Brighton Festival
Nick Hasted
Brighton’s barely a city. It was awarded the title in 2004 without having to build a cathedral, or become bigger than a greatly swollen version of Brighthelmstone, the fishing village it once was, hemmed in from further growth by the South Downs and the sea. For all the relentless tide of London incomers and tourists, and the bustle of the bohemian North Laine, most of Brighton is quiet and peaceful, hardly urban compared to the capital. Fitting it into the venerable “city symphony” film genre, defined by the magically evocative Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (1927), is a challenge Read more ...
David Flack
"Wouldn't it be great if you were playing a concert and you looked out and everyone is a dog?" Laurie Anderson mused, almost a decade ago, waiting backstage with cellist Yo-Yo Ma. Anderson has realised her outlandish dream, creating a most unusual concert, apparently tailored to the canine ear. When the opportunity to attend came up I jumped at the chance, as did Paddy, our black Labrador-New Zealand Huntaway cross.The 20-minute performance features music only audible to dogs and includes other sounds for their human companions. It was first performed at the Sydney Opera House, then again in Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Maybe rock star economists are what we need. Former Greek finance minister Varoufakis’s bullish good looks, charisma and verbal fireworks failed to charm the Troika technocrats who finally banished him from government during last year’s infamous negotiations. But for this regularly applauding, sell-out crowd in Britain’s sole Green constituency he’s fascinating and, to many muttering approvingly, hugely admirable. As actual rock stars mostly absent themselves from their old role of rough, rebellious moral compass, this engaging, irreverent man of ideas may find his time has come.Interviewed Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Smoke and Mirrors is a show based around circus skills. It’s by the Ricochet Project, a performing unit consisting of Berlin-based US performers Cohdi Harrell and Laura Stokes. However, those expecting a spectacle offering visual pizzazz and the occasional laugh will be disappointed. These two are not clowning. Smoke and Mirrors is full of physical skill, precise choreography and attitude, but the 55-minute piece, which won an award for Best Circus at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival, is overwhelmingly stone-faced serious. It's not so much circus as an amalgamation of contemporary dance Read more ...
bella.todd
Of all the 400th anniversary tributes to Shakespeare, this ramble through an allotment just outside Brighton has to be one of the oddest, and most unexpectedly moving. Brighton Festival has a reputation for site-specific work, rediscovering secret pockets of the city and surroundings. This year it’s the turn of Roedale Allotments, a sprawling site of 200-plus plots hidden within a tree-lined valley. It’s a ramshackle rural idyll with a distant twinkle of the sea.Artist Marc Rees stumbled upon this “horticultural, higgledy-piggledy metropolis” a couple of years ago. He had been looking for Read more ...
bella.todd
Tindersticks certainly know how to instill a mood. Outside the Dome Concert Hall the start of the Brighton Festival is in full swing, with a proliferation of tents, parades and shiny happy tourists drinking in the sun. Inside, Stuart Staples is singing “don’t let me suffer” in a wracked warble to a video of a lone woman floating naked in a distorted swimming pool.Masters of all kinds of musical melancholy – creeping kinds, seething kinds, billowing kinds and above all achingly beautiful kinds – Tindersticks are currently touring their tenth studio album. Each song on The Waiting Room Read more ...
bella.todd
You’ve arrived at a party in a pub, tagging along with a guy you just met. You’re attempting to catch the barman’s eye, while scouting for a friendly face. The band declares that everyone must dance to the next one, and you wish you’d ordered a double. A man you’d like to speak with keeps walking past, but you can’t think of a single opening line. This situation is seriously awkward. And that’s before you factor in the real reason you’re here.A collaboration between immersive theatre company Hydrocracker and interactive media artists Blast Theory, Operation Black Antler is a piece of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Brighton Festival is a fantastic, exhilarating, leading annual celebration of the arts, with events taking place in venues both familiar and unusual across Brighton & Hove for three weeks every May. This year, the Festival celebrates 50 years of commissioning and producing innovative arts and culture with the experimental artist and musician Laurie Anderson, who is guest director.Enter this competition for a chance to win a fantastic break for two over the closing weekend of Brighton Festival (Friday 27-Sunday 29 May).The prize package includes:A two-night stay at Holiday Inn - Brighton Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Beth Orton (b 1970) is a singer-songwriter who first came to prominence via her collaborations with the Chemical Brothers, at the start of both their careers. She recorded an album with the producer William Orbit in 1993 but it was her 1995 album, Trailer Park, a canny amalgamation of folk and electronica, that really put her on the map as a solo artist. Since then, spending increasing amounts of time in the US, she has recorded a series of critically acclaimed albums, the latest of which, Kidsticks, her seventh, appears in May. She will be performing two special concerts at the Brighton Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Alexei Sayle (b 1952) first came to fame at the birth of alternative comedy, as MC at the Comedy Store in London at the dawn of the 1980s. He cemented his reputation via his recurring role in the anarchic student sitcom classic The Young Ones, as well as appearances in a number of Comic Strip Presents… films. He has written and fronted a host of sketch shows, including the Emmy Award-winning Alexei Sayle’s Stuff.Sayle retired from stand-up for a decade and a half but returned to the stage in 2011 and has since successfully toured new material. He has had a sporadic career in film, radio and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Charles Linehan is an acclaimed British choreographer, whose company has performed all over the world, from DanSpace New York to Brussels’ Kaai Theatre to the Venice Biennale. Born in Cyprus and raised in Kent, he studied at the Rambert School of Ballet and Contemporary Dance, prior to honing his craft as a dancer with various European companies.The Charles Linehan Dance Company appeared in 1994 and he became choreographer-in-residence at both The Place and the South Bank Centre, also winning the 1998 Jerwood Choreography Award. He moved to Berlin in 2011 for two years but returned to the UK Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
With the 50th Brighton Festival taking place this year, Festival CEO Andrew Comben meets theartsdesk for a chat about the original 1967 event, and its relationship with this year’s Festival. Comben has been the Brighton Festival's overall manager since 2008, also overseeing the Brighton Dome venues all year round. He shares the festival’s curation this year with Guest Director Laurie Anderson.We meet in his office in the centre of Brighton. I start by mentioning that the great 20th century violinist Yehudi Menuhin played the 1967 Festival. Comben goes across the room and pulls a silver- Read more ...