Music & Audio
Free nightly concerts from Budapest Orchestra’s Quarantine Soirees. Nightly recitals including Beethoven, Hadyn and Schubert https://bit.ly/2xyK81L
Artists doing free concerts ... Pink, Billie Eilish, Mariah Carey, Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong, Alicia Keys and many more https://bit.ly/2QRv5qZ
Culture Under Quarantine
If you have bags of time and are relatively new to Netflix you could gorge on the blockbuster series. Most are made and set in the USA. A bunch of them focus on difficult, screwed-up white men though their imperfections contrast with some amazing female characters.
Sashaying in the footsteps of Made in Dagenham, Battle of the Sexes and Hidden Figures to sprinkle Hollywood dust on milestones of the fight for gender equality, Misbehaviour offers a post-millennial viewpoint on the women’s liberation protests at the 1970 Miss World pageant.
With over 100 million viewers, the beauty contest was then the most-watched television programme on the globe – or as the show’s compere tells us on screen, more than the moon landings or the World Cup final.
Somehow it was apt that Algiers took the stage as Storm Ciara took its toll on the country. Inside, the brave, the curious and the devoted were treated to a devastating live set, which drew heavily from their new album There Is No Year.
The opening punk blast of “Void” set the tone; resplendent under the neon red strip lights, the band tore through a diverse set list with absolute command. The band acted as one supremely powerful entity, locking in and out of searing dance grooves and discordant noise sequences with consummate ease.
If anyone needs extra motivation for another five years of the Tories, Motihari Brigade will put your marching boots on in Power from Below.
Named after the Indian birthplace of George Orwell, their call to action is standing up to power through their own Orwellian “thoughtcrime” music.
The album begins with the cry that everything will stay the same “until people take the power” and ends with a poignant message in “Waiting for the Revolution” that “We are on our own but we are not alone”.
Melancholic ethereal vocals reminiscent of Sharon Van Etten, with wandering guitar picks and Courtney Barnett-esque bass provide an arresting balance as the Irish songwriter’s debut album opens.
The unexpected introduction of a late 60s psychedelic sound, the chord progressions with the bend of 7ths, floating flute and jagged touch of the strings over the top lifts the mood.
Themes of a woman finding herself at a crossroads in life, there is a longing for more agency, but with resigned understanding that we don’t have it.
Greed stars the actor Steve Coogan in a comic take-down of the world of the top one percent. It’s based around a retail boss’s 60th birthday party at his private villa on the Greek island of Mykonos,
The film nominally features the fictional Sir Richard “Greedy” McCreadie. But it’s all about Sir Philip Green. He’s the Topshop supremo who accrued fabulous wealth as he waded through a series of profitable financial manoeuvres and then devastated thousands of lives as the reality led to collapse.
This is the first UK showing of ‘Life in the Margins’ by Pacita Abad, a worldwide recognised multimedia artist of the past 30 years; and how lucky we are in Bristol to host this fantastic debut to the country.
Spike Island’s bare, open studio creates the perfect space for Abad’s large tapestries. They burst with complex and loud colour, varying from story-telling portraits to abstract prints, heavy in cultural references through colour, shape and technique.
Born to Manifest is the latest dance work by the acclaimed choreographer and performer Joseph Toonga and his company Just Us Dance Theatre. A hip-hop piece for two dancers (Toonga and Dani Harris-Walters), it is a powerful, invigorating, enraging and almost unbearably moving evocation of the experience of young black men in Britain.
As a performing arts critic, I see a lot of stage works. Consequently, I hope, I have developed a strong sense of the difference between cheap sentiment and the real deal.
