Cheeseboards, red wine and Edith Piaf. Even the bar staff gallantly attempt to speak French to you. The Battersea Arts Centre’s beautifully opulent Grand Hall has been transformed into a 1930s Parisian music hall for Little Bulb’s lovingly created version of the Orpheus myth. The company was inspired by the incredible guitar music of Django […]

A Thousand Shards of Glass starts with a warm welcome from solo performer Lucy Ellinson. She has a seemingly innocent question or remark for each of us as we are led in groups of three or four to seats set around a circular network of wires and tunnel lamps. From the start, we are in it […]

Rhetoric has the power to persuade and a good speech takes its listeners on a journey, often leading them to a place of rapture – and no more so than with evangelist preachers like the American televangelist Jimmy Swaggart. In a fifty-minute dance piece, Lisbeth Gruwez embodies this disarming process. She first appears backlit, standing […]

In the opening scenes of this show, the stage is full of children and adults happily dancing; brightly lit, laughing, they throw giant red balloons gently to one another and dance gaily around a central maypole, framed by the stylised wrought iron trellis / tree panels that make up the show’s set. It could be […]

My programme tells me that The Famous Lauren Barri Holstein ‘has been making vagina-based work since 2009 and dancey-dance work since 2003’. Opening this year’s SPILL Festival in London, Splat! sits very much in the ‘vagina-based work’ category. The piece is littered with references to popular and mainstream culture’s representation of desirable women. From a […]