Brighton Festival
Thomas H. Green
Marc Rees (b 1966) is an interdisciplinary artist-performer from Wales whose works are renowned for imaginitively mixing media, as well as for their underlying sense of fun. Over the years he has been based in Berlin, Amsterdam and Canada, and now runs the collaborative arts company RIPE (Rees International Project Enterprizes). He has worked with international talent such as DV8 Physical Theatre, Brith Gof and German dancer-choreographer Thomas Lehman, and has, in recent years, presented pieces ranging from Adain Avion, a contribution to the Cultural Olympiad of 2012, which involved Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Brighton Festival 2016, which explodes into life again this year on Saturday May 7, has revealed its programme. Guest Director Laurie Anderson sent a short film in support of the occasion, while Chief Executive Andrew Comben, acknowledging this as the 50th edition of the Festival, added: “Every year since 1967 some of the greatest artists, performers and thinkers have come together with some of the most open-minded and enthusiastic audiences anywhere for a festival whose home is one of the most artistically rich and geographically blessed places in the country.”Indeed, the theme of this Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Brighton whooped as if she had never seen risqué entertainment last night, as cabaret veteran Joey Arias brought his Billie Holiday-meets-bawdy-standup show to the Brighton Festival. Able to switch between sincere tribute and brilliantly, cathartically filthy jokes instantaneously, he makes an audience unfamiliar with his style take a few minutes to calibrate their response. Once you understand that the Holiday is for real, and everything else tongue (or that’s what it looks like, anyway) in cheek, the evening makes curiously, but compellingly refreshing dramatic sense. The echoes Read more ...
Florence Hallett
What strange things netsuke are. Tiny sculptures, usually made from wood or ivory and depicting anything from figures, to fruit to animals, they were first made in the 17th century as toggles to attach pockets and bags to the robes worn by Japanese men. For as long as they have existed they have been considered highly collectible, and perhaps it is this, and the rapturous appreciation they inspire in their devotees, that to me at least makes them seem hopelessly, unspeakably kitsch.Listening to the potter Edmund de Waal talking last night as part of the Brighton Festival, it struck me that Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Over the past decade Alice Coote has emerged as a singer of rare and exquisite vocal quality. Even when the direction of a project is questioned, there has generally been consensus that she generally sounds gorgeous. The concept of Being Both, a juxtaposition of Handel mezzo arias for both male and female characters, is brilliant both musically and commercially. It allows a fascinating exploration of identity and sexuality in a period when both, in opera, were pretty fluid; and it makes, conveniently, for a programme of Handel’s greatest hits.It’s unfortunate that according to director Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
In an oft quoted moment of self-deprecation, WH Auden once described his own face as looking like “a wedding cake left out in the rain”. But the poet might have thought twice if confronted with the Porcelain confections of Rachel Kneebone. The London-based artist has brought three of her sculptures to the gallery of the University of Brighton; each one piles flora, vines and body parts onto a tomb-like plinth. They are as grand as wedding cakes, sugar white, and slick with a wet-looking glaze. Look closer and delicate flowers dissolve into less seemly clumps of undergrowth. Tendrils look Read more ...
caspar.gomez
Kate Tempest's long blonde-brown hair flailed as she prowled the stage, red-faced from exertion, adhering not a jot to the media’s tick-boxes for femininity. She is smaller, by far, than her backing band, dressed down in baggy sweatshirt and jeans. Unlikely star material yet she exuded such energized passion and righteous charisma that, by the end, as she encored with a poem that, like so many tonight, seemed to allude to the troubling political developments of last week, she had the audience rapt, completely engaged. “We never saw it coming,” she announced towards the close, “like all the Read more ...
Matthew Wright
The author of such inimitably evocative melancholia as “If All The Cornflakes” and the many episodes of “Life In A Scotch Sitting Room”, Scottish poet and songwriter Ivor Cutler had a stellar cult following for many decades until his death in 2006. This wonderfully fluid ensemble show, making its English debut at the Brighton Festival, was devised by Scottish group Vanishing Point in association with The National Theatre of Scotland. It recreates episodes from Cutler’s life, and fragments of his music in a mesmerising, dynamic collage of bleak-tinged fun. Cutler, who always claimed that his Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
Thanks to its international festival and a thriving catalogue of fringe events, May brings a great deal of noise to Brighton. Putting artwork into this saturated landscape can never be easy. But Nathan Coley has managed to inject some critical thinking and reflectivity.HIs best-known works, quotations in illuminated text, blazon themselves on the mind. They occupy a tidy niche and reproduce well in books, magazines and social media updates. So when you first see his work here on the south coast, in an 11th-century church no less, you might for a moment get a sense that, were this not a cosy Read more ...
Nick Hasted
World War One poems can become too familiar. So can the war itself, its five years of centenary commemorations so far suffering from excessive patriotism, a sense of uncomprehending disconnection from the gone generation which lived it, and a politically expedient veil drawn over its holocaust, the Armenian genocide. The Lads In Their Hundreds combines contemporary English music and French war poetry unknown here to more intimately recall the time’s voices. As the poems’ performer, Tcheky Karyo, mentions in an after-show talk, some of them were written huddled over trench candlelight. They Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"I hear America singing," wrote Walt Whitman, the American poet whose language playwright Richard Nelson has co-opted for the title of the second (Sweet and Sad) of his remarkable quartet of Apple Family Plays. And those wanting to know what song is being sung in certain corners of liberal America right now should make every attempt to see any or all of these plays, whether on their continued European tour (Weisbaden and Vienna beckon) or perhaps on screen: their original Off Broadway stagings at New York's Public Theatre have been recorded for public television Stateside, and much the same Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Shami Chakrabarti pointed out early on that she is “grim and worthy” and that stand-up is not her strong suit. Despite this, svelte, petite and wearing a sharp back outfit, she acted as compere for an evening of literary “turns” celebrating Liberty, the human rights organization of which she is director. “Everyone loves human rights,” she joked at one point. “Their own. It’s other people's that are a bit more challenging.” It was a good line, but anyone here looking for kicks’n’giggles was very much in the wrong place. On Liberty proved something of a congratulatory end-of-Bank Holiday slap- Read more ...