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 […]

Stage presence is an ineffable quality. As soon as Barbara Matijevic enters the space you know she has it and that you are going to be in safe hands. The Basement is bright but warmly lit, with a white background wall. The piece has started before this defining moment, with a MacBook on a stand […]

  The Bombed-Out Church is a Liverpool icon. Tourists love it as a photogenic ruin. Locals flock to it for cultural events programmed by the redoubtable Urban Strawberry Lunch. Everyone loves a ruin. For Tony Teardrop, Cut to the Chase draws upon the Church’s reputation as a hangout for some of the city’s homeless. It’s […]