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Panteón Rococó in concert
Kassablanca, Jena
Panteón Rococó is a Punkrock, Ska
or Reggae ten-piece group from Mexicao-City: their style lacks a
definitive genre and their music is bursting with eclectic Latin
American verve derived from rumba, salsa and tango, to name a few.
For nine years they have toured prolifically throughout
Europe, South America and the US. They opened KulturArena in Kassablanca,
a small, vital nightclub hidden away in West Jena.
Their debut record, A La Izquierda De La Tierra,
self-produced and self-released, ultimately sold 40 000. They have
gradually risen from obscurity via the alternative scene to some
degree of infamy in the mainstream market, whilst remaining eccentric
performers.
Performing from their MTV Latin Music Award-nominated
second album, Compañeros Musicales, which sold 40, 000 in
the first month of its release, the scene is a sea of boisterous,
bustling, sweat-ridden fans, such is the indefatigability needed
to attend a Panteón Rococó concert.
The energetic atmosphere is fuelled by lead singer
Dr.Shenka, clad in shorts and covering every millimetre of the stage;
gitarrist Gorri is at once fighting amongst the over zealous members
of the audience and shouting into his microphone with unrestrained
gusto. From Pascual blowing into his trumpet with him in harmony
with the charismatic Misael on Sax at front, while Huram blasts
his drums at back, every band member dovetails the audience´s
esprit.
Kevin Widdop
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Alicia Keys in concert
Museumsinsel, Berlin
The palatial and tranquil surroundings of Museumsinsel
were host to soul diva Alicia Keys´ second visit to Germany.
The alcohol being served at the tents dovetailed
the variegated audience - Merlot or Chardonnay for the middle-age
couples; Cubra Libre for the quasi hip-hoppers; and beer for the
miscellany of urban singletons, some of whom donning hats worn at
curious angles and some even with their parents, showing just how
far Keys' reach extends.
The smell of dope polluted the air as the crowd
waited, and kept on waiting, for Miss Keys. Entertainment, however,
was provided competently by back-up singers Denise, Jessica and
rapper Jeremiah Jermane, whose canny observations added to his vital
and mellow performance of `Purple Rain', "it was rainin' earlier,
but now the sun is shinin' - that's a beautiful thing". Jessica
set the tone for the preambles for the evening, reminding us helpfully
why we were there, "I'm gonna sing y'all a little song".
Her performance of Aretha Franklin's 'R-E-S-P-E-C-T'
was accomplished with verve, though her anti-phallic comments to
arouse the chilled audience proved unsuccessful. The
arrival of a large piano signalled the singer's imminent appearance.
Clad in denim and trademark hat, she oozed confidence, opening with
'Karma', accompanied by a cane used to vivify the previously inert
crowd. Less effective were such ballads as
'Heartburn' than her more familiar chart material - 'A Woman's Worth'
and 'Feeling U, Feeling Me' were as well received as they were lyrically
performed.
As she moved seductively atop the piano, playing
with one hand, her usic the while segueing from classical to R&B,
and back, and orchestrating her impressive band, she showed herself
to be a charismatic performer too, eliciting intermittent responses
from a conservative crowd. She finished with
panache and predictability filling the overplayed yet endlessly
entertaining "Fallin'" zealously with her staccato voice,
offsetting the chilly evening breeze.
The interregnum was filled by two of her kindly
back-up trio singing some of "Alicia's favourites", whose
inspiration is manifested in her blues-influenced oeuvre. Her reappearance
brought with it a white dress and the melodic `You Don't Know My
Name', interjected with the lame and sentimental mobile phone aside,
ingratiating herself to the Berliners by skillfully replacing New
York with Berlin.
Kevin Widdop
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Lhasa in concert
KulturArena, Jena
The crowd of 1700 was as eclectic as the award-winning
Tibetan´s oeuvre: students, artists, couples and families
packed into the KulturArena to hear Lhase de Sela´s dark,
smoky, rasping voice.
Lhasa´s multicultural second album, The Living
Road, follows her very Mexican debut, La Llorana (1998), where she
spent time living in a mobile home as a child. Sung in English and
Spanish with a French accent, the petite singer´s material
covers love, familial discord and the adventures she experienced
whilst travelling, from which the album´s title is derived
- the excitement and discovery that happenstance can deliver.
With a Mexican writer for a father and an American
actress for a mother, and a childhood spent on the road between
Mexico and America, the result is this outlandish artist. Perhaps
she was tripping or perhaps it was eccentricity as her intros tended
more and more towards the philosophically verbose. The album´s
melancholic close, "Soon This Space Will be Too Small,"
and Lhasa´s demeanour resonates with the creative Icelandic
singer Bjork, who she cites as an inspiration on her work.
Whilst the Jenaers sipped their wine, gulped their
beer and devoured their bratwurst, the music remained depressive
and the atmosphere solemn. A number of quiescent ´dankeschons´
followed the audience´s elegant applause in harmony with a
passive performance which was nonetheless filled with bulging passion.
Kevin
Widdop 2004
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Tommy Tiernan stand-up
City Varieties Theatre, Leeds
Inventive Irish comic whose humorous, eclectic and
controversial material both wowed and shocked. The
almost two-hour long, expletive-strewn, stereotype-packed show saw
Tiernan at his most characteristically wry and self-deprecatory,
letting these aspects of his often hilarious often offensive Irish
wit sparkle. Best-known for winning the Perrier
Award in 1998 and for hosting the BBC’s Stand-Up show, he nevertheless
remains relatively unknown in England; that half the crowd were
Irish compounds this.
His subject matter segued from the political (Jews,
the Catholic Church) to the trite (women) to the racist (insert
race here). Many enjoyed the light-hearted context his jibes were
to be taken in; alas, and probably inevitably, a heckler took distaste
to his “degrading” attitude towards women. This
interjection came before a joke he had been working towards for
around twenty minutes, which became thirty-five after he spontaneously
wrought and adapted it to suit the dissident. After all the hoopla
his punch-line actually petered out.
Her predecessor, heckler No. 1, a man dubbed “show-jumper”
because of his sonorous voice, persisted with
the comic in a prolonged, intermittent game of outwitting one another.
Tiernan unwisely mocked his southern accent, ostensibly unaware
that he was performing in England, thus leaving himself open to
a jeer about his apparent malapropism in confusing “thought”
and “taught”.
That the there was an unfortunately small crowd
seemed to invite riffs from the audience, which probably worked
to Tiernan’s advantage, as he is notorious on the stand-up
circuit for dealing admirably and mercilessly with hecklers.
It was occasionally topical and frequently political.
“The Irish have had eight-hundred years of oppression,”
ran one of his more memorable gags. “The Americans had one
afternoon and they’ve blown up half the world.” His
piece on Israel was tiresome and wasn’t helped by shouting
an expletive more than ten times in illuminating their stance towards
the UN. Some of his jokes also created a flat response, as if he
was jaded and wanted people to laugh because of his Irish accent
– it can and did come off, but idiomatic colloquialisms only
stretch so far.
He seemed to enjoy deviating from his pre-prepared
material. There was a further heckler, whose career went from a
cuttingly funny peak to a decidedly dismal trough.
The satirical sketch on his putatively unsuccessful
education was particularly funny, and he ultimately showed that
he could deal adroitly with both brain-dead and qualitatively superior
comedy.
Words – 385
Kevin
Widdop Leeds University 2004
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R&J
Dir: Joe Calarco
Cast: Tom McKay; David Sturzaker; Daon Broni; Liam Evans-Ford
Yet another portrayal of Shakespeare's tragic love
story, but this time with no women
Shakespeare was very fond of the play-within-a-play
format: In Hamlet, he asks players to perform a play which reveals
Claudius' guilt; in The Taming of the Shrew the local drunkard is
deceived into thinking he is Lord; it also constitutes a very funny
denouèment in A Midsummer Night's Dream in which the tragedy
of Pyramus and Thisbe is performed. The conceit
is used intelligently here by Calarco. Four boys study at a strict,
militaristic boarding school and re-enact the play clandestinely,
immersing themselves in its passion: laughing heartily at the naughty
aspects and bursting into the violent bits with gusto. The context
both engages the young audience with its modern setting and evokes
Peter Weir's film, Dead Poets Society, in which a group of boys
at a not dissimilar prep school are inspired by an eccentric teacher
to read poetry in secret. This rather works to the play's benefit
as it delineates the alchemical aspects fascinatingly: the boys
struggle with their thriving libidos and treat the literature as
something illicit, paralleling Romeo and Juliet's secret love in
a claustrophobic atmosphere.
Lauded in New York and London, the play has been
done to death on stage, but this is a different sort of adaptation.
Calarco has an acute awareness of the nuances of Shakespeare's text:
the boys kiss on several occasions, playing on the confusion in
the lovers' adolescent and vulnerable love. There is a homoeroticism
making the play more sexually-charged and seemed to add to an already
tangibly tense atmosphere: there were restrained gasps from some
sections of the audience.
The dark background works as a presentiment of doom:
Tibalt is killed by Romeo with the imaginative, if somewhat unrealistic,
use of an extraordinarily long red cloth. It also augments the poignancy
of scenes in which Romeo and Juliet are pulled apart. However,
at times, I felt in something of a malaise. The overuse of the cloth
became somewhat tiresome as the only prop. Student 1(Tom McKay)
and Student 4's (Liam Evans-Ford) roles are obfuscated somewhat
as they unfortunately looked very similar from the back row and
the play's short duration meant that some important parts are skirted.
For instance, there is nothing of Juliet's fantasy in the family
vault after taking the potion, making the play's depth ultimately
seem superficial.
Kevin Widdop
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