Today's idea - Christopher Guild (piano) "Off the beaten track"

Tonight we like the sound of some little heard and somewhat neglected gems of the piano repertoire alongside masterpieces of the musical canon with a few surprised on the way! There'll be works by Respighi and John White alongside Shostakovich's '10 Aphorisms', Beethoven's Appassionato Sonata and Chopin's 4th Ballad with food and wine. For classical music lovers or anyone who wants a low-cost delve into a live performance of the genre, this sounds good.

Time: 7.30pm
Cost: £4/6
Map: here
Location: St Luke's Church, Queens Park Terrace
More information: here

Today's idea - Oscar Wilde's Salome at the Theatre Royal

Today the Theatre Royale brings Oscar Wilde's Salome to life. In keeping with Wilde's dramatic writing, "Salome is a lyrical yet shocking piece of storytelling from one of the greatest writers of the last two hundred years. It is fragile, savage and shimmeringly beautiful, rendered exquisite poetry and unforgettable theatrical images. Headlong and Curve Theatre, Leicester present a vivid contemporary production of this rarely-seen masterpiece."

The plot is thus:

"The brutal power of ancient myth collides with twentieth century decadence in Oscar Wilde's dazzling verse tragedy. Salome, stepdaughter of King Herod, agrees to perform the mysterious dance of the seven veils but demands in return the head of the King's most influential prisoner - John the Baptist."

It comes from director Jamie Lloyd, one of the most critically acclaimed young directors in British theatres, and is performed by Headlong, a fantastic and innovative theatre companies at the moment. The Theatre Royal's responsible for a brilliant standard of production, and this sounds to be no exception.

It's running until 29th June.
Time: 7:45pm (Thurs and Sat matinee 2:30pm)
Website & tickets: here
Cost: £14-28
Map: here

Today's idea - My Arm at The Basement

Today The Basement, of which we are rather fond, have a curious performance titled 'My Arm'. Having toured internationally since it premiered at the Traverse Theatre in 2003, this is the first time it comes to the public eye in Brighton.

"“At the age of 10, for want of anything more meaningful to do, I put my arm above my head and kept it there. Now, thirty years on, I’m so full of meaning it’s killing me.”

Told through performance, film and the animation of everyday objects, my arm is the story of an empty gesture. It’s the confession of a man who has lived for thirty years by the courage of his lack of conviction. In that process he’s become a celebrated medical specimen and an icon of the New York art scene.  It’s about modern art, bloody-mindedness and how the things we do when we’re ten stick with us for life."

"Colossally powerful” says The Scotsman, singing its praise.

The Basement is often home to experimental performers, describing itself fairly accurately as "a vibrant hub for all things subversive and idiosyncratic". We're not sure if it'll be taking place in The Space, a large room with "unbound experimentation" or in the more intimate amphitheater known as 'The Pit' with a sunken stage but we expect a visit to the arty venue to be very much worth it.

Written and performed by Tim Crouch; film by Chris Dorley-Brown
Date: Fri 16th & Sat 17th April
Doors: 7.30pm
Tickets: £8 / £6 (Concessions)
Find it on the map here.

Today's idea - 'In Flames' at the Brighton Little Theatre

Today at the Brighton Little Theatre, In Flame, a new play by Charlotte Jones comes to the stage, followed by beaming quotes from The Sunday Times after its stint on the West End. “It has some of the best writing I have come across, vigorous, poetic and lethally funny, probing hearts with warmth, compassion and irony” the newspaper gushed.

The plot is thus:

"In Flame juxtaposes different periods. The present where we see Alex, a young woman, coping with a mother who has Alzheimer’s disease. Not only does she have to cope with her mother but Alex has to deal with a difficult flatmate and a selfish married lover. Meanwhile in 1908 Yorkshire, Alex's ancestors have a similarly stressful time: the simple minded Clara and the oppressed Livvy live with their stonily severe Gramma."

It sounds a tad unusual, presenting itself as "not only one play but two, with scenes intermingled from 1908 and the present day." Running until Saturday 17 April, it costs £7.50 a ticket and starts at 7:45pm. You can book tickets online or telephone the Box Office on 01273 777 748.

Find it on the map here.

Today's idea - White Rabbit presents: ARE YOU SITTING COMFORTABLY? SECRETS!

Tonight, a furtive yet sumptuous evening of original story telling and performance in the White Rabbit's Candlelit Warren. The Basement: 'where edgy and interesting stuff goes off in Brighton.' Today part fifties tearoom, part deranged children's party invites you and a host of local writers to enjoy this month's theme of SECRETS with short stories and secrets in invisible ink. There are promises of free cakes, sweets and treats, and perhaps the plan is to fill up the audience until the stories become part of a carb-filled, sugar-high blurry food trip, in the way one reads Alice in Wonderland.

The Basement also promises a secret confession box for the airing of skeletons, and a side of dirty laundry.

"Grab a "Teapot Cocktail" from the bar, cross your heart, hope to die, and follow the bunny... down, down, down."

It starts at 7:30pm, and costs £6 for adults, and £4 for concessions. Find The Basement on the map here. (If you are a writer and have a short story to share with the audience, please e-mail Bernadette Russell: arryousittingcomfortably@live.com.)

Today's idea - The National Testing Grounds of Live Art

Perplexing and intriguing live art comes today from the National Testing Grounds of Live Art taking place at The Permanent Gallery in response to The National Review of Live Art taking place in Glasgow next weekend. Pushing the boundaries of practice, the focus is on Boundaries, Fluidity and Dislocations, with the comissioned artists explicitly exploring ideas through artists: Mikhail Karikis, Mitch & Parry, Kristin Sherman, Dori Deng and Meta Drcar.

It's all about:

"The boundaries of the body – and the distance between bodies, the exploration of sound and the confinements of our physicality, the limitations of the gallery space, of the self, of the other, of the individual and of group migrations in our geography, identities and disruption across the artistic and the non artistic."

Supported by Lighthouse and curated with Permanent Gallery, two places known for filling up the South Eats arts scene with rich new ideas and provoking thoughts, the event starts at 7pm and costs £4. I've included 'the blurb' below with more details on what each artist does. It's a fine line I suspect between revealing nothing, and describing every details. It seems quite worth an investigation, and lasts for today only.

"For this Testing Grounds event Mikhail Karikis will draw parallels between the nature of the medium of sound and politics of migration; thinking of sound as a perpetual immigrant, always travelling away from its place and material of origin, penetrating invisibly into spaces where it may not be welcome.

Kristin Sherman explores structures of power made manifest through intricate performance machines. Her work for Testing Grounds paints a dark and humorous portrayal of power and control, a system made of bodies, where each actor monitors the other. Taken to extremes, the work questions and challenges our notions of freedom.
Mitch & Parry’s new working project examines the landscape of the body as a space for collecting and exhibiting the stains and marks of loss, love and labour, by developing their work of creating external discourse with internal bodily fluid – creating a tension between provoking and inviting the spectator.

Dori Deng and Meta Drcar’s Measuring series questions the relationship between space and different medias including the body, visuals and sound. The action of measuring is presented physically, but also through mathematical connections, for instance the connection between musical rhythm and time in order to change the dimension and the proportion of the gallery space, twisting our assumption or expectation of a given context."

Today's idea - The Steampunk Hidden Planetarium

The honour of your presence is requested at the occasion of the Steampunk Hidden Planetarium, a show of heroes of music, mechanical hats, operatic ghetto classics and performance art. It should be bizarre and fantastic.

Steampunk "is a genre of fiction set somewhere in the 1800’s during the Victorian Era," and tonight The Marlborough Theatre plays host to the Steampunk Hidden Planetarium with the theme revolving around the "Victorian interest in the cosmos, the inventions that helped further our understanding of what lies beyond our fair planet, and the art and literature that was inspired by the field of Astronomy."

The theatre puts on A Hidden Market - an Emporium even - today from 3pm and later hosts a busy show tonight at 7pm in the name of all things Steampunk:

"We have some SP heros performing for you this month, including Ghostfire, who will be making their long awaited debut on our stage. We also have music from Ru (an excellent astrologer and musician), from Jane Bom Bane (who will be performing complete with mechanical hats), plus Marianna Harlotta and Ruby Corset will be playing their operatic renditions of ghetto classics. And last but by no means least there is performance art from the Lady Absinthia, whom I have been desperate to bring to the Marlborough since I first saw her bizarre and beautiful performance at Decompression."

You can find the event on Facebook here and more information on Steampunk over on Brass Goggles and Wikiedpia.

They've also got Hendrick's gin to sponsor them and so the first 25 Steampunks to arrive get free Gin. Win win.

Today's idea - Testing Grounds at the Permanent Gallery

Testing Grounds is fond of a Roland Barthes quote and the exhibition is focused around this; the human mind's endless creation of stories to process and interpret the world:

“Myth is not defined by the object of its message, but by the way in which it utters this message: there are formal limits, there are no ‘substantial’ ones,” he says, Myth Today.

The works could be defined for a large part as construction of mythology, and in a big mix of performance, story, sound, and movement all focused around fictionalised realities. Regardless of the words though, the concept of Myth is interesting and has interesting arty potential:

Plymouth-based art duo Got Any Rice will create their sound-based story of Brighton that looks at the history through "stethoscopic exploration" and present a taxonomy of their ethnological finding.

Sylvia Rimat’s work intertwines subtly and gently with the ‘real’ and the ‘imagined’, and wittingly plays with the audience imagination by writing the story of what has not happened yet, or that is just about to happen.

Mim King's movement piece will follow a very personal story reflected through her own body, thinking about ideas of stillness and waiting, of endings, markings and the traces we leave behind.

Anne Gaelle Thiriot and Marcel Sparmann’s performance aims at reaching imagination in adulthood and at involving the audience as story-makers through action with the use of “cards of Propp”, a Russian formalist who analysed fairy tales and folk-tales through a series of functions.

Officially this big mix is know as:

"autobiographic elements; anatomic and sonic examination of a town from an outside stance; stories that reflect an ambiguous presence somewhere between text and reality; and finally the re-exploration of fairy tales and folk tales to bridge the narrative and abstract features of live performance."

It's on today at the Permanent Gallery at 7pm for £4, and you can find the Facebook event here and a map here.

Today's idea - See 'The Ugly One'

Yesterday on Brighton's Reverb radio I heard what essentially sounded like a segment involving the presenter reading a newspaper. I was confused as we don't have this segment of radio where i come from, but she payed nice music so it was okay. My point, is that this newspaper reading involved a mention of upcoming plays and entertainment type things. She mentioned 'The Ugly One', which was on my list to talk about and now it means that it must be talked about with slightly more gusto than normal.

'The Ugly One' comes out today at the New Venture Theatre and the blurb says thus of the plot:

"Lette, a happy employee of an electronics company, thought he was normal. But to everyone else, including his loving wife, he is 'unspeakably ugly'. When the extent of his ugliness is revealed he turns to a plastic surgeon for help. But after the bandages come off, he soon learns that there is such a thing as too beautiful."

It's a play involving eight characters played by four actors. Apparently the "role-changing becomes mind-bending as the characters proliferate and share names and faces. The last time I saw something like this was in a World War II play I saw with my school when i was 13. It was a professional acting 'troupe' and it was done really well. I rarely go to the theatre or such to see things in some form of acting (films and TV meanwhile, I am there) and I'd like to go again (because theatre is secretly fabulous, although maybe it's just me who doesn't know this.)

In good news, tickets cost £8, £6 on Tuesdays, and £9 on final night. This leaves you from between £1 - £4 from a tenner to spend on sweeties and wine and such good things.

Director Mike Stubbs says of 'The Ugly One': "This is a fantasy that relies on feeding the imagination of the audience. My aim is to create the world of cartoon comedy on stage where the only real thing is the laughter".

In other good words, they also call it "An evening of fantasy and farce that has the bounce and snap of music-hall cross-talk."

Find tickets and more info here, although I'd hurry as they might disappear soon. Opening night is tonight, and it closes on the 23rd. Which is soon, so chop chop!


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