The End of the World. A state of mind, a song by – come on, who, who? Name that tune! It’s Skeeter Davis, a country-pop classic from 1962. You’d know it if you heard it. You’d know it even if the version you were hearing was slowed-down, then slowed-down again, and slowed-down thrice so it becomes a painful deconstruction, a dirge delivered by a murderous minx.

FK Alexander is dressed in a flouncy white organza frock. Her arms and legs are bare. She has intense eyes that look out to us with monstrous intent. She has yellow hair that she tosses away from her face as she bends over the guillotine. Yes, a guillotine. The first chop-chops, delivered in perfect percussive rhythm, jolt us out of our seats with a collective intake of breath. Why does the sun keep on shining? Why does the sea rush to shore? Don’t they know it’s the end of the world? Cos you don’t love me anymore. Chop, chop, chop. Her victims – bouquets of beautiful blooms, pink and yellow roses and more – fall aside, beheaded. The heads bounce, or are pushed, off the table. Chop, chop, chop.

She stands, walks over to the centre of the stage, puts on a pair of red patent stilettos with clippity-clop steel tips, and stands again, looking out, puppet-esque in a corridor of light. Behind her, a screen flashes up words. Love, Loveless. Lovelessness. God. Godless. Godlessness. Sister, Brother, Father, Mother. There’s a smoke machine – mic’d up so that the sound of the machine’s fan becomes a drone. As she stomps her way backwards, upstage, the floor mics pick up the staccato beat of her steps, the sound augmented by varying degrees of echo effect. Her movement creates an in-the-moment musique concrete soundscape.

FK Alexander is one of a roster of contemporary performance makers for whom music, and musicality, is core to their practice. The music, the sound design, the enacting of the music, is intrinsic to the dramaturgy of the piece, not a decorative add-on.

Repetition is a key element to much of FK Alexander’s work. Take the Total Theatre Award winning (I Could Go On Singing) Somewhere Over the Rainbow, in which she sings Judy Garland’s iconic song over and over again– aided and abetted by Glasgow noise band Okishima Island Tourist Association – to one audience member at a time, whilst others witness, and yearn for her attention. Sometimes for an hour, sometimes for six hours.

But it’s not just repetition for the sake of it: the repetition in her work reminds us that nothing can actually ever be repeated. Once the moment is gone, it’s gone, replaced by another one – different in small or great ways, it doesn’t matter. It’s different.

In this new piece, Violence, we have a repetition that mirrors the structure of a pop song: verse, chorus, verse, chorus, middle eight etc. There are key changes. We return to the table and the guillotined flowers, then back to the walkway. The words reverse out their order. Lovelessness. Loveless. Love.  Change is possible, they say. Things can be re-arranged. Life goes on. There are firecrackers, and a live drummer accompanying the walk, creating a crescendo of percussive and ambient sound. In the final rendition of the song,  slowed down to within an inch of its life, FK Alexander’s beautiful voice synchs perfectly with Skeeter Davis’s on the recording. She has this chameleon ability to be other singers: then, Judy; now, Skeeter. But whoever she’s being, she is also – always – her own inimitable and magnificent self.

A vitally important artist, with another great show under her belt.

Featured image (top) FK Alexander: Violence. Photo by Nial Walker

Sleepwalk Collective’s latest work, Kourtney Kardashian, is the third part of what the company describe as an ‘accidental trilogy’ which is inspired, in part, by Chekov’s Three Sisters. I haven’t seen the other two parts, a ballet called Kim Kardashian (2016), and a ‘stage play’ called Khloe Kardashian (2017). I am also a bit vague about who the Kardashians are and what they do – but (and this is the point) even though I don’t watch TV or read Hello! magazine, I do know that the Kardashians are immensely famous for being famous, and they pervade all of our lives, staring out from YouTube, uninvited, or pouting from the pages of the Evening Standard left on the train that’s glanced through. The Kardashians in this third show in the trilogy are an oblique presence – a leitmotif, a metaphor, a trope. They represent opulence, luxury, privilege. The allure of fame and celebrity that unsettles us, dragging us further away from the shore.

Kourtney Kardashian is an opera, of sorts. ’Written by the dead, for the dying.’ Is ’the dying’ a reference to the fact that most opera-goers are over 60 and therefore closer to death than birth? Or a philosophical musing on the fact that all of us – 64-year-old me, and my twenty-something companion, and those thirty-somethings behind us, and the performers on stage – are all of us dying, in every moment? Probably both.

The music in Kourtney Kardashian is not just a crucial element of the work – it is also its subject matter. At the start, as is good and right, the conductor (Sammy Metcalfe, behind the upfront sound desk) takes a bow, and prepares. But there is, we are told, no orchestra, and no singers. ‘There won’t be any singing here tonight’ says the diva standing statuesque, centre-stage, in her gold-slash dress. But she’s wrong, there is.

We are given not a version of, but a skirting around, The Marriage of Figaro. There is an Overture and a Prelude and an Interlude; a Cavatina, a Concertato and a Coloratura. There are Arias and Recitatives. The intensely beautiful soundscape includes epic, systems-music symphonic reworkings of Mozart’s ‘opera buffa’; live singing from co-performers iara Solano Arana and Nhung Dang; and crackly recordings featuring Sammy Metcalfe’s parents, Stephen and Lucy Metcalfe, singing the roles of Figaro and his bride-to-be Susanna – all cleverly mulched together. There is a Melodrama, and there is melodrama. There is even a Claque – an ‘organised body of professional applauders’. They are behind us, at the back of the auditorium: two large speakers decorated with gold bows, offering enthusiastic clapping and cheering on command from the maestro at the desk.

The show features many familiar tropes and tricks from the Sleepwalk Collective repertoire. There is text, lots of text, often delivered in the second person, the accusing ‘you’ fired straight out in poetic provocation to the audience, seducing us siren-like on a rolling sea of allusion and alliteration. There are lots of words in this piece, words that work on a semiotic level, above and beyond semantic meaning. I find myself musing on one line that really catches me by the throat, and a whole load more wash over me, in a musical medley of sound. Often with Sleepwalk Collective shows, I love the words, but struggle to remember them afterwards, although I remember the feelings that the words evoke – they bypass my brain and go straight to my heart, little daggers of emotion and soulful meaning. There is a sculptural placing of bodies on stage: statues moving on turntables, duets of gestural choreography.

But most of all there is the voice, the voice – iara’s haunting voice drawing us ever closer to the rocks, taunting us. Opera, theatre, fame, celebrity: all these things here, we are told, but we know anyway – are an illusion. All that glitters is not gold. That ingot of gold, in its velvet box – it’s pretend, right? They are just pretending that they bought an actual ingot of gold for the show, right? She rustles her gold-slash dress, which shimmers alluringly under the lights. It is, we learn, fashioned from a rescue blanket. Nothing is what we really think it is.

Cuckoo! Here they come, the Cuckoos – red and white and shiny, rolling along the conveyor belt as a cheery jingle sings out. What is a Cuckoo? It’s a rice cooker – the brand so popular in Jaha Koo’s homeland, South Korea, that Cuckoo is to rice cooker there as Hoover is to vacuum cleaner here in Britain.

So we see an ad for the Cuckoos on screen, as part of the luscious and lavish video work that is integral to this show, but there are also three Cuckoos on stage, sat seductively on a table, behind which stands the lone and lonely figure of Jaha Koo. The onstage Cuckoos have been ‘prepared’ (in the John Cage sense of the word) – Jaha Koo is not only a writer and performer, he’s a contemporary electronic music composer and producer, working under the name GuJAHA, and he has turned the rice cookers into ‘telerobotic’ objects that manifest as singing, talking, swearing divas. But, as we find out further into the show, they do also still cook rice – or at least, one of them still does. For others, such a mundane reason for existing as making rice is far, far below them.

The Cuckoos are here as foils to Jaha Koo’s monologues, punctuated by very cleverly edited filmed footage, exploring his angst as a thirty-something South Korean, growing up in a country crippled by a financial crisis that, in 1997, resulted in National Humiliation Day, in which the country’s leaders accepted  a 55-billion dollar bailout from the International Monetary Fund, on the condition that they implement the organisation’s extensive and damaging changes to fiscal policy that led to a widening gap between rich and poor, endless riots, and a level of national anxiety that permeated every area of life.

Twenty years on, Jaha Koo appraises the effect the past two decades have had on himself and his peers. On screen, and in Jaha Koo’s words (spoken in Korean, with projected text captions in English an integral part of the visual design of the piece) we experience a deluge of challenging ideas and images: two that particularly haunt me are the statement (and accompanying harrowing image) that the artist as a child was cared for by a grandmother who put a clear plastic bag over his head when they went out to protect him from the tear gas; and that when South Korea co-hosted the Olympic Games, the colourful street parades and processions of dancers were the first time he had seen large groups of people on the streets who weren’t demonstrating, rioting or being beaten up by the police.

The piece is beautifully constructed, with different sections each adding another layer to our understanding of recent history and contemporary life in South Korea. I’m not the only person in the audience, I know, who was shocked by the revelations about the part of Korean peninsula that we’d always seen as the saner and more civilised. In particular, the multi-faceted reflections on suicide, which has reached epidemic proportions amongst young people living in the pressure-cooker that is modern Korean life. The generalised observations – on, say, the anti-suicide glass screens separating platform and track on the subway – give way to a very specific story about a dear friend who throws himself from a balcony: ‘When he died, I made this music,’ Koo says, then lets us just listen to the music. It’s a terribly sad but beautiful moment.

Jaha Koo, who now lives between Belgium and the Netherlands, has created a work that captures his native culture astutely – the work is intrinsically Korean – but which also has a modern European style and sensitivity, and sits very well into the body of Flemish new theatre work that explores the possibilities of the performance-lecture. A week later, I’m still haunted by the show’s sounds and images. Food for thought indeed.