REVIEW: Daughter, Cambridge Junction, Saturday, October 26

Daughter

I was expecting tears to mingle with the mud and beer streaked floor of  Cambridge Junction on Saturday night, but instead, a strange uneasiness  fluttered through the room instead.

No tears, no snatched, awed breaths, and it was strange because Daughter are  the kind of band that usually make your skin shiver and your bottom lip wobble.

Hailing from London, the indie folk trio, made up of Elena Tonra, ethereal  with cropped hair and a voice that haunts, Igor Haefeli on guitar and Remi  Aguilella on drums, their debut album If You Leave raked in reviews written by  critics whose blood stopped at the first listen (this is no exaggeration: it’s  crushingly beautiful and just as crushingly emotional). Basically, they aren’t a  good idea if you’re recovering from a break up, unless you need a good old cry.

So it was never going to be a happy-go-lucky Saturday night (“We’re a bit  depressing for a Saturday night, go get drunk afterwards,” Elena sighed), but  then it wasn’t meant to be awkward either.

They wandered on stage looking slightly lost and vaguely overwhelmed, clad in  black and smiling shyly at a crowd already, disappointingly, poised with their  camera phones.

Spinning into Still, Elena’s voice soared above a bass that thumped  dangerously through your chest, hair shielding her face as they sank into the  track. And then, abruptly it was over. A huge, uncomfortable pause lapping  between claps and whoops for the first track and the start of the next one.  Instruments were traded clumsily (was one roadie not enough?), they barely spoke  except for small, quiet thank yous and the lack of urgency from song to song  (which carried on throughout the set), meant the momentum stuttered, floundered,  evaporated…

It wasn’t just them though. The crowd was almost as much to blame as the band  (even Igor noted: “You’re very quiet,”): for not dancing, for only knowing a  smattering of words, for (this is a sneaking suspicion) turning up as a show, to  have another up-and-coming band tethered to a skinny jean informed nonchalance.

Hence why it was no surprise that when they swung into the opening bars of  Youth, Daughter’s most radio played record, the reaction in the room suddenly  crackled into jittery recognition. It was too much though. Elena seemed to crack  in front of us: either her earpiece buzzed and threw her, she forgot the words  (how?), or she got over emotional and crumpled – it was hard to tell if she was  angry or upset. Either way, the track faded out with her apologising and shaking  her head, as confused as we were.

It was still beautiful though, despite the strung out pauses and the strange  collapse. The lighting was spectacular, huge shafts of colour obliterating the  band, switching from electric blues to blazing oranges and sickly pinks, and  their craftsmanship and skill was wondrous, the likes of Camera and Amsterdam  were aching and angry in all the right ways.

There was just a lack of charisma. They needed to come out on stage and set  the tone, not leave us jarred between each track, not quite sure whether to  whisper sympathetically, sob unhappily or resign ourselves to just getting  another drink at the bar.

First published by Cambridge News.

REVIEW: Tom Odell, Cambridge Corn Exchange

Tom Odell

I’ll be frank, my expectations were low.

I was prepared for a sedate, somewhat emotional affair involving a boy in  need of a haircut, playing a piano with his eyes closed in deliberate  melancholy.

It’s unlikely I could have been more wrong. Tom Odell has suffered some bad  press (looking at you NME), has faced a slow start to a career that has suddenly  gone stratospheric (he’s gone from boozy, disinterested pub crowds to sold out  venues heavy with hairspray and pheromones), and the pressure of being the BRIT  Award’s Critic Choice.

The odds were stacked against him; pair that with broken hearted tracks,  introspective lyrics and upsetting piano chords, and what should you have live?  Not that much really.

But he came out blazing.

Discarding his usual nods to Kurt Cobain grunge (denim and checked shirts),  he stalked on stage in skinny black jeans and a white school shirt, buttoned at  the cuffs, before launching into Grow Old With Me, instantly sinking us into a  state of awe-struck bliss.

I partly blame the fact his band was impossibly pretty and one was playing a  double bass. I’m a sucker for a double bass.

But then, as he raced through the likes of Sirens, Can’t Pretend and Supposed  To Be, you realised it was him, Odell, there’s something blindingly likeable  about him, topped with passion darting down his arms, into his fingertips,  imploding with help from a voice that, on the radio, smushes into the realm of  generic, but live hurls into the air magnificently.

He even pulled off a cover of the Beatles’ Get Back and that takes some  effort.

Then the opening tendrils of Another Love started, breaths were collectively  held, tear ducts smarted to attention, but Tom yelled “Let’s go!” and this  sweet, sad song morphed into anger: frustrated, disillusioned, despair driven  anger as huge light bulbs burned, glowed and popped around the stage. Next the  band slowed slightly into Hold Me, inducing actual goosebumps and making  everyone hoarsely, wrenchingly sing along.

In the gap that followed, the fawning girls were a bit of a shock. I felt  like pulling them aside and politely explaining, he’s good but he really isn’t  the sixth member of One Direction. It wouldn’t have mattered. There were  constant unified cries of: “We love you Tom!” and he played up to it  brilliantly, flirting with his piano as much as the crowd, rocking back and  forth on his stool, slotting in the lyric: “And all the girls screamed…” with a  sweep of his arm to be deafened by hysterical shrieks.

When he came back on, things went up a notch. Three tracks blurred together  as he shouted “COME ON CAMBRIDGE!”, battered the piano, his band simultaneously  losing it in frantic, brilliantly orchestrated chaos.

Tom was properly in the moment (which made the hordes of people filming it on  their phones, filtering his performance through pixels, really quite insulting),  and gave it absolutely everything: hollering, almost splintering the keys with  his palms, lashing out at the mic stand and kicking over his piano stool in  rage.

The boy went mental.

By the end of the set his hair was curling with sweat, his school shirt  soaked see-through and his eyes wired.

That’s what you call a performance.

First published by Cambridge News.

REVIEW: Local Natives, Cambridge Junction

Local Natives

Local Natives look like they’ve been ripped straight from playing a game of  space-invaders in a strip-lit arcade.

Tousled beards, buttoned up shirts splattered in 80s wallpaper patterns and  wired eyes: they trouped out on stage a tad late, but they had been sightseeing  (bless them). It was their first visit to Cambridge and the first night of the  UK leg of their tour, and they seemed kind of overwhelmed by it all (“Your  buildings are old, really old. We’re from LA, all our buildings are from the  90s,”).

With Taylor Rice on vocals and guitar, Matt Frazier on drums, Kelcey Ayer and  Ryan Hahn both on vocals, keys, percussion and guitar; last night also saw the  group’s first official gig with new recruit, bassist Nik Ewing, who rolled  around on stage in a spectacular pair of Hawaiian trousers.

The band’s debut album, Gorilla Manor, tipped them into the fray with the  likes of Fleet Foxes, Foals, Grizzly Bear and Arcade Fire in 2008, leading to a  gauzy, shifting kind of success (they don’t get all that much radio play but  have a music obsessed core of a following), before former bassist Andy Hamm left  in 2011.

The break, which wasn’t easy, filtered down achingly into the tone of their  latest album, Hummingbird. Co-produced by The National’s Aaron Dessner, the NME  gave it 8 out of 10: “The LA quartet’s airy, heart-jolting harmonies are still  present and correct… but this time around they’re playing things a little  differently.”

And they are a little different.

Aside from floppy haired drummer Matt, they form a front on the edge of  stage, switching instruments, swapping places, sharing vocals, sharing chat, all  slightly wide-eyed – although to be fair, that might have been jet lag.

Either way, these boys know how to harmonise.

Whipping through newer records Ceilings (woozy, sun-drenched and ethereal),  You and I (angry, soaring and haunting), and old favourites like the jaunty,  punchy Airplanes that makes you reach out at them involuntarily, they jitter and  shimmer, voices leaping, hands whirring against their instruments, caught up in  it.

And yet, the atmosphere was strangely edgy. After the band had swooped  through their first three tracks of the night (they opened with the wonderfully  shuddering Breakers), someone yelled at Rice: “I LOVE YOUR MOUSTACHE!”

Don’t get me wrong, it is an excellent moustache, but people seemed to take  it as a cue to hassle and goad him all night: for wearing skinny green jeans,  for having a drink, and before the final song, shouting nastily: “It better be a  good one.”

It all got a bit malicious. They handled it blithely though, admitting wryly,  with languid LA drawls: “Sometimes we just don’t understand what you’re  saying.”

Let’s just hope they come back. It’s hard to not be rather fond of them.

First published by Cambridge News.

REVIEW: Bastille, Cambridge Corn Exchange

They ambled shyly on stage, all in black, reluctant frontman Dan Smith hiding  his cheek bones and spiked shelf of hair under a soft grey hoody. You could tell  just by looking at them, Bastille honestly can’t believe their luck.

Bastille

With Dan on lead vocals (and sidelining in smashing the hell out of some  drums), the cutely mustachioed Kyle Simmons on keys, the ever so rugged Will  Farquarson on bass, keys and acoustic guitar, and long-locked Chris Wood on  drums, the London four-piece’s debut album Bad Blood sauntered straight into the  Number One spot earlier this year and kickstarted a summer of festivals,  tumbling into this sold out autumn tour.

You could say things have escalated for them. Massively. Pros at anthemic pop  shot through with indie twists and choruses that make your throat hoarse with  screaming every single word back at them, they are electric live. Absolutely  electric.

The worry was of course that there’d be a wedge of desperately frantic  14-year-old girls, hurling themselves at the stage, collapsing in giddy puddles  against the barriers. But actually the Cambridge Corn Exchange crowd was  strangely skewed in favour of smartly shirted lads making flailing attempts at  crowdsurfing and moshing to the slow tracks (after the bottom-lip wobbling  Overjoyed, Dan laughed: “That’s definitely the first time people have moshed to  that one,”).

Still, we helped make up the shortfall in hysterical shrieks.

Launching into title track Bad Blood, they skipped through album staples  Things We Lost in the Fire, These Streets and Laura Palmer, anxiously slotting  in three new tracks: the jaunty, catchy Campus, the wrenching Blame and The Draw – a slightly disappointing rock track that had guitar chords and anger yanking  at every line (both new slants for them).

They made up for it by performing their heart-racingly wonderful cover of  City High’s What Would You Do? though – think dizzyingly good, aching vocals,  combined with a whole lot of leaping about.

After almost every song, Dan, who to be fair, for a rather nervous frontman,  is getting chattier, murmured his thanks, disbelief that so many people were  yelling happily at him shaking in every syllable. And then, during the opening  bars of Flaws, he disappeared, remerging on the balcony, scaling the railings,  whipping his mic cord behind him and loping into the stunned crowd as we on the  sticky floor thrashed around jealously.

And then they really had us, skittishly intoxicated, throwing themselves into  Of the Night, their version of Snap!’s Rhythm is a Dancer, Dan making everyone  get low and pogo (“I’m a terrible dancer, you’re going to have to help me  out!”). It’s almost a good thing they didn’t reprise their Live Lounge cover of  Miley Cyrus’ We Can’t Stop, there’d have been definite fainting.

Then there was only Pompeii left; the stage blazing orange as support act To  Kill A King trooped out amidst hugs and hugegrins, to bump up the epicness of  the “Eh eh oh eh ohs” running through it. And it was too good.

You were left just shivering with it all.

First published by Cambridge News.

REVIEW: A rather funny punting trip in Cambridge

You couldn’t get a much more “Cambridge” evening to be honest.

Run by Hannah Dunleavy, comic and former Cambridge News columnist, the premise of Funny Punts is this: you jump aboard for a guided river tour while Hannah melds facts and figures with a smattering of witty asides and off-the-cuff observations.

Your host is bawdy and fully prepared to spew a wedge of Cambridge related knowledge from her brain – and the setting is obviously pretty magical, especially at dusk.

Once lazily scooting down the river from the Granta, we learnt about ridiculous kings and queens, the great, the famous and the utterly mental that have studied at Cambridge University (Isaac Newton’s lack of sexual prowess and Prince Charles having actually been to university both get a ribbing), and politicos will definitely enjoy nods to Cambridge’s bubble beliefs.

Although some of the pop culture references did slightly whoosh over my head (luckily you’re free to ask questions and chip in), you get the feeling each tour is tailored to the audience. And, while it isn’t always highly glossed and polished, thankfully the routines don’t feel rigidly rehearsed – which is good because, on the water, anything can happen…

Hannah is the first to admit she’s up against some tough competition when it comes to river based distractions. She’s used to powering through when a cute flock of ducklings paddles over mid joke, (“awws” from the audience ruining the punch line), and happily digresses when fellow boaters provide too exceptional a lure for further comedy/sniggers.

In our case it was a troupe of foreign students doing widths instead of lengths, and a velvet clad guy splayed out with his feet up, attempting to look all-too nonchalant and Byron-esque while his poor girlfriend did the hard graft – spectacular.

Then there’s the distraction of the lad doing the actual punting (no, Hannah doesn’t punt and joke simultaneously, that would most likely end in a splash). We were lucky enough to have bagged an Eddie Redmayne look-a-like (swoon) who, when Hannah declined (“I was just about to do a joke about Sylvia Plath killing herself!”), obliged us by bridge jumping – this should definitely become a staple part of the gig. Seriously.

Pithy, clever and light, Cambridge will definitely look different when you hop back out of the boat. And, just so you know, health and safety-wise, no-one’s toppled in yet…

:: Tours leave Granta Punts on Newnham Road at 6.30pm and 7.45pm every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Tickets cost £15 per person and are available on the night or can be booked in advance at http://www.wegottickets.com/cambridgecomedytours. For more details contact cambridgecomedytours@gmail.com.

:: You can also follow @funnypunts on Twitter or visit http://www.facebook.com/funnypunts.

First published by the Cambridge News.

REVIEW: Secret Garden Party 2013

Me at Secret Garden Party

It’s ever so inventive, Secret Garden Party.

A trippy kind of dream with added bikinis (you couldn’t move for girls in bikinis and boys with fetching vest-shaped burn lines, but then, it was pretty damn hot), art installations carving colourful shapes in the rolling skyline – my favourite was a giant hand created out of blown-up rubber gloves – topped up with hay bales, flags and fire-breathing DJ sets.

In fact, it’s like an amped up Strawberry Fair, except with more naked mud wrestling and naked trampolining than a summer Saturday afternoon in central Cambridge. You will not be frowned upon for jumping in the lake in your underwear (yes, I should have packed my bikini like all the other girls), you can dance with badgers in the woods, drink tea and eat scones in The Living Room (ideal for lazing around in the afternoon listening to acoustic sets – Saint Raymond and Gabrielle Aplin were definite highlights), row out to the pirate ship on the lake – which was torched (deliberately, mind) on Saturday night amid an eyeball blazing fireworks display as we geared up for Faithless’ amazing headline set.

And if this all seems garbled, that’s because SGP is a bit. At once cutesy and quirky – you can play hopscotch and croquet, cartwheel on the green and play badminton, after making lino prints, going on the swings and hulahooping – it’s also a bit mental. You can rave all day nonstop, crawl back to your tent at 6am and start all over again after a power nap. There’s no let up, which means you’re much better off ditching the programme and rambling aimlessly… hence how we caught the rather wonderful Public Service Broadcasting, danced around to Mo, caught a trapeze act twirling above a 1920s speakeasy and chatted against a backdrop of John Newman on a stage made out of trees. Although we did make a concerted effort to get to Bastille – and they made it fully worth our while – bouncing, leaping and overwhelmed by the number of people crowded round the main stage to drink them in.

Fantastical, it’s tough work too. Luckily there’s a hog roast going non-stop, which is how I just about survived the heat, the strangeness and the mess. Because it is, in the same way Strawberry Fair has a bit of a reputation, you can definitely see why SGP has one too… but I won’t be forgetting it in a hurry.

First published by the Cambridge News.

REVIEW: Latitude Festival, Henham Park, Suffolk, July 18 – 22

Latitude

It all started with a topless man refusing to get off the roof at Ipswich Station.

But, despite network rail practically dissolving, somehow my friend Louisa and I still managed to make it to Latitude on Friday, throw up tents and catch the end of The Maccabees’ set; cramming burritos in our mouths to Toothpaste Kisses. Then on came Bloc Party – and they were magnificent (am ignoring those rumours it was their last ever gig). After the crush of bodies leaping about to One More Chance (Kele also did a brief, brilliant cover of Rihanna), we went off for a ramble in the woods…

This is why Latitude is wonderful, discovering the random silliness and artiness going on in the faraway forest: Barbies hang from trees, a tiny 70s disco with paint splattered, tinfoil covered sofas, in a room of swings you can listen to podcasts about how snails have sex, and, best of all, you can dance about with a troupe of transvestites (they were called Sink the Pink – really) prancing, crowdsurfing and playing Cher. Just. Amazing.

Looping round the lake (sighing over the multi-coloured sheep that looked a little worse for wear, smudged with colour rather than popping in their usual brights), we got caught up in a rap about gloves, a swing dance gatecrashed by a burlesque dancer eating fire and brandishing power tools, and a tent with people writhing to Girls Aloud. You couldn’t make this stuff up.

Family friendly and fairly comfortable with the “ultimate middle class festival” label, Latitude isn’t just pretty indie bands and copies of the i newspaper strewn all over the fields. It’s got bite too. You could go head-shakingly mental to Rudimental and Disclosure, mellow out with the haunting tones of Daughter or get bruised battling to be even a little bit near alt-J (or was that just me?). We tucked ourselves into The iArena and BBC Radio 6 Music tents to unearth new loves (namely Dark Dark Dark and King Charles), and swooned over Jessie Ware and Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs (who was in a very bizarre yellow shorts suit with red socks).

And, if you’d rather settle down and relax than fight 16-year-olds for a space on the barriers, you can skip the music and hole up in the comedy and cabaret tents all weekend (don’t ever do that though, I wouldn’t have missed James Blake getting all emotional in the baking heat on Sunday for anything). Dylan Moran (fresh from the Cambridge Comedy Festival gala night) was hilariously rambling, Tim Key had us choking as he sputtered utterly nonsensical poetry and screamed abuse at the crowd while Cambridge comedian David Trent had me in tearfully laughing pieces with a Sigur Ros skit (if you ever get to see him, go. That’s an order.) Then there’s the poetry arena (we saw an incredible beatboxer), a lake with giant, floating swans decorated with live ballet dancers, a rollerdisco, the best woodfired pizza ever and did I mention how breathtakingly amazing alt-J were?

The only downsides? Getting trapped on a train and missing Chvrches perform on Friday, and getting trapped in a tent with Tim Key, too nervous about being yelled at to escape to Laura Mvula.

Bruised, exhausted and high on a cocktail of sunstroke, glitter, cider and jangly limbs (So. Much. Dancing.), I am heartsick for magical tents and woodland parties. Take me back please.

First published by the Cambridge News.

Review: Romeo and Juliet, Cambridge Shakespeare Festival

Romeo and Juliet

If you were able to snack on strawberries and popcorn under a fleecy blanket at any and every theatre production, we would all be experts on Shakespeare. Fact.

Nestled at the far end of the King’s College Fellows’ Garden for Romeo and Juliet – and feeling suitably clandestine about it too – we had picnic envy almost instantly.

It was the first night of the annual Cambridge Shakespeare Festival and the grass was a patchwork of Kettle Chips, wine and tubs of cut veg, the sun dissolving slowly behind the university library, towering in the background.

The setting – sweeping lawns and huge leafy branches falling in a natural curtain for the players to rush through – is stunning, threatening at every moment to upstage the actors. Luckily, they held their own, crashing into the fray of Shakespeare’s greatest love story brandishing swords as sharp and keen as their enthusiasm.

Liam Webster plays a rather bubbly Romeo, who, in this interpretation, is actually a bit of a lad. His jocular scenes, bantering about with the steady Benvolio (George Collie) and the rash Mercutio (Alexander Pankhurst) are some of the best, and he nails lovesick: giddy, puppyish and whirling round the crowd overcome by the girlish, bright eyed Juliet (Beth Lilly).

The first half is light and funny: the balcony scene falls into the realm of comic sketch as Juliet brushes her teeth and spits, juxtaposed by Romeo hyped up and blinded by love in the garden below; Juliet’s buxom nurse (Emma Sylvester) gives Mercutio a run for his money in sauciness and lines are skewed and double-edged, eyebrows raised dramatically at the audience and laughter awkwardly concocted. It’s silly but it works, illuminating the fact they really do fall in love ever so quickly that pair.

Undoubtedly pacy – the muddle of confrontations, secret nuptials, poisonous vials and cruel luck swiftly shatter what might have been – at times things are more hurried than urgent, and the final act teeters on moving but lacks the emotional punch needed to leave you tear-strewn and wobbly.

However, Pankhurst’s Mercutio is magnificent. He rakishly stalks the stage, biting out the lines and effortlessly capturing nuance (as well as laughs), so, when he yells: “A plague on both your houses,” it catches tumultuously in his throat, the pain, anger and disbelief filtering into the hazy dusk.

Ian Pink also cuts a pointed, frustrated dash as Tybalt, while Stephanie Merulla’s Friar Laurence brings gravity and reason.

Fun, lively and littered with moments that border on fantastic, the setting is perfect, the performance just shy of wonderful and the picnicking pretty amazing.

Time to start hopping through the rest of the performances…

:: Cambridge Shakespeare Festival, various Cambridge University College Gardens, Monday, July 8 – Saturday, August 25 at 7.30pm. Tickets cost £15, concessions £11 from (01223) 357851 / http://www.cambridgeshakespeare.com

First published by the Cambridge News.

Review: Birdsong, Cambridge Arts Theatre, Monday, June 24

Birdsong, Cambridge Arts Theatre

I was expecting to fall to pieces; blubbering, shaky pieces that would need picking up off the Arts Theatre floor. Every page of Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong tears and claws at you; so, on stage, surely it’d be even more harrowing?

Rachel Wagstaff’s version of the acclaimed novel – which spins around the cold, distant Officer Stephen Wraysford as his present and past collide in a mesh of blood and mud – is touching, brilliantly staged and inches towards being quite wonderful, but it left me strangely dry-eyed…

It opens with smoke: tendrils of muskiness edged with sulphur that reach out into the front rows as a band of not-so-merry, drunken soldiers scatter about bawdily, jigging and singing away their fears.

The story flits between the crush of trench life, focusing on the suffocating work of the men who tunnel towards the German lines to lay explosives, and Stephen’s glinting memories of France and its golden fields before the First World War.

Sarah Jayne Dunn plays Isabelle Azaire, the beautiful, fragile wife of French textile factory owner Rene, host to a much younger Stephen who has been sent by his Guardian to assess the factory. Inevitably, as sounds of abuse from the Azaire’s bedroom filter down the stairs night after night, Stephen finds himself falling uncontrollably for Isabelle, the desire to save her mingling with the desire to have her.

These memories tumble to the fore like stones in a shaken jar of earth, and, instead of playing it straight (Act One set in 1910 and Act Two set in wartime), Wagstaff interweaves the two. It’s impressive how, with just a flick of a light, an opening of a door and a whirl of redistributed props, the cast step through the years by just turning round.

And the set is stunning. Strung with rickety ladders, jagged barbs of wire and hunks of dull metal that rise up towards the rafters, it is simultaneously ominous and comforting, making you feel closed in and protected as dawn rises and falls against the back wall, casting shadows and silhouetting the cast. It particularly comes to life at the shivering end of Act One as the Battle of the Somme looms and the men prepare to go over the top. The cast layer themselves across the stage, facing outwards, reading letters to their loved ones in short, sharp, wrenching bursts as the room fills with haunting song and your skin prickles involuntarily.

Such parts are harrowing, as are aching scenes in which sapper Jack (Tim Treloar) writes to his wife of their ill son, before hauling himself, dirt stained and sleep deprived, back under the ground. But others, that should have your eyes spilling over, strangely leave you searching for a connection.

Jonathan Smith, who plays Stephen, is suitably strong jawed and has ripples of mania to him that make his need for Isabelle, his disillusionment with war and his inability to love his men, convincing – and he shines when they switch from present to past. However, his scenes with Dunn are often stilted; they plough into their lines too loudly, perhaps to conceal a lack of genuine emotion, and grab at each other rigidly.

There are moments of lightness – the incredible supporting cast joke and scratch at imaginary lice, Stephen fumbles mistakenly for a nurse and Arthur Bostrom pops up as a rather camp acquaintance of Rene’s, inducing a smattering of “Ohs!” throughout the audience, and “It’s Crabtree from ‘Allo,’Allo!” – but perhaps it needs more, to contrast with the horror and the loss.

Raw and more faithful to Faulks’s original story than the recent BBC production, it will leave you shattered and awed, but not heartbroken – as perhaps it should.

:: Birdsong, Cambridge Arts Theatre, Monday, June 24 – Saturday, June 29 at 7.45pm. Tickets £15-£30 from (01223) 503333 / cambridgeartstheatre.purchase-tickets-online.co.uk

First published by the Cambridge News.

Ours was the Fen Country

Now, I’m not one for dance pieces, let alone dance-theatre, but Ours was the Fen Country was amazing. Here’s my interview with the creator, Dan Canham, and my review of the show:

Ours was the Fen Country, Cambridge Junction, Thursday, May 30

Built around memories and fading ways of life, Ours was the Fen Country is bitter-sweet and brief, capturing a beautiful, mysterious world we shouldn’t forget, but which is slowly slipping away.

Dan Canham, a former Hills Road student from Burwell and artistic director of production company Still House, decided it was about time he explored the murky stories and watery histories of the Fens he had lived beside, yet ignored. Interviewing more than 30 Fenland people, from eel catchers and farmers, to stable owners and people who spent their whole lives there, he worked his findings into a dance theatre piece. Performed alongside Neil Paris, Ian Morgan and Tilly Webber, it takes the stereotypes, myths and history of the Fens and fashions them into a transient story, dabbling with words, images and electrified movements.

After plugging in their iPods the cast erect a fabric screen lit up with serene Fenland scenes: magnificent burnished sunsets, ploughed land crisscrossed with waterways and huge, cloud-strewn skies – each image still with the heavy openness and flatness that only the Fens seem able to ooze.

The dark stage was sparse, dotted with camping stools that squeaked and threatened to collapse, stripped wooden boards and microphones that swung in and out as the performers layered their voices over the interview recordings. At times they become the Fenland people Dan spoke to, mimicking and miming vocal patterns with unnerving precision, (sniffs, deep breaths and mumbled words included), adding fitting body language as though that voice is attached to a human in the room.

It’s incredible and surprising how they slip into these characters, bringing to life the fears of the Fenland people and how so many of their traditions – and the people who continued them – have been chipped away, just as the “black gold” soil is being swept away by the wind.

The show captures the bleakness of the Fens, but what I didn’t expect was it to be funny. The characters make you laugh with tales of scrapping over eel catching techniques, family arguments and silly recollections, but it’s sad too. Your tear ducts are bound to prickle.

Described as ‘dance-theatre’, there is in fact very little ‘dance’. It is more stilted movements that tug on threads in your brain to make you see eels and horses arching round the stage, rather than people. The performers weave in and out of each other, jolting, swerving, dragging their feet, sharpening their spines and elbows, and, in the final stage of the show, just take off, leaping and running and wheeling in circles like the Fenland birds and butterflies.

It fills you up with a sense of lightness and freedom, whether you are of the Fens or not.