Reviews
Helen Hawkins
A big welcome awaited the Alvin Ailey dancers at the Wells, on their first international tour since lockdown. The company has scheduled four different mixed bills over 10 days, each with its signature piece, Revelations, as the finale. This is a great idea as the company returned after their final bow on press night to reprise part of the piece and coax the audience onto their feet. No problem.What a wonderfully versatile troupe this is. Its opening night programme, a bill subtitled Contemporary Voices, began with a 2022 Kyle Abraham piece, Are You in Your Feelings?, made on the dancers, that Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
A cameo by Jeremy Allen White wouldn’t usually excite interest, but the star of Disney+’s The Bear is big box-office now, so his presence in Fremont, however brief, will probably guarantee it an audience. There the curious will also find a gem from the Iranian-born director Babak Jalali and a serenely powerful debut performance by Anaita Wali Zada, who gives this simple-seeming project an inner glow.Fremont is a city in California’s Bay Area that has become home to a sizeable population of Afghan refugees. Donya (Wali Zada) is one such, a former translator for the US Army who has had to leave Read more ...
Sarah Kent
“There’s nowt so queer as folk”, they say, and Life on the Farm amply proves the point. A cassette slides into the slot; “play” is pressed and a middle-aged man appears on screen at the gate of Combe End Farm. “Follow me down”, he says to camera,”I’ve got something to show you.”We’re in the realm of home movies and opinions differ on the “something” he wants us to see. “It’s like a horror movie,” says one viewer. “I can’t tell if this man’s a genius or a psychopath”, says Nick Prueher of Found Footage Festival which tours the world with VCR parties. “We’ve been collecting weird VHF tapes Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
One thing we know for sure about Erin Carter is that she’s played by Swedish-Kurdish actor Evin Ahmad, and it’s clear right from the start that she’s a woman with a complicated past which she’s trying to run away from. But you’ll have to get to episode four before the mysteries start to unwind themselves.We also know that she fled furtively across the Channel from Folkestone in a trawler with her daughter Harper (Indica Watson, pictured below), and has started a new life (with a new identity) as a supply schoolteacher in Barcelona. With her hospital nurse partner Jordi (Sean Teale, from Skins Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
VINYL OF THE MONTHAfrican Head Charge A Trip to Bolgatanga (On-U Sound)The latest album from percussionist Bonjo Iyabinghi Noah and On-U Sound producer-par-excellence Adrian Sherwood is stunning. 40-something years into their collaborative career, it proves the pair are still more than capable of offering sonic surprises. A Trip to Bolgatanga is more in-yer-face than a fair chunk of African Head Charge material, less stoned and dubbed out… well, it’s dubbed out alright but comes clattering forward in the mix, energized and foot-moving rather than bonging on the sofa. It even boasts unlikely Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The cows are scattered across the mountains. Without scrambling up the slopes, the only way to summon them is to call. Unni Løvlid is beckoning them. Instead of standing outdoors she is in the medieval Ullensvang Church, in the Norwegian village of Lofthus. She uses the interior of a grand piano to get the necessary resonance, the echo which distant animals would hear.This evocation of an aspect of country life is part of a radical reinterpretation of Edvard Grieg’s 19 Norske Folkeviser (19 Norwegian Folk Songs), composed in 1896. The first piece in the cycle is “Kulok” (Cattle Call). With Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
In the mood for love? It’s over 23 years since Wong Kar-Wai’s swoony, bittersweet film of that name reset the bar for the art-house love story. Now comes Celine Song's Past LIves, an entirely different kind of bar-setter but with a similar tough-but-tender core. It’s an unshowy, slim film, but it takes on hefty topics: can love survive for decades, can it cut through cultural barriers? What does a relationship need to survive?The autobiographical plot was triggered when Song found herself in her home town, New York City, sitting between her American husband and her Korean childhood sweetheart Read more ...
Supersonic Festival 2023, Birmingham review - musical eccentrics battle the odds and come out on top
Guy Oddy
You’ve got to feel for Lisa Meyer and the team behind Birmingham’s magnificent Supersonic Festival. Just as the live music scene gets to a point where the Covid pandemic is no longer a malign influence on dancing and having fun in a room full of like-minded people, the UK is hit by a two-day rail strike that coincides with this annual shindig of the musically wild and wonderful. On top of that, our loathsome Home Secretary refused to grant a visa for Day One’s headline act, MC Yalla.However, these Brummies aren’t ones to just throw their hands in the air and give up, and on the festival’s Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Bruckner's behemoth has always had its fervent champions – and its muttering sceptics. The 85-odd minutes of his Eighth Symphony, finally performed after major revisions in 1892, build into a titanic testament. Advocates read into it enough apocalyptic doom and gloom to make Wagner sound like Offenbach.Thank the gods, therefore, that the always-impressive Semyon Bychkov guided the BBC Symphony Orchestra through across these craggy Alpine peaks at the Proms with a listener-friendly finesse, even geniality. With its explosive timpani, tank-division horns and earth-trembling low strings, the Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
To proclaim that you’re playing gender games with Shakespeare’s As You Like It seems a little like announcing that you have a bicycle with two wheels, or indeed that you’re doing something interesting with rhythms in Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.Let’s face it, this is a plot in which the female love interest doesn’t just disguise herself as a man but names herself after Ganymede, famed in mythology as Zeus’s gay lover. The idea that this might be heteronormative in any way sounds like a spurious idea on some emotionally constipated academic’s bookshelf. There’s not just sauce for the goose Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
It’s one of the great tragedies of Les Troyens that its composer never got to hear it performed in its entirety during his lifetime. This ravishing, big-hearted interpretation of the two of the most dramatic episodes in Virgil’s Aeneid was dismissed by orchestras that could not comprehend its technical or emotional demands, with the consequence that there was no attempt at a proper staging till 21 years after Berlioz's death.Last night’s astonishing performance of Berlioz's masterpiece by the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique and the Monteverdi Choir conducted by Dinis Sousa (pictured Read more ...
Jack Barron
Reading the torrent of press-releases and blurbs on the many – and ever-growing – contemporary poetry collections over time, one starts to notice a distinct recurrence of certain buzzwords: searing is a regular participant, as is honest, and urgent, and unflinching. All of these words share a common indistinctness; each appeals to timeliness and/or some kind of apparent bravery; and each actually means extremely little.But without a doubt the lord of vague and laudatory adjectives is powerful. Publishers and publicists like to say that this or that is ‘a vital and powerful comment on/response Read more ...