Two bands which have come out of the Folk Ensemble recently which have what lazy PR-writers like to say ‘exploded’ onto the scene are The Bonfire Radicals, and Auriyga; both bands formed earlier this year, The Bonfire Radicals caused quite a stir when they played at Moseley Folk Festival, and another stir with their Symphony Hall performance as part of ArtsFest. As well as displaying a high standard of musicianship, what also characterises their performance is musical maturity; they’re not just playing the tunes that they’ve read in the books (or written themselves) – they clearly all get the folk genre, living and breathing the traditions whilst making them their own, and not being hide-bound by those traditions but very quickly taking the traditional forms and tunes and extending them in the way they want to take them whilst still remaining respectful to the origins.

One thing which shines through the Radicals’ performances is just how much they are enjoying themselves – they are clearly a tight-knit group of friends who enjoy working together, and when they play you can tell they’re doing it to please themselves, which results in a much more natural performance than the usual band which just seems to be going through the motions, or worse still, visibly acting; they’re enjoying themselves, and that enjoyment is infectious, making it impossible for us in the audience not to share that enjoyment. But there’s also the added bonus that as musicians they’re all true professionals, doing their own things separately in their own projects, which I hope to check out as well.

If they wish it, they could go a long way as a band together – they gel as if they’ve been doing it for years; the challenges they face immediately are threefold – (1) to not let their immediate success go to their heads, (2) to stick at it rather than it being a year-long project which they move on from, and (3) if they survive the previous two challenges, to grow and develop their own soundworld to keep moving forwards, rather than getting stuck in a sonic rut. The creativity they show so early in their careers plus the wealth of material they can draw from in world folk music traditions should make (3) a cinch – so let’s hope (1) and (2) don’t let them down. I have every confidence in them!

 The Bonfire Radicals

Auriyga

(the lighting in the venue was a bit too low for my cheapo video camera, hence the graininess)

In this review I’m aware I’ve not touched upon Auriyga’s performance; they’re playing again in Birmingham on 2 December (Hare and Hounds) and 11 December (Tower of Song), after which I hope to write about them in their own rights.

With a change of site there’s been inevitably a change of feel – at first I felt a little antsiness at how close together all the tents needed to be (I like to be sociable at these things, but I also like to have my personal space around my bed) on the new camping area, but that soon passed. To a certain degree the clearer separation between the stage marquee and the tents compared with previous years helps you feel like you can have a break without having to go too far away. If you’re a fan of nature, the large number of crickets chirruping away constantly will be a particular feature.

Belper Music Festival is a family festival, and as I’ve been going to it since its first year – though sadly missing a few – it’s started to feel like a festival which is a family reunion as well, as I recognise the same faces who come time after time; so of course, a festival isn’t about the place, it’s about the people, and the music.

Friday night’s bands included The Cactus Room – political reggae with songs covering such as the European Union and the 1689 Bill of Rights, Ska-Ra-Bouche, who whilst still feeling their feet a little right now most definitely have the potential to go far, and the Paul Evans Trio; now I’ll admit that as a basic straight-ahead blues band they weren’t fitting into my preferred musical genre, but actually their presence easily held my attention.

Outshining everybody so far, though, has to have been about an hour or so ago, in the Saturday Showcase slot, Salmagundi; their core sound is Balkan-influenced, but the knowledge and expertise of the band members has taken them far outside being able to be described as a Balkan folk band, with jazz, big-band, and even the R’n'B sounds of 60′s James Brown (ie, before modern young peoples’ music misappropriated the label) feeding into the mix – I definitely hope to see them come to Birmingham some time, and indeed maybe headline one night at a future Belper.

The Cactus Room

The Paul Evans Trio

Salmagundi

Is his music minimalist? New age? Easy listening? Indulge me, while I chew on my own molars.

To be sure, the first time I heard his music, I thought it was by Michael Nyman, and there are other similarities in Einaudi’s cannon – and in his looks, which are very like Nyman’s, if only due to the heavy spectacles and baldness. But Einaudi’s music is somewhat less challenging, and restful. Some would say blander, but it’s not that, it’s just more laid back, bringing to mind the colour- drained of Scandinavian landscapes in habited by television’s Kurt Wallander, rather than latin-blooded Italy.

Eschewing his band, and performing solo, with an amplified (occasionally overly so) grand piano, and at one point playing along to a pre-recorded backing track from his iPad, the non-demonstrative Einaudi looked lost in the grandeur of the Town Hall, his near-monotone voice during two lengthy expositions on the origin and meaning of the works her played doing little to convey the undoubted passion and intellect behind their composition.

I’ve wanted to see him live ever since I first discovered him, and, while I can’t fault his playing, or the material he selected (apparently, he changes his set-list at whim), I was left ultimately unsatisfied – and wondering if I might as well have stayed at home and listed to a recording.

The genre is basically afrobeat; as an English person who can’t actually understand the (mostly French) lyrics, the overwhelming sense I get from afrobeat is one of striving optimism – not bland, senseless optimism against all odds, but rather the kind of optimism which inspires you to work, because the harder you work the better you’ll be. I’m not remotely a runner, but had I been running in the Birmingham Half-Marathon the other weekend I’d have wanted four hours worth of Salif Keita stacked up on my iPod because the steady-but-driving rhythm would have forced me to keep going at a good page. Not so fast as to have risked personal injury (or an asthma attack), but not so slow as to have had me finish in an embarrassing time.

That said, it could be argued that over the course of a whole concert, maybe it was a little too driving; the tempo, mood, and basic rhythm was basically the same over the course of the whole concert – a bit of variety with the occasional slow track would have been good.

Sadly we were not introduced to the band members by name, and there was not printed information with their names on either, but special mention does have to go to the kora player; a kora is basically a home-made harp crafted from a gourd, a stick, and some bicycle cable. This kora player had an electric one (which as it is I found an amusing idea); when he started to play what amounted to a guitar solo rather than the classic kora jangly background riff on it, you could suspect something interesting was in the offing. When he took it off his shoulder strap and started playing it behind his back, Hendrix-style, you knew this was a man properly acquainted with his western classical rock music. Then when he followed it up by laying down on his back and rolled around the stage continuing his solo in a manner reminiscent of Spinal Tap’s Nigel Tufnel, you knew you were in the presence of an artist! Similarly, the lead guitarist showed his mastery of both Malian beat and western jazz/rock by moving effortlessly into a George-Benson-esque flow of singing in unison with the melodic line of his own guitar solo.

Letting the show down was the sound; my experience of amplified music in the Town Hall has always been that the sound lets the whole thing down (or at least upstairs it does, which is only where I’ve ever been for bands there) – engineers just seem to not know what to do in there. However, the hall can’t be blamed for Salif’s microphone simultaneously overdriving the speakers whilst at the same time leaving him struggling to be heard above the rest of the band. It did seem like the sound improved over the night, but it’s hard for me to judge whether that was because the engineer genuinely sorted things out, or because I simply got used to the bad sound.

The near-end of the concert brought us to the obligatory silly encore game; this time it was particularly silly because the advance publicity had made it clear the concert was going to finish at 9:30pm, so why oh why oh why leave the stage at 9:05 (after only an hour of performance) pretending it was the end?

Those who left to get their buses at that point did miss further treats, with the first encore giving the backing singers an opportunity to shine on their own. During the concert proper they provided excellent texture in with the overall sound, and as they took turns to sing the solo lines they proved they were well capable of holding a show themselves – I don’t know how well known they are in their own right in Mali, but they certainly deserve to be.

Of all the concerts I’ve been to at the Town Hall, this was the one at which I saw the largest number of people dancing in their seats – perhaps it might be worth them considering removing the front few rows in future to give plenty of space for people to come up and wiggle their jiggles?

Brian Eno’s 1983 album Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks was originally intended to be the soundtrack for a film collaboration with Al Reinert editing footage put together from the early NASA moon trips, however it took Reinert considerably longer than planned to view all of the raw footage, and eventually the film was released in 1989 as For All Mankind, in a considerably different, narrated documentary format to how it was originally conceived. Fast forward to 2009, and the contemporary music ensemble Icebreaker revisit the original concept and produce a live version of the music to perform to the silent NASA footage.

Many of those images – the Saturn V rocket taking off, the Earth-rise shot, and the actual landing – it has to be said have become such clichés that the impact they had at the time has become long lost. However, the addition of footage most people have probably never seen before – much of it seemingly mundane – for me restored the magic which would have been there when the original launches happened. The most moving image I felt was actually the shot out of the window of the Saturn V launcher on the launchpad, looking up at the moon above – I could really imagine the thoughts of the astronauts as they lay there strapped to their chairs, thinking ‘in a couple of days time, we’ll actually be there’.

Although the point of the piece was to have the film as a silent piece with musical accompaniment, I did wonder if the work would have gelled together as a whole better had some of the dialogues between the ground crew and the astronauts themselves been spinned in to the mix, just to better contextualise the images.

The second half of the concert introduced the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group to the stage, performing three works – Bruno Maderna’s Serenata per un Satellite, Param Vir’s Constellations, and conductor Peter Weigold’s Mysterium. I’m not going to say I didn’t enjoy the second half, but after the awesomeness of the first half it did seem like a bit of a let-down; it’s a shame though that from a commercial perspective having the two halves (which were technically two separate concerts anyway) the other way round would have been a non-starter – about half the number of people stayed for the second half, and of those who did stay there was a steady stream of people leaving; whether they weren’t fans or if they had buses to catch wasn’t clear.

The three works were performed concurrently without a break – which made for a nice change from the norm, but I did wonder how many non-contemporary music aficionados would have been able to pick apart the shift from one piece to another – but that’s an entirely different article to write…

Whilst watching the video in the first half I was struck by the simplicity of the real ‘space’ images compared with the complex cgi starfields and nebulae you get in science fiction films – and how film-makers could learn a little from the less-is-more principle. The video which accompanied the second half definitely played fast and loose with the physics of light, showing the Earth eclipsing the sun followed by sunrise over the Earth from completely the opposite side of the planet to where it should have been, and then moving Saturn from its current position beyond Jupiter to be nearer to the Earth than Mars – rounding off by having most of Saturn’s rings behind the planet rather than surrounding it! Also letting down Mysterium was the seemingly gimmicky inclusion of the noise of two satellites communicating into the piece – rather than adding to the soundworld Weigold had created it somewhat interfered with it, almost as if it was added in order to satisfy the brief for the commission rather than because it was musically necessary.

I did satisfyingly note that Weigold’s laptop was running the GL Astronomy Slideshow screensaver, though. Very apt!

Fortunately, in this instance there was no danger of that happening – (almost) everybody in both bands dressed and acted on stage in a dignified manner befitting their age and positions in life – no, not adopting the nursing home stereotype of dressing gown and slippers, but clothes that looked like rock people clothes without being skin tight jeans.

But you don’t really want to know what they were wearing, you wanting to know what they played like. The answer, for the most part, was ‘pretty good, actually’. With both bands, we were presented with a set of musicians who are clearly playing together because they enjoy playing that great music, and they enjoy playing it with each other. For both bands, the lions’ share of their sets was taken up by playing the old classics both were most widely known by – Nik Turner playing the early Hawkwind material, and Gong playing mostly from the Radio Gnome trilogy. My worry was that the old material might have sounded stale and forced (I saw the first Gong reunion concert which was organised and filmed by Central TV in 1990, and it had all the life of beached plaice), but actually came across as fresh as it did on the classic early live albums, Gong Live etc and Hawkwind Space Ritual Live respectively.

Conversely, for both bands newer material just…

…well, just didn’t quite work, really; it’s hard to fully put the finger on what was wrong – it wasn’t that it was under-rehearsed (though for both bands’ encores it did seem their rehearsals for that material was still at the in-progress stage), more that it wasn’t yet complete – space rock, whether your straight ahead archetype of Hawkwind or your let’s-take-a-walk-along-the-edge-of-the-cliff Gong, relies heavily on texture-rich sounds filled in with lots of analogue synthesiser and echo-looped glissando guitars, and for both of them their new material seemed to lack that, with a general ‘unfinished’ sound. Maybe had both bands played material from both leaders’ punk era experiments (New York Gong and Inner City Unit) the differences would have been less stark?

There was also a general sense amongst people I was talking to that Steve Hillage was generally too quiet in the mix for Gong, and when he was audible he was massively underutilised – this is a guitarist who could probably turn his hand to any genre. In the same concert. So it did seem a shame that he didn’t get more limelight. Sound generally was a bit problematic – where I was stood near the front there seemed to be too much booming in the upper bass range, which I put down to being too close to the speaker stack, but another who was there also commented that moving around wherever they stood in the room it seemed like the speakers were being overdriven. It is, however, to all intents and purposes a new venue, so everybody is going to be finding their feet in there for a while.

I said ‘almost’ everybody dressed and acted their age – of course, to expect Daevid Allen himself to not dress in his Pot Head Pixie costumes and prance about the stage like a gazelle would be a big ask, and actually, it came across no sillier than it would have done in 1973. More to the point, if I’m as trim as him and as capable as he of prancing about the stage for two whole hours when I’m 73, I’ll certainly have no complaints! Gilli Smyth’s space whisper has always been my least favourite aspect of the Gong soundworld (I actually first heard them from the later, much more jazz-rock Pierre Moerlen era); there’s no denying she’s a 77 year-old lady who still sounds like a 20 year-old girl down the microphone, though she seemed visibly the least able to handle the rock and roll lifestyle.

I don’t think I’ve ever been to a concert which I would say was ‘perfect’, and it may be considered cruel of me that I do find it easier to write things to criticise about than to praise. But on the other hand, if my criticisms above are the worst I can think of to say about three hours of fine musicianship, even with its warts, I’ve certainly no problem there.

Since that performance, I’ve not been able to bring myself to listen to the work again – not because it was a trauma (though CBSO Chorusmaster Simon Halsey did refuse to work with the Conservatoire choir again we were so recalcitrant during rehearsals), but because I found taking part in it to be so moving that I feared the memory may be spoiled.

But since it was being performed again in that very hall by such luminaries as the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the Ex Cathedra Choir, on the occasion of the honouring of the author of the text by his church, I couldn’t resist.

The work begins with the last moments of a man on his deathbed, the visions, dreams, hopes, and fears he’s having in his final hours with his friends around him to lovingly encourage him on his way. He dies at the end of part one (in a classic drama cliff-hanger moment), and part two resumes with him awakening at the start of his journey through the afterlife with a guardian angel in assistance. Newman’s original poem had the Angel as a male, but Elgar’s score – almost certainly not anticipating DCI Gene Hunt – recast the character as a mezzo-soprano; I guess with all the other masculinity around he figured a woman would be more comforting to the dead guy. She guides him through the limbo world, past demons and angels, towards the hall where he receives his judgement (with special pleading on his behalf being done by the Angel of the Agony) and is cast into the lake of Purgatory (where pretty much most Catholics who believe in that sort of thing expect to spend some time after death, so it’s not the bad deal popular culture tends to make it out to be).

I’m always conscious in choral performances of the danger of the choral part being seen as the main event, and the orchestra ending up as mere accompaniment. In this case the blending of orchestra and choir was so seemless it was sometimes difficult to hear where the orchestra ended and the choir began, with no sense of competition between them.

One minor niggle was the orchestra layout; standard orchestra strings layout has – from left to right – first violins, second violins, violas, cellos, double basses; tonight had them arranged in the ‘sometime experimental layout’ of half of the double basses, first violins, half of the cellos, violas, other half of the cellos, second violins, other half of the double basses. The idea is to get a better blended sound, but having second violins effectively pointing their instruments away from the audience does end up muffling them a bit, and even with the best players splitting sections in two risks the tightness of the ensemble playing.

Less minor niggles were the respective vocal powers of the soloists; mezzo-soprano Anna Stephany as the Angel cut through just fine, but tenor Adrian Thompson (Gerontius himself) did have occasional difficulties making himself heard; bass Roderick Williams was mainly audible in part one as the Priest, but in part two as the Angel of the Agony, relocated behind the orchestra, he was mostly lost, which was a bit of a shame.

But was my memory of our performance 20 years ago spoiled? No, not at all, far from it – this, again highly moving performance in a building steeped in the tradition of the work (arguably the building it was written to be performed in) with such a celebratory background served to enhance my own personal story – and whatever one might think about the theological basis of the text, the piece itself is a monumentally optimistic and uplifting glimpse of everything which is good about being human. I hope it’s not another 20 years before I hear it again!

Many years later, the ownership of the restaurant changed hands, and the sheen seemed to wear off. Visitors couldn’t help noticing the place was rarely busy – it almost seemed like they were deliberately taking a long time to come out with the bill and then take payment just to keep people in their longer in order to add some atmosphere to the place. Whilst at the same time, orders came out of the kitchen suspiciously quickly, leading diners to wonder if their meals had just been spooned out of a giant container and microwaved rather than hand cooked to order, and rubbery chicken was the house speciality. Eventually there came the point where the restaurant closed, with a notice in the window saying ‘closed for redecoration, re-opening in two weeks time’. That ‘two weeks’ became several months, and eventually news got out that they had ceased trading altogether.

Then in a blaze of glory the restaurant re-opened with publicity proudly announcing it had been re-taken over by the original owners, and that the quality would return to form. We visited shortly after that reopening, and weren’t immediately impressed, but decided to leave it a while to give them chance to settle back in, develop new menus, and recruit some new, higher quality staff.

That second chance came last night with a takeaway – chicken and cashew nuts, and Thai-style chicken in a sweet chilli sauce, with two portions of egg fried rice.

We were initially reassured that the food didn’t come out straight away after paying, but sad to say, disappointment ensued when we got home and cracked open the tubs. And on reflection, the disappointed actually started on opening the menus to choose – I wouldn’t normally order anything with sweet chilli sauce (finding it normally tastes more like strawberry jam), but frankly there wasn’t anything else on the menu to excite me.

At least the sweet chilli sauce didn’t taste of strawberry jam, but that to be honest is the best that can be said about our meal. It was barely detectable that the rice was either fried or containing egg. The chicken and cashew nuts tasted just like that – chicken, with some cashew nuts, and not a great deal of flavour in not a great deal of sauce. And the Thai-style chicken was… well, I’ll be positive and say it didn’t quite taste like the sauce had come from a jar of Uncle Ben’s. And at least the chicken wasn’t as rubbery as it used to be. All for £17, which compares poorly with a takeaway ‘budget gourmet’ curry takeaway from Bar-a-Jee on Broad Street, and when one considers that the same meal eaten in the restaurant would then be pushing £25-£30 with drinks makes it quite steep for a very poor quality meal – and not a patch on Cafe Soya, which surely has to be by far the best Chinese (or Chinese-Vietnamese, if one wants to be specific) restaurant in Birmingham right now.

So my recommendation – if you’re in the Brindley Place looking for somewhere to eat and you’re thinking ‘Chinese’ – avoid Tin Tin’s.

Sampad dance demonstration

The City Sings finale (via Jon Bounds)

A sneak preview of the new Mac building in Cannon Hill park, Birmingham (via Nick Booth)

Martin Mullaney’s welcoming speech

When Portishead first hit the record shops in the mid-90s, I have to admit I was initially a little underwhelmed. That all changed with the release of Roseland NYC Live (and the accompanying concert video) when I discovered just how artistic their music can be; if you’re the kind of person who likes contemporary classical music as might be played by B.E.A.S.T. or the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, or alternatively if the arthouse flicks of the Electric Cinema might make that venue your second home, then Portishead are the band for you.

After a gap of some 10 years since that album, the band have come together at last to release a new studio album, the imaginatively titled Third (released on 28 April 2008), together with a European tour to promote, which reached

Unlike many rock reformations, where it feels like the spark had long gone and has barely been rekindled to pay an unexpected tax bill, the return of Portishead shows a group of true dedicated and accomplished musicians demonstrating as much skill and energy today as they did on the album which converted me. The opening track included loud heavy guitars demonstrating them to be so much more than the label ‘trip hop’ leads one to assume, but the intimate numbers are still there with the band gathering around close in to each other sitting in a huddle.

Importantly, each song blended perfectly with the one preceding and following, and the sudden endings – a feature which often irritates me in a band – in this case were just ‘right’, an important part of the music rather than laziness. The Lalo Schifrin-esque melodies which wouldn’t be out of place in a James Bond soundtrack are still occasionally there along with the live turntablism (I do often wonder, does it matter what records they’re playing when they’re scratching?), together with a more classic analogue synthesisor soundworld – I counted at least two Minimoogs on stage.

Unless you can make a trip to Paris or Brussels early next month you’ve missed your chance in the UK on this tour, but if you fancy a Bank Holiday Eurostar trip you could do no worse. Hopefully we won’t have to wait another 10 years to see such a truly great band.

certainly when one arrived at chamberlain square to pick up your ticket (a buttonhole plastic flower) you were given the impression of something promising – if you had seen the setting up of the space in paradise gardens down in front of the conservatoire, you would have seen the potential for something magical. the staging around the chamberlain square fountain was less impressive – but that’s ok, because most outdoor performances of amnd i’ve seen have been minimally staged for the first half; it’s all part of that suspension of disbelief, innit?

in the warm-up before the performance was scheduled to start at 8:30 a number of schoolchildren came in to the space, showing off their circus skills with diabolo, clubs, and unicycle, and did a show comparable with some of my older, hippy, friends. nearer the time a few members of the company started circulating, working to get the audience into our character as wedding guests (“so how do you know the groom, then?”). as a warmup, it was quite good.

unfortunately, things started to go downhill before the performance proper had even started…

at around 8:15 the music, by composer and musical director ian chapman, started coming through the pair of speakers either side of the stage. by 8:30, after i’d heard the same four bars of not-particularly-well-executed guitar riff go over and over and over and over again i was losing my initial good mood about the production.

suddenly, something happenned – we heard the strains of the wedding march start up, and eventually looked behind to see a white rolls royce deliver the bride and groom to us. the wedding party promenaded to the stage, with an enormous train behind the bride’s dress which, over the course of getting on for ten minutes (with no dialogue, no other apparent visual action, and four bars of a new incessant riff blasting out of the speakers) was slowly spread out as being the covering for the stage. it was an amusing idea, spoiled by being drawn out like home-made toffee.

for another five minutes or so (again with no dialogue, action, and the same four bars repeated over & over) the photographer (graeme rose) spent time arranging the wedding party into their photograph. eventually the deed was done, and he revealed himself in a seemingly improvised speech to be puck (or should that have been pcuk in a contemporary setting?), set on making a merry night of mischief. he threw a handful of fairy dust over the father (greg hobbs) of the bride, prompting a change of riff to yet another repeated four bars sounding like a year 7 music class’s interpretation of ‘spooky’ and causing the father to embarrass himself with his improv speech. that out of the way, some more fairy dust was thrown over the mother (sandra hall) of the groom, with the same effect. the bride (rachel priest), suitably upset by the affair, ran off in tears and we were treated to the earlier four bar riff for a while. the groom (paul edwards) looked confused and shouted out “has anybody seen my wife?”. it was difficult to resist the temptation to reply “behind you”.

we were then invited, according to the colours of our buttonholes, to follow the flags of the bride and groom down into paradise gardens – one down the spiral staircase in front of the library, the other down the steps outside the conservatoire.there was no apparent dramatic justification for this, but granted it was quite a clever device to shepherd a large number of people into a smaller space as quickly & efficiently as possible.

now i had hoped that after this half an hour of scene setting the action would pick up fairly swiftly and we might then get on with the actual play. hope, as they say, springs eternal, and instead there was over ten minutes of watching some musicians, led by a vicar on stilts, parade around and around and around and around the garden doing what i think might have been a year 8′s interpretation of ‘native american chant’.

by 9:15, with still nothing having happenned and no sign anything was going to happen in the near future, i’m afraid we decided to cut our losses and go home; on the way down into the gardens we bumped into a friend who had seen the production the night before coming out of the conservatoire, who informed us the second half was even more tediously drawn out than the first. we left wondering whether it was supposed to have been a performance with a defined start and finish, or whether really it was supposed to be an installation which you wander around for five or ten minutes, think “that’s very nice”, and then go off to the pub.

birmingham alive! does actually have an editorial policy on bad reviews; we’re much less likely to write and publish a bad one than a good one, working on the basis that ultimately they’re up there doing it and we’re sitting comfortably in the audience risking nothing. the circumstances for publishing a bad review basically are either ‘has this poor performance actually taken away the opportunity for somebody else to have done something much better’, or ‘have people been ripped off by paying good money for rubbish’.

now, the audience didn’t have to pay anything, but the production itself clearly cost a lot of money – certainly thousands. this was money provided by sponsors and out of the public purse, money which could have been spent on some real quality community performing arts work, money which could have been spent on a really good outdoor performance bringing shakespeare to the modern audience. so much obvious potential ended up being so much down the drain.

according to the back of the programme: “hamfisted! is a birmingham based, experimental arts company that produces live theatre, interactive interventions and visual arts projects, in conventional and unconventional spaces, in professional and community contexts, all with the aim of putting smiles on people’s faces”. i’ve seen some excellent community arts work and participated in some not-so-good professional work, but at the end of the day this performance had to be judged on the merits of what was presented – of which there were few.

‘experimental’ should not be a synonym for ‘unprepared’; ‘improvised’ should not be a synonym for ‘unrehearsed’, and ‘community’ should not be a synonym for ‘mediocre’. the point of experimental arts and improvisation is that you spend time honing your craft and skills in smaller-scale workshop environments, and then when you know you can pull off experiments which will work you present to the wider public. when the experiment should obviously never have left the workshop, it gives the whole genre a bad name. i hope the result of this production is not that audiences and funders are put off experimental arts for a long time.