Brighton Festival
Thomas H. Green
Jony Easterby (b. 1966) is an artist renowned for working on large-scale projects that combine the natural world with technology and sound. Born and raised in Birmingham, he now resides in the Welsh countryside at Machynlleth, Powys. As a recording artist, he worked extensively with Norwegian vanguard electronic musician Biosphere, and was very much involved with the Big Chill Festival during its heyday. He has led a wide array of acclaimed artistic installation projects all over the world and been recognised as one of Britain’s leading ecologically aware artistic forces. He produces For The Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Brighton Festival, which takes place every May, is renowned for its plethora of free events. The 2017 Festival is curated by Guest Director Kate Tempest, the poet, writer and performer, alongside Festival CEO Andrew Comben who’s been the event's overall manager since 2008 (also overseeing the Brighton Dome venues all year round). This year the Festival’s theme is “Everyday Epic”.“Kate has this sense of the arts being important through the everyday of our lives,” Comben explains, “at the same time as acknowledging that, for everyone, things can take on epic proportions, whether that’s Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Tommy Sissons is a 21-year-old poet, originally from Brighton, now based in London. He has won a number of poetry slam championships, and has performed across the UK at venues ranging from the Boomtown Festival to the Royal Albert Hall. His debut collection Goodnight Son was published last year. Sissons has taught classes and workshops as far afield as Germany and as close to home as the Victoria & Albert Museum. He was a regular presenter of Channel 4 music programme Four to the Floor and was commissioned by the BBC to write a Remembrance Day poem in 2015. He will be appearing at the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
This morning the Brighton Festival 2017 announced its much-anticipated programme, with guest director Kate Tempest enthusiastically leading from the front. The poet-playwright-novelist has put together a programme that responds to the strange, dangerous times we live in, but which also offers up a plethora of lively entertainment.The theme she’s given the Festival is “Everyday Epic”, adding that, “Singing, playing, dancing, moving, painting life and communicating about that in public spaces requires no qualifications, no training to enjoy. It’s truthful communication between humans about Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Beth Orton’s sparsely ethereal new collection Kidsticks has been well received for marking an interesting change of direction. Last night’s Brighton Festival gig gave audiences the best of both, beginning with most of the new songs, then climaxing with some old favourites that evoked her rockier past.Nor was it just the blend of old and new songs that offered an intriguing perspective on her craft. Live, her voice has a grainier, more sensuous quality than on (the new) record. A case can be made for the perfect sheen of the recorded sound. The glassy lacquer was missed on the dreamy waft “ Read more ...
Nick Hasted
A Victorian transgender celebrity is a fitting and timely subject for this Brighton Festival premiere. Writer-director Neil Bartlett turns Stella’s scandalous life into a stark horror story, marked by the regular, jarring crash of glass which sounds like splintering flashbulbs, mirror images breaking and jabbing at an older man (Richard Cant) whose hand is already slashed and bandaged, as he awaits a fatal knock on the door. A young man (Oscar Batterham), meanwhile, becomes a beautiful woman expecting a lover. Both are, or were, Stella, telling their tale in intercut, elliptical monologues. Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The last time I saw Alexei Sayle was at a benefit gig in Essex in the Eighties, when his rapid torrents of invective and surreal invention was stand-up as great as I’ve seen. Last night’s stage interview about his memoir, Thatcher Stole My Trousers, was reminiscent of those times rather than comparable.The format means Sayle the performer is half switched on – "Alexei Sayle", the tight-suited, aggressive character the former art student describes creating, only occasionally twitching to life beneath the more “genial” reality he says was always present. The Sayle whose sacred cow radar made Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Berlin are, misleadingly, an arts unit from Antwerp, Belgium. They’ve been around for well over a decade and major in artily constructed documentaries that are presented in the manner of experiential installations. Their focus is usually the slow, commentary-free dissection of a geographical quirk or circumstance, hence past films have been about and titled Jerusalem, Moscow, Iqaluit (Canadian Inuit capital), and Bonanza (a tiny Rocky Mountains community).This time it’s the turn of Zvizdal, a Ukrainian village that falls within the Chernobyl isolation zone, and its two remaining inhabitants, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Of all the nostalgia-fests, of all the retro events, those that involve rave culture have the wildest sense of glee. The atmosphere in the Dome tonight, before a note has even been played – just as when The Prodigy hit this city last year – dials the anticipation levels up to delirious. The crowd is mostly fortysomething and fiftysomething, but many are already dancing as the hall fills, while Peter Hook, ex of New Order, spins quarter century-old dance tunes that once graced the speakers of the long-closed, now-mythical Mancunian club mecca, The Haçienda.From the grins, ecstatic gurns and Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Brighton Festival’s guest director speaks in a sort of rapid-fire drawl, ideal for her debut as a stand-up comic, which she claims was tonight’s Plan A. This half-century veteran of performance art is more slippery than that, proffering a discursive, unreliable, funny and profound master-class in shaggy-dog philosophy, with the festival’s theme of home at its arguable core.The hit single “O Superman” was Laurie Anderson’s vital calling-card to pop culture, her marriage to Lou Reed a brief downtown New York art nirvana, addressed elsewhere in the festival. But the life she zigzags through Read more ...
Heidi Goldsmith
The foyer of Brighton Dome for Brighton Festival director Laurie Anderson’s Song Conversation would have had a PR executive flummoxed; from punks in their 20s licking the rim of a plastic pint to a hobbling couple clutching programmes. The breadth of audience is surely a testament to Anderson’s unique career of performances combining pop melodies with countercultural performance art. As the seemingly ceaseless passings of pop eccentrics litter our newsfeeds, it’s a relief to see the former NASA artist-in-residence and “O! Superman” composer alive and electronic.The performance is a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Complete Deaths refers to the complete onstage deaths in Shakespeare’s work, all 75 of them, including the “black ill favour’d fly” in Titus Andronicus. The latter becomes a persistent theme throughout, appearing even as the audience take their seats, a joke shop plastic approximation attached to wire, being poked up the nose of a prostrate cast member. The whole is the work of two respected Brighton-based theatrical entities, the four-person physical comedy troupe Spymonkey and writer/director Tim Crouch. And it’s a fantastic, hilarious, consistently imaginative hoot from start to finish Read more ...