Directed by Neil Bartlett and staged amid the sombre shadows and silhouettes of Paule Constable’s lighting design, Britten: The Canticles is an intense evening of music visually animated by physical theatre, dance and film. The piece has been devised in collaboration with leading choreographers Scott Graham and Wendy Houstoun, as well as controversial war artist John Keane, […]

In the first of three dance pieces by the Californian dance company Zion the audience is invited to cluster around a small raised stage. As mine was an English audience of course there was much embarrassed shuffling ‘not too close’, and the stage manager handling this aspect of our entry had to coax and encourage. […]

Table Manners dished up three courses ‘exploring the rituals of food and dining that enshrine our social hierarchies and hang-ups’. First comes the buffet, Delia – We’ve Been Thinking, presented in lavish colour by Hunt & Darton. Seating is placed around the fully laden and largely inaccessible buffet display. We are given name tags so that […]

When somebody disappears without explanation you can’t fail to notice, as you process the excruciating painfulness of it, that the experience is also a curiously powerful one. The suspension of normality, a heightened awareness of every possibility around you – the ongoing lack of any resolution fundamentally skews your perspective on the world. The sense […]

Pedigree and provenance, that’s what it’s all about. This ‘subversive promenade performance’ is one of the key commissions for this year’s Brighton Festival, and follows in the Festival’s tradition of commissioning high quality site-responsive work as a key part of its theatre programme. It takes the form of a tour around Preston Manor, described quite […]