilili - a Congolese band partly made up of paraplegics – I felt a little uneasy. The last thing that one wants as a (hopefully) trusted critic is to feel compromised by an obligation to give a positive review, or feel guilty about lessening their chances of bettering their circumstances with a bad review. Yes, the vanity and solipsism of your reviewer has no bounds! But this visual and musical treat of a film wastes no time in informing us that there is no room for pity in the story of this resilient collective of musicians who, rather Read more ...
theartsdesk
CD of the MonthTom Jones, Praise & Blame (Universal/Island) by Adam Sweeting Reinvention is all very well, and indeed indispensable for any career that aims to last longer than a series of X Factor, but you can have enough of seeing Tom Jones hamming it up with Robbie Williams or Cerys Matthews or Stereophonics. Jones seems to have reached the same conclusion. On his last outing, 2008’s 24 Hours, he circled back towards his traditional strengths, revisiting some of the musical styles he became associated with in the Sixties and Seventies but with the aid of a submerged iceberg of Read more ...
Anonymous
Its acronymic moniker stands for World Of Music, Arts and Dance, but the line-up at this year’s WOMAD is, as usual, very much skewed towards the first of those artforms – hailing from anywhere and everywhere between Australia and Azerbaijan. The “arts” component is likewise fully evident; in the two different venues for film screenings, for instance, or in the four small wooden stages in construction throughout the weekend as a demonstration of sustainable architecture.
The dancing, by contrast, though covered in various workshops, seems to be left largely in the hands (and feet) of the Read more ...