poetry
Tribe//Still I Rise, Brighton Festival 2019 review - an evening of poetic movementWednesday, 22 May 2019
Maya Angelou’s iconic poem Still I Rise is a good starting point for many things in life. But it’s a particularly good beginning for a piece of contemporary dance choreography, and Victoria Fox has done a great job of bringing the poet’s words to... Read more... |
salt., Royal Court review - revisiting the Atlantic slave tradeSaturday, 18 May 2019
Most of the facts about the Atlantic slave trade are well known; what is less easily understood is how history can make a person feel today. A question which invites an experimental approach in which you test out emotions on your own body. In 2016,... Read more... |
Ben Okri, Brighton Festival 2019 review - adventures in writingWednesday, 08 May 2019
If there’s one thing to learn from Ben Okri in this evening of conversation at Brighton Festival between the Famished Road writer and author Colin Grant it’s how to “upwake”.The phrase, coined in his new (11th) novel The Freedom Artist – a post-... Read more... |
Patti Smith, Roundhouse review – the priestess of punk has lost none of her powerSaturday, 26 January 2019
“Don’t love me yet,” replies Patti Smith to the first of tonight’s many excitable shout-outs. “Who knows, after 20 minutes you might be gone!” An unlikely scenario, given that this show – part of the Roundhouse’s annual “In the Round” series, which... Read more... |
CD: Marianne Faithfull - Negative CapabilitySaturday, 03 November 2018
There are many layers of allusion that come with Marianne Faithfull’s powerful new album. The title is drawn from Keats, his formula for great poetry as opposed to instructive morality, and it’s towards a poetry of experience rather than the fixed... Read more... |
CD: John Grant – Love Is MagicSaturday, 06 October 2018
There are people who do and say awful things in the name of honesty. It can be used as a cover for rigorous appeasement of our own worst impulses, or as a thin veil to disguise needless personal attacks on those around us. With singer-sonwriter John... Read more... |
DVD: Mary ShelleyTuesday, 04 September 2018
This should have been the perfect match. Saudi-born director Haifaa al-Mansour earned real acclaim for her 2012 debut film Wadjda, whose 12-year-old central character had to break the conventions of a restrictive society to realise her dream –... Read more... |
DVD: Al BertoFriday, 17 August 2018
There are plenty of reasons to be apprehensive about biopics of poets. The activity of writing is most often, after all, anything but cinematic, unless its moments of creativity are forced, while the “myth” of the poet all too easily becomes... Read more... |
Proms at...Cadogan Hall 4, Connolly, Middleton review - perfect partnering in the unfamiliarTuesday, 07 August 2018
“It has a music of its own. It produces vibrations.” Oscar Wilde was being ironic when he had Gwendolen contemplate the sound of her beloved’s drab name in The Importance of Being Earnest, but he had a point when it comes to composers and poetry.... Read more... |
The Last Poets, Brighton Festival review - black power sets the night alightWednesday, 16 May 2018
The venom with which Abiodun Oyewole spits “America is a terrorist”, the key repeated line to “Rain of Terror”, has startling power. The piece is an unashamed diatribe against his nation. Beside him his partner Umar Bin Hassan rhythmically hisses... Read more... |
Lemn Sissay, Brighton Festival review - a mesmerising sermon of performance poetryMonday, 14 May 2018
I first heard – or rather saw on paper – the work of Lemn Sissay in an English literature lecture hall in the late '90s. As a fresh faced first year uni student, coming firmly from the school of Pablo Neruda, it was quite a departure from my norm.It... Read more... |
IOU Rear View, Brighton Festival review - imaginative odyssey around townSunday, 06 May 2018
Yorkshire theatre company IOU have a tool in their armoury that most of their peers do not. It’s an open-topped bus with tiered seating, as pictured above, built in Halifax and the only one of its type, replete with headphone sets for every seat. It... Read more... |
