- The Guardian
Wednesday 24 July 2019 13
Live reviews
PHOTOGRAPHS: JOE SINGH; TRISTRAM KENTON/GUARDIAN; GEOFF FORD
the Bug crushes everyone under
hammer blows of dub machinery.
His guest vocalist Moor Mother spits
out words as if to create something
to hang on to, and at one point
fl ows like a pissed-off Rakim over
an old-school breakbeat, a thread of
outsider rap later picked up by Dälek
and Prison Religion.
Some artists encourage the
headbanging into a blur. “Does
anyone like gabber?”, duo Big Lad
ask the crowd before launching into
mashed synths and pummelled
drums. The BPM increases further
for Aja, who plays inside the mouth
of a giant beast: a stage constructed
and curated by Turner-nominated
artist Monster Chetwynd , who
spends the weekend dressed as a
whoopee cushion. Under grotesque
makeup and wearing a yellow
morphsuit adorned with sagging
teats, Aja screams down a mic over
pounding beats. Fastest of all though
are brilliant noise duo Guttersnipe ,
playing inside the monster in a blur
of fi endishly intricate guitar lines
and drumming somewhere between
free improv and blastbeats.
Some of the best performances
are those that wield heaviness
with the lightest touch. Reciting
a long poem about “demons and
odours”, Daniel Higgs is a genius of
language. Faulknerian neologisms
(“pupatedly”, “sarcophageous”)
build into musky images recited
with a soothsayer’s vision, where
“hurling wigwams of ghoul-sponge”
are off set with contemporary
details such as mobile phones and a
mutilated Star-Spangled Banner.
Casual eccentricity abounds :
the suburban Sun Ra that is Paddy
Steer; the crocked Balearic disco
of Hen Ogledd; mouse-and-bear-
voiced punk trio Victim, made up of
band members Car Crash, Iron Fist
and Pub Fight. In a week in which
British politics narrows into mere
buff oonery, we need to look to these
visionaries, whose wit and energy
shows us how broad life can be.
Ben Beaumont-Thomas★★★★☆
Palladium, LondonPop
Supersonic
festival
Dance
Yo u n g
Associates/
National Youth
Dance Company
A
city built on guns,
iron and chemicals,
often under
drizzly skies and
with no horizon,
Birmingham has
always been heavy. As the summer’s
Home of Metal arts programme
across the city suggests – including
a Black Sabbath retrospective at the
Museum and Art Gallery – that mood
infl uenced its music, but Supersonic
festival shows that while Brummies
still adore heaviness, it comes in
all kinds of pressures and weights.
Celebrating its 15th year and set
across three modestly sized stages,
the world-beating lineup massages,
prods and kicks at music’s edges.
Neurosis induce the weekend’s
most soulful headbanging, and
it’s evident why: with their slow
guitar lines, the Californians are
a bright blast of spiritual sludge-
metal. Supporting them are
local veterans Godfl esh, whose
tinny drum machine acts like a
wretched treadmill, locking theminto industrial nightmares of
ratcheting intensity.
The Body are excellent, vocalist
Chip King howling far from the mic
to conjure a spectral, tenacious
humanity above their cauldron
of noise. Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs
Pigs Pigs blend Sabbath’s grandeur
with the boisterous enlightened
laddism of Idles – one song is about
Aleister Crowley being on The Great
British Bake Off – while Yob are all
hair and strident Viking riff age, Sly
and the Family Drone hand their
instruments over to the gleeful
audience for a noisy jam, andW
hen in need
of hope, it’s
common to
look to the
young. You’ll
fi nd the next
generation of choreographers and
dancers in two laudable initiatives
from Sadler’s Wells: the Young
Associates, four choreographers in
their early 20s; and the ambitious
National Youth Dance Company ,
all aged 15 to 24, here performing
Madhead by 27-year-old Botis Seva.
Look at the dance they produce and
it’s clear these young people have a
message, but that message seems to
be: we’re doomed.
Environmentalism is strong in
the Young Associates show. “You
set planet Earth on fi re!” accuses
Ruby Portus’s retro-futurist activist-
comedy Port Manteau, while
Wilhelmina Ojanen’s confi dent Land
gives us dreamy forest people who
lose their earth, trees, community
and trust. People crumble too,
lost and despairing in Christopher
Thomas’s To the Ocean Floor.
Anthony Matsena’s happy tribedisintegrates into darkness in
Vessels of Affl iction, individuals
destroyed by the system.
The works are wildly varied in
style, but perhaps the main takeaway
is just how hard it is to make
choreography, even when you’re
this talented. Jokes don’t quite come
off , voices are not yet found, drama
is undercooked or overdone. Still,
Young Associates have skill, energy
and ideas to build on.Botis Seva is a more established
choreographer, and his experience is
clear. He comes out of east London’s
hip-hop scene and makes powerful
work that sparks with friction,
disaff ection, mental struggle and the
gregarious energy of youth reined in
with tight discipline.
His style centres on the physical
contradiction between frozen
tension and explosive pugnacity,
manifesting as the inevitable
eruptions of fear and frustration
that people try to keep clamped
inside. Madhead uses the seriously
impressive NYDC dancers in tight
militaristic manoeuvres. They’re
taking aim, but who the enemy is
isn’t clear. Individual moments of
human connection and compelling
short solos resonate against the
sometimes repetitive routines. It’s
a work that could be stronger at half
the length, but Seva creates striking
dance and an all-consuming, if
unvaried, atmosphere.
All these works may need honing,
developing or editing, but in terms
of dance’s future, we’re not doomed.
Lyndsey WinshipPop
Lea Salonga
M
usical-theatre
singers are in an
odd position:
they need to
be distinctive
but not too
distinctive, powerful but not
eccentric. The Filipina singer
Lea Salonga has been striking this
balance perfectly on Broadway
and West End stages since starring
in Miss Saigon 30 years ago , aged
only 18. She sings with perfect
diction and “acts out” every
lyric she performs, but her secret
weapon is a fi erce yet controlled
vibrato. It rarely strays beyond
a few microtones either side of
the princip al note, and, unlike an
opera soprano’s vibrato , retains
an intensity and focus that never
detracts from the melody.
As well as performing songs from
musicals in which she has starred –
Aladdin, Mulan, Les Misérables and
Miss Saigon – her actorly skill ekes
new truths from familiar showtunes
and pop standards, such as a duet
arrangement of A-ha’s Take on Me
for voice and acoustic guitar, or a
conversational version of Tracy
Chapman’s Fast Car.
But, in her slightly
school marmish way, she’s also a
fi ne master of ceremonies. She
orchestrates the audience to sing
the backing vocals to This Is Me
from The Greatest Showman ; she
turns Frozen’s Let It Go into a Disney
singalong. When one gay man in the
audience responds to the line “and it
looks like I’m the queen” by standing
up and whooping “Yas queen!”,
Salonga responds, like much of
the audience, by applauding and
giggling hysterically.
Memorably, she invites a random
man from the audience to duet with
her on A Whole New World, with
tonight’s lucky winner being Mark
from Salonga’s home city of Manila.
“Thank you for perpetuating the
stereotype that all Filipinos are great
singers,” she says, drily.
John Lewis★★★★★
Various venues, Birmingham★★☆☆☆/★★★☆☆
Sadler’s Wells, LondonSly and the Family
Drone hand their
instruments to the
gleeful audience
Activist comedy ...
Young AssociatesMonster’s ball ...
Aja at Supersonic
festivalFierce vibrato ...
Lea SalongaРЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS