Call us now

Author: Eric Page

REVIEW: KAYA @Brighton Festival

Posted on by Eric Page

Ceyda Tanc Dance
KAYA at Brighton Festival

Ceyda Tanc is a Brighton-based choreographer creating dynamic dance influenced by her Turkish heritage, highlighting the intersection of modern Britain’s diverse cultures.

With a unique movement vocabulary fusing traditional Turkish folk dance with contemporary styles, Ceyda’s work utilizes the virtuoso movements of male Turkish dancers conveying striking shapes and an emotive and sensual energy.

The all female dance group challenged gender stereo styles with their use of bold masculine moves that only men use in Turkey and although the movements fluidly showed grace and power there seemed little narrative to them.

The piece was inspired by stories of refuges and migrants, but I found the lack of diversity in the dancers themselves a distraction. Almost as if it were some kind of meta comment. The lights, shade, costume and make up all blended into a soft neutrality which erased the dancers as individuals until once or twice they were boldly lit and thrust up into the light, before fading.

There was certainly a restless energy to the movements, a feeling of relentless moving on and some magical moments of dynamic repetitive sensual direction that transfixed us but it failed to gain traction in any real urgent sense.

This was a story of easy migration, or perhaps a story of migration told and retold so many times that it had become a softened legend, losing it’s hard edges and human pain. Like hearing your grandmother tell of her grandmothers journey here from a country no longer on the maps, distant and remote.

Kaya was engaging and interesting but I left feeling disconnected with the heart of this peace, although the audience showed their appreciation of the performance.

For full details of the event, click here:

REVIEW: Magnard Ensemble @Brighton Festival

Posted on by Eric Page

Magnard Ensemble

Monday May 14 at St Nicholas Church, Brighton Festival

Suzannah Watson Flute
Mana Shibata Oboe
Joseph Shiner Clarinet
Jonathan Farey French Horn
Catriona McDermid Bassoon

This superbly balanced ensemble had the most delightful programme of short and engaging pieces for this lunchtime concert in the wonderfully antique St Nicolas Church, high on the hill in the warm spring sunshine.

As we walked through the meadows of the churchyard with the sun playing gently with the new leaves and flowers we felt we were in for a treat. The ensemble offered a varied programme of music spanning 300 years and as soon as they opened this performance with a sprightly, tightly honed rendition of Ligeti’s Six Bagatelles we were confirmed in our opinion.

This young but technically brilliant ensemble bounced through this strident playful piece giving it just the right amount of depth when required before introducing some shade into the emotional texture and finishing neat and pithy.

The programme was a curious mix of arrangements from Bach – Prelude and Fugue in B Flat Minor and Mozart’s Adagio in B Flat Major mixed in with Hindemith’s Kleine Kammermusik Op 24, No 2 which was an exercise in perfection, and moved from rhythmic sections to gentle slower movement before ending in a fierce crescendo.

The hour-long performance was rounded off by Paul Patterson’s Westerly Winds, a lovely piece and obviously well-known to the Magnard Ensemble as is Patterson himself as he was in the audience and visibly pleased by their performance of his work. It’s a delightful and evocative homage to southern English counties with echoes of folk and jaunty music from traditional and folk sources, folded together with gentle reflective piece and themes from the first two sections.

As charming as they are talented this young and fanatically gifted ensemble have far to go, it was a really pleasure to be able to listen to them take turns to introduce each piece and then play. They make music fun. The audience adored them and we waved them off onto the tides of success as the Westerly Winds caught their sails.

We left with a spring in our step and a smile on our faces, after a perfect seaside Lunchtime concert

Full details of the event, click here:

REVIEW: Woodland @Brighton Festival

Posted on by Eric Page

Woodland

Brighton Festival, May 12

So we arrive, in the splendid Stanmer Park, wander up though a spring meadow, heavy with buttercup and downland flowers just poking their blooms out and get to a tent. The views are lovely, did I mention the rain, the relentless thick raindrops of a May weekend, but this was touted as an all-weather event so we persevered.

We are handed headphones and a smartphone, a plastic sheet is offered, as is tea, my hands are full, with an umbrella as well, it’s fiddly as hell and you can’t put the phone round your neck or in your pocket.

With simple instructions we set off, using GPS to navigate our way through the thick green damp forest to the ‘listening space’ marked by two throbbing yellow discs north northwest from us, on the phone’s satellite view map. So far, so fiddly.

The views and traffic noise fall away, we are enclosed by the trees of Stamner Great Wood, in full resplendent gushing spring growth, you can almost hear it growing around you, the green is vibrant, we wander on, muddy tracks wander off into the trees. To our May Memento Mori.

We arrive, it’s raining too hard to do as requested – which is to lie on the ground, close your eyes and start the app’s soundtrack. I tried, but the rain was too heavy, even with the umbrella and every time I moved the sound cut out, not sure if I had a dodgy connection or the rain was affecting the tech, but it spoiled the effect.

Eventually I found a comfortable relatively dry place and turned on the annoying sound track, within moments I had forgotten my petty annoyances as a soothing melodious woman’s voice gave me some simple fair weather instructions and then began to recant what happens to the body once death has happened.

It turns out rather a lot happens, its non-stop, nature reclaiming you and decomposition has never sounded so sensual, with gracious pauses and breathy moments of interaction with the wildlife, the voice continues on, relentless like the wheel of life itself. There are moment of dark humour and others of clinical brilliance, some deeply curious explanations of the dissolution of the matter of the body with a constant, lullaby texture to how your bits are being reused around you, by the insects and animals, by the trees and bluebells.

It’s a guided mediation into the very still heart of death, but within death it’s all life! Endless changing life! the crepuscular, muscular sweet stenching oozing splendour of each and every bit of your body being reused, transformed and recycled. It’s a smart phone app version of Job 19:26

In the rain, in the woods, with some hardy folk laying stock still around me I thought of the Body Farm in Knoxville, Tennessee and how they leave out corpses to decipher the riddles of forensic decomposition, and still the ducet, euphonious, voice lulled me on, beyond death, beyond decomposition, beyond breakdown into a verdant outbursting of recycled reincarnation where my hair was the wings of moths, my organs transformed into the newest greenest leaves high on the huge oak and elms above me, and the blue bells stronger from my nutrients.

French & Mottershead are the UK artist duo behind ‘Woodland’ Rebecca French and Andrew Mottershead known for creating multi-artform experiences that are as playful and poetic as they are subversive, French & Mottershead are inviting participants to think again about who they are, and their ties to place and one another.

A beautiful and reflective experience which avoids the mawkish and through superb narration takes us on a journey beyond ourselves, but is all about the stuff we live in and then all, finally leave behind.

For more information or to book tickets, click here:

On a clear day, you could see forever as dear old Barbra Streisand sang and on a clear day, on this Woodland trip you could see forever, and ever more.

On a clear day Rise and look around you

And you’ll see who you are

On a clear day How it will astound you

That the glow of your being outshines every star

You’ll feel part of every mountain, sea, and shore

You can hear from far and near

REVIEW: Butt Kapinski @ KOMEDIA

Posted on by Eric Page

Butt Kapinski

Komedia

Brighton Fringe

May 12th

Butt Kapinski is the alter ego of American performer Deanna Fleysher, a vintage meta monochromatic gnomic gnome who shuffles and stutters round a landscape created from segues and stereotypes instantly recognizable, and reproducible by the audience. Fleysher is an astonishingly good worker of crowds, instantly winning and able to elicit engagement and interactive gems from a stone.

“Think it’s a solo show? Think again. Private eye Butt Kapinski invites you to choose-your-own-adventure in a film noir rife with shadows, sex and subterfuge.”

The audience are mapping the plot in this piece, Butt waddles around the space, lit by an overhead lamp which he carries around on his back, part penguin, part private detective he’s constructing us a film noir in a hour, dissecting and exposing the clichés and meta narratives that we all know and love while getting various members of the audience to act out vignettes of plot, from murder victims, to battered wives, reporters, taxi drivers and quite an astonishing number of hookers. With his beguiling speech impediment this leads to a lot of laughter.

It’s a fun hour in daftness which doesn’t seem to quite pay off as far as a satisfying Film Noir plot ending is concerned but them with some neat meta-meta narrative and some easy ‘Bobby Ewing’ plot reset everything reaches a satisfying end.

But….

There’s more to this than meets the eye, Fleysher in her guise as Butt is performing some subtle magic, playing with cliché and expectations, allowing people to the play in the company of others, getting an early evening British crowd -who haven’t had that much to drink- to transform into a room full of teasing, flirting, toying hookers ( the men in the room)  and their masturbating johns ( the women in the audience)  and all the time shifting narratives on gender, power and status. She transformed herself into the stage, interrogator, narrator, teacher, empower and releaser of inhibitions and does it to a crowd.  Keeping the laughter focused at Butt, who is the literal but of the joke. That’s some skill. We is impressed!

“No seat is safe.” Says the listing info, but although every single member of the audience joined in last night, no one felt unsafe, there was a genuinely moving performance or two and Fleyshers sharp and relentless wit and whip like asides kept a stag night well under control and the rest of us corralled into some pretty sleazy narrative. While the plot plunges down into the gutter the narrative changes and enlightens, with some superb ‘time out’ moments of pure instruction talking about the power of words and how we use them carelessly. I love a serious clown.

I could gush about this show for ages, it’s wonderfully complex but also terribly simple. It works because it’s fun and people like to play, given the space and permission to do so.

I took a friend, who hates interactive, immersive theatre, shrinks back from any idea of being part of anything, and he loved it, chatting all the way home about the sheer fun he’d had and this is pure festival gold! The narrative might be familiar, the plot might not always land well, but the hour spent in the ridiculous and collaborative presence of Butt Kapinski has been one of the highlights of my festival so far.

This was a connective, transformative evening , fully engaging everyone in the room with everyone else and allowing Butt Kaplinki to shine. Later I saw two men in the urinals congratulating another man -who they didn’t know before – on his sensitive portrayal of the tender unrequited love of his character Lola.

Delicious!

There are eight million stories in the naked city and last night we created another one.

Recommend, book NOW! Two shows left!

REVIEW: The Comforter @ MARLBOROUGH

Posted on by Eric Page

The Comforter

Stacy Makishi

The Marlborough

Brighton Fringe

The show suffered from a loss in translation from the start, ‘comforter’ as Makishi told us is American for Duvet but is also what American Catholics call the Holy Ghost. So there was play on words and on comfort that is beyond the easy reach of English speakers.

Non-the-less this intimate and highly personal set of stories all interlinked and woven together with a single point of trauma from childhood is an engaging hour of theatre. There are moments of bonding which work in different ways and some daft interactions with the ghost of George Michael. The point of it appears to be something about life affirming choices but this felt muddled and undefined. The transformation power of pop was a theme that ran though and perhaps if i was more of a fan of pop or of the late Mr Michael’s I might have felt more comforted.

The show is sold as an event that reclaims spirituality and gives a new perspective on the church, we certainly got Makishi’s perspective on a lot of things, from folding sheets, to the smell of ginger flowers luau and the fun of finding coincidences but I didn’t feel there was anything new offered.

The deeply personal stories about loss and the rejection of love and some curious explorations of neediness both circle around the main focus of this show; the performer herself and avoid the supposed purpose, to find comfort.

While Makishi is an undeniably enquiring and affable performer and utterly charming to watch I found this performance curiously without soul.

You gotta have faith. Nui kalakalai, manumanu ka loaa.

Full details of the show can be found here

 

Fringe REVIEW: Fast @Purple Playhouse Theatre

Posted on by Eric Page

The new play Fast by Kate Barton is a dark drama based on a true story.

SET at the turn of the 20th Century in the Pacific Northwest, the play examines ‘Doctor’ Linda Hazzard. Complex, mesmeric and driven, Hazzard advocated a fasting cure that gripped the press and divided the nation. Her ideas were not new, yet Hazzard was subjected to intense scrutiny.

The small cast is uniformly good, the sisters played with a sweet dependency and confusion as the wretched starvation treatments take their toll. The set is interesting with a lovely use of projection to move on time and back story by projecting on the back of an old wheeled medical screen.

The costume, set and cast get the period detail right and inflections of character traits allow us insight into relationships both personal and professional.

Dr Hazzard played by Caroline Lawrie was an odd mix of a person, determined, angry, driven, but whether she was delusional, demented or coldly psychotic was not truly explored. We got the fact of her experimental treatments of fasting in that notorious sanatorium and a real flavour of the way that many pioneering women were treated as freaks of nature by the press and patrician interests of the day, but the nub of this play is about her motivations.

Was she aware of the harm that her ideas caused – up to the point of death or was she the triumph of self-delusion?  Was she convinced the weakness of her patients lead to their deaths and not her own methodologies. There were moments when the narrative suggested both, and then neither, it was unclear.

The historical obsession with good diet wasn’t explored much other than some throw away lines about Mr Kellogg and his obsessive enema brigades but the manipulative ease to exploit medical trust from worried people forms the core of this play and was explored with a sinister inevitability.

The narrative moves at a good pace and we’re left with exposé in the press then Dr Hazard escaping her conviction and continuing her dangerous experiments in New Zealand.

The play left me a creeped out and with a lingering sense of discomfort, which is a good thing in such a claustrophobic subject matter and I drove off, past the glamourous private medical establishments of Montefiore Road wondering at the suffering caused today by medical fads and unscrupulous or dangerous ideas pushed by celebrities with their own agendas, not looking at you Gwyneth.

Play until May 11.

For more details or to book tickets, click here:

 

Fringe REVIEW: Gender Euphoria @Marlborough Theatre

Posted on by Eric Page

Gender Euphoria

James Lorien MacDonald

Marlborough Theatre

Play till May 9

GENDER Euphoria is James Lorien MacDonald’s solo stand-up show with a focus on his ideas and experiences of gender and the way it affects him, us, the people around us and what people may think (or say) about us.

Like all male stands-up’s there’s a fair bit about cock and sex but these are not the dick jokes you’re used to. James’ take on masculinity and gender is informed by the fact that he’s a transgender, gay immigrant in Finland with Canadian heritage and this give him a unique and slightly left field perception into your typical men’s stand up.

He grabs masculinity by the balls and giving them a good squeeze takes us on a journey into his own journey into masculinity. We take a peek into his past, a very funny tangent into late night You-Tube, how he made the worse lesbian in the world. There some educative serious stuff folded in too, about the Nordic eugenic past and sterilisation obsession but none of it too preachy. His observations from deep within the mysteries of the locker room, driven by insecurities, powered by raging testosterone and mounting lust are funny, full of careful and honest observations, both about his own state of mind and the reactions of others.

There are some very funny stories in this show and a fair few good lines, discussing his rampant sex drive and unfocused urge: buses, trees and furniture all turn him on, with a delicious riff about thirsting for designer Finnish furniture. His wanderings around male shame, body image and Masc. performance are surprisingly delicate but veined though with a disarming honesty that testified to the lived experience at the core of this show.

Gender Euphoria is an engaging hour of funny testimony but it could do with firming up with more materiel, his musing and tangential distractions left potentially funny avenues unexplored, and there was a cul-de-sac or two. Overall the subject matter is hardly original, a bloke talking about being a bloke, but it’s the delivery which is always essential in stand up and here James excelled, he’s honest, engaging, frank and honest enough to talk about his weaknesses which is a real strength in stand up. With a touch more polish and a pinch more material this is a winner of a fringe show. As a cis man swirling in privilege it was my pleasure to laugh with some novel insight into the anxieties and the experience of being a modern gay man done with panache.

Gender Euphoria adds its weight to a pretty impressive line-up both from Nordic performers, Gender Queer and just plain funny ones in this year’s Marlborough Fringe program. James Lorien MacDonald’s stand-up and confessional is a superb hour of honest entertainment and well worth catching if you can.

Until May 9

For more info or to book tickets, click here:

Festival REVIEW: Grand Finale @Brighton Dome

Posted on by Eric Page

Choreography and music by Hofesh Shechter – a Brighton Festival commission.

Grand Finale

Brighton Dome

May 5

INTERNATIONALLY celebrated choreographer Hofesh Shechter’s latest work is a Brighton Festival commission, Grand Finale, a spectacularly bold new piece featuring 10 dancers and six musicians. It is comic, bleak and beautiful, evoking a world at odds with itself, full of anarchic energy and violent comedy. Filtering this irrepressible spirit, Shechter creates a vision of a world in freefall: part gig, part dance, part theatre.

The company’s exceptional ensemble of dancers comes from eight different countries. They are Chien-Ming Chang, Frédéric Despierre, Rachel Fallon, Mickael Frappat, Yeji Kim, Kim Kohlmann, Erion Kruja, Merel Lammers, Attila Ronai, Diogo Sousa with Associate Director Bruno Guillore.

We’d been warned about how loud it was going to be, but when the drums started beating and the music rising in its relentless drone and percussive pulsating tones we were helpless and dragged off into the dark heart of this wild, colossal dance piece. There’s a huge amount of contact between the dancers, a familiarity, a holding and nursing, a touch, a feeling of deep fundamental interconnectedness which is fleeting but constant, a note that underscores the mania, an exact touch stone of hope.

With disrupting and challenging movements using the apparently dead bodies to puppet and mimic moment and constant dragging around and off stage of seemingly lifeless dancers the piece is unsettling, but not for long as the frantic, frenetic pace forces you to lift your eyes up, to put things in perspective and move on. Urging you to get up and take one more step. It’s the ritual, the dance and the dance, Kali is on stage with us and as the music becomes ever more demanding of our attention, the shadows, high contrast shade and crepuscular shafts of smoky highlighted action grab the dancers themselves & they seem to melt in and out of the sets.

The set itself designed by Tom Scutt, is black huge monoliths, lit expertly by Tom Visser moved silently around the stage, boxing in, walling off, showing and swallowing, always looking on, sometimes iconic, other times threatening, always present and their moments formed a bigger, older ballet around the smaller, softer dancers beneath them. They evoked walls from Palestine, Berlin, Belfast and Mexico all trying to keep the other out, or in, implacable against the soft dancer’s bodies. I kept thinking of the genocides in Cambodia and the sectarian violence in Belfast, even though the music and tone suggested the Israeli Palestine conflict.

It’s rare to see and hear a piece so loud, and so agitated but at heart a mellowness, a settled seeking of something solid and permanency within the movements.   The onstage orchestra, themselves a part of motion and dance sometimes amplified to extraordinary levels other times acoustic and forced search themselves for chords and resolution in the music they play, hinting at folk melody and dance tracks, jingoistic anthems and reflective religious music’s, elements of Arvo Part’s search for serenity within repetition came out, but without settling long in, the music, like the movement and the dancers constantly segue from one to the other, leaving us tense and unable to look away, unsettled but fascinated.

And then when the moments of calm arrive, they are still, like death itself, sudden. Dancers fall to the floor and are lifted, urged back up, only to fall once again. Bodes are tenderly lifted and rocked, grief is felt, life is urged upon stillness once again then then they flesh is discarded. A stunning wall of bubbles fall directly downwards in the smoke, too heavy for their dreams, like spherical glycerine snow, the music and move shifts but the shadows linger on.

It’s chaotic and repetitive but slowly themes and movements become familiar, tribal, social, fascist, religious, urgent and bored, desperate and hopeless, druggy, frenzy, mobs and solitude, apotheosis and resolution, cruel and loving, it’s humanity’s chaos and the beauty that comes out of that, the dance touches on them all, and it has moments of startling beauty within it.

We left churned and fascinated by the dancers and this dance and also vividly connected to the heaving mass of humanity and our own movements within it and well pleased by this return to the Festival by the ravishing Hofesh Shechter Company

Full details of this event can be seen here on the Brighton Festival Website

FEATURE: A-Z of Street Drugs

Posted on by Eric Page

ALCOHOL:  The most popular drug BY FAR. A depressant, makes you sociable; too much and you’ll have a hangover, way too much alcohol will put you in a coma or kill you. Causes more illness, accidents, violence and death than all the other drugs combined. It’s legal and anyone over the age of 16 can buy, the gateway drug to all the others in this list…

BUTANE: Sniffed to get you high. Makes you uninhibited, euphoric and dizzy, effects on your heart can cause death, even the first time.

COCAINE: Snorted, makes you feel on top of the world,  confident, alert and awake, but over-confident, arrogant and aggressive and end up taking careless risks. When the effects wear off you get a comedown, feel depressed and run down.

DEXIES: are amphetamine type drugs and have stimulant effects. Speed, Dexedrine, Ritalin, keep you awake, energised and alert.  Overuse leads to overactive, agitated or psychotic conditions.

ECSTASY: The original designer drug. Makes you energised, happy to dance for hours, the effects last 3 to 6 hours, followed by a gradual comedown.  People feel in tune with their surroundings, with sounds and colours more intense. Users develop temporary feelings of love and affection for the strangers around them.

FAGS: Regular smokers believe that smoking tobacco helps them to relax, handle stress and less hungry, but smoking makes you smell. It’s a risk factor for emphysema, heart attacks, strokes and lung cancer. Smoking contributes to 100,000 premature deaths in the UK every year.

G: GHB & GBL (gammabutyrolactone), are sedative with anaesthetic effects. Produces a feeling of euphoria and reduces inhibitions, make you super horny and causes sleepiness. But it is particularly dangerous with alcohol.

HEROIN: Made from opium has been around for hundreds of years. Heroin is a strong painkiller. A small dose gives a feeling of well-being; bigger doses can make you sleepy and very relaxed. Heroin is highly addictive and people quickly get hooked.

INHALIANTS:  Glue, petrol or gas: Effects depend on what glue, gas or aerosol is sniffed, but includes mood swings, aggressive behaviour, hallucinations, vomiting and blackouts, drunk with dizziness, dreaminess, fits of the giggles, and difficulty thinking straight.

JUICE: Steroids mimic hormones in the body that control how the body develops. Anabolic steroids improve endurance, helps build muscles.  They help gym-bunnies train harder and longer.  Can make some users feel paranoid, irritable, aggressive or ‘roid rage’ violent, and cause dramatic mood swings and horrible skin problems.

KETAMINE: A powerful  anaesthetic reducing sensations, gives a detached feeling as if the mind and body have been separated, with some people incapable of moving. This is called a k-hole. You trip for several hours, can cause agitation, panic attacks, and memory  loss.

LSD: Acid, a powerful hallucinogenic drug, distorting view of objects and reality, including seeing and sometimes hearing things that aren’t there, known as a ‘trip’. Trips can be good or bad. Time and movement can appear to speed up and slow down. Colour, sound and objects can get distorted and be unpredictable.

MEOW MEOW: Mephedrone gives you euphoria, alertness and feelings of affection or anxiety can also overstimulate your heart and circulation; and your nervous system, with risk of fits.

NITROUS OXIDE: Laughing gas, is inhaled makes you feel euphoric and relaxed or experience hallucinations. The gas is transferred to a balloon, then inhaled.

OPIATES: Painkillers are medicines on prescription; they are sedative painkillers that depress the nervous system, slowing down body functions and reducing physical and psychological pain. They are highly addictive.

POPPERS:  When inhaled they dilate the blood vessels and give a short, sharp head-rush like high, enhanced sexual experiences. Feelings of sickness, faintness and weakness, dangerous with heart problems or with Viagra

QUAALUDE: Was the party drug of the 1970s. It was known as “disco biscuits” because it released users’ sexual inhibitions thus making it a nightlife mainstay.

ROHYPNOL:  Makes the user feel calm and relaxed and help sleep. Has been used in sex crimes, where a victim’s drink is spiked, knocking them out so they’re unable to prevent a sexual assault.

SPICE: Synthetic cannabinoids act like cannabis (THC) but are much stronger; the effects – good and bad are similar. Users feel happy and relaxed, get the giggles, feel hunger pangs and become talkative or feel ill or paranoid.  Sold as an herbal smoking mix.

TINA: Methamphetamine aka crystal meth, powerful rushy stimulant, keeps you awake, alert, energised, abandoned and super horny. Too much will tip you into an overactive, agitated or even psychotic state, very addictive, one of the main drugs driving the chemsex circuit.

ULTRAM:  Tramadol is prescription medicine used to treat moderate pain, with feelings of warmth and well-being, relaxation and sleepiness can also cause fatigue, drowsiness, diarrhoea or fainting.

VIAGRA:  Initially used for sex, improving erections, increasingly the drug is mixed with ecstasy to enhance a feeling of euphoria, sexstasy.  It’s the most counterfeited drug in the world

WEED: Cannabis: THC is the ingredient makes you feel very chilled out and relaxed. It alters your senses. Cannabis effects how your brain works. Makes you feel anxious and even paranoid, it can make it difficult for you to concentrate, make you feel less motivated. The most popular illegal drug in the UK

XANAX: Tranquillisers. These induce calmness, relaxation and are used to treat anxiety and insomnia.  Prescription only medicines most common are Xanax, Rohypnol, Valium, with nasty withdrawal symptoms, including decreased concentration, tremors, vomiting, panics and depression.

YABA: Methamphetamine makes you feel very up, exhilarated, alert and awake can leave you feeling agitated, confused and aggressive. Long-term use causes brain damage, crystal form Crystal Meth or Ice, is extremely powerful and gives an intense, powerful high followed by a very severe comedown,  very addictive.

Z-drugs: Zopiclone, Sanofi are a group of non-benzodiazepine drugs used in the treatment of insomnia, overuse causes sleep disruptions, anxiety and depression.

Click here: for a much more in-depth list and plenty of helpful information. It’s non-judgmental; you’ll learn loads and may help you save someone’s life in an emergency.

A Cuckoo In The Nest!

What is cuckooing?
Cuckooing is where criminal gangs target vulnerable people in their homes to deal drugs from there. The person is intimidated with threats of violence and bullying or enticed through the offer of drugs. The person being cuckooed often won’t want to raise concerns for fear of repercussions or violence. Victims of cuckooing can disengage with support groups or services and be unwilling to talk about what is happening at their home when the subject is raised with them.

Signs to look out for:
More visitors to the property than usual, often visiting for short periods of time, new associates hanging around, bags of clothes, bedding or other unusual signs that people may be staying there, lots of vehicles outside for short times, including taxis, discarded syringes, foil or other evidence of drug use, more local anti-social behaviour than normal, including lots of stolen bikes.

What to do:
If you’re worried that someone is being cuckooed, contact Sussex Police by emailing: 101@sussex.pnn.police.uk with an email title OPERATION CUCKOO, providing as much detail as possible or for further advice ring the Safer Communities Team on 01273 292735 or community support from the LGBT CSF on 01273 855620.

REVIEW: Rear View : IOU @Brighton Festival

Posted on by Eric Page

Rear View

IOU Theatre

Brighton Festival

Rear View, is a trip in more than one way, a journey where you spend the entire time looking back, literally and figuratively into the city as it unfurls itself unexpectedly around you and into the life under examination by the single performer of the poetry and story unfolding alongside. A trip in a bus, a trip around the city and also very trippy. But to say there’s only one performer is a fib as IOU that innovative Yorkshire theatre company have enlisted the entirety of Brighton to take part and by embedding the performance in the very real world of Kemp Town, the seafront and even the wretched marina this brings to very vivid life a dreamy reflective journey into what it is to be a person and where our lives take place and unfold.

The event starts at an art class, on a barge in the marina, so far so good, even though it means going to the marina, but the sun is shining, there’s a real sense of excitement in the air, the seagulls whirl around the blue sky and we all dutifully board the barge and allow our adventure to unfold.

I’m not going to say anything more about the content of the show as that would diminish the experience, but it’s clever and interactive and make us feel immediately part of what’s happening, then we are taken out to the next venue which is an open top specially build Double Decker bus with high raked seating, headphones, rather comfortable red seats and some charming Festival folk to make sure we’re all safe and happy before off we go, looking back, heading backwards into the day.

The show then takes place in various places around the city, which blend the backdrop into the very real lives of people, the city is fascinated by the bus, which makes us – the audience – the show for a lot of passers-by who stare and wave at us staring and waving back, a pleasantly surreal experience and the headphones pump out an ultra relaxing ambient soundtrack of soporific electronica and the voice of the performer, her mic also picking up snippets of the background noise and people surrounding her.

A gentleman who was drinking on the seafront bench we had stopped near took a pee out over the prom in full view of all us, as the performance went on before him, and there were a few more moments of the real intersecting with the imagined. The role, which was created by and played by Cecilia Knapp and Jemima Foxtrot – alternating performances depending on the day is simple, a 65-year-old women reflects on key moments in her life, taking us to where they happened.

It’s floaty and tries it’s best to be geographically relevant but I felt it not connected to the city unfolding around it. It’s obviously written to work anywhere, but a few local tweaks to seriously connect it to that street, that seafront bench, that side street and pub would have done wonders for the narrative, but I didn’t really care, I was seduced, floating around on a bus, in bliss, watching the seagulls reel under a bright blue sky (did I mention them…. ) mesmerizing music murmuring on in my ears.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been so absorbed by the simple everyday marvelousness of this city by the sea. It’s delightful and we could have spent all day on the bus floating around in the warm comfortable sunshine, music floating and rising and falling in our ears, the seagulls reeling against the blue sky and the city unveiled in unexpected ways.

Brighton looked stunning, the familiar became weird, and the bus offers a novel perspective on the city, it’s inhabitants and just the sheer beauty of a spring day by the seaside.

It was like being in an arty film, where nothing happens in particular but the everyday and ordinary are shot in such vivid HD detail that they become extraordinary, a passing women takes a double look then loops back to stare and take a photo, at us 50 people silently staring back, two lovers outside a pub share a cigarette, a man in an upper story window right next to us holds his Jack Russell up to see, a stoned lady twitches her curtains and looks concerned. Each moment made more vivid with the washing musical soundtrack the interjections of the poetry and the vibrations of the bus itself. This is what immersive theater is all about, transformative, simple and touching. Well-done IOU.

The performance went on, but I’d tripped out, drifting along with the experience, a warm smile on my face, the seagulls reeling amongst a perfect blue sky… and we arrived back to the Marina in a state of bliss. Having had a trip and a half to a half imagined place.

Recommended

For full details of Rear View, click here:

Latest News

Community News Making Brighton ‘POP!’: local artist Dave Pop! and city centre businesses team up to dress city centre for the summer
Community News Legends and Two Brewers launch fundraisers ahead of events in Brighton and London to celebrate the life of Miss Jason
Community News Robbie Currie announced as new CEO of National AIDS Trust, taking over from Deborah Gold
Pride UK Black Pride to return on Sunday, August 11
X