Before the performance begins a video camera pointed at the audience projects our waiting faces onto the screen, individuals singled out and video mapped onto the bodies of superheroes and samurai wrestlers. We laugh, we smile, we’re amused and enchanted. After this pre-show, it’s a helter-skelter freefall into an optic, joyful, fast-paced, pulsating arcade of […]

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 […]