Coffee-Table Notes

Jupiter Artland until September 29 Four stars A ballroom is the perfect place to witness the wonders of Trisha Brown, the American choreographer who did so much to push the boundaries of contemporary dance from the 1960s right up until her death in 2017, aged eighty. So it goes for this first UK showing of Brown’s extensive archive of filmed performances, as anyone passing in the garden should be able to hear. Depending on timing, they’ll either get the loft-friendly electronics of Laurie Anderson’s Long Time No See that accompanies 1985’s seven dancer work, Set and Reset, Version 1, or else the more classically inclined selections from Pygmalion by Jean-Philippe Rameau that go with Les Yeux et l’ame (2011). While the former features costumes by visual artist Robert Rauschenberg, the latter, part of a fortieth anniversary celebration of Brown’s work, sees eight dancers show off the work of an elder stateswoman at her peak. In both, for all the work’s seriousness, judging by

Talbot Rice Gallery until October 5 Four stars Listen hard to this first UK show by Hong Kong-based composer and polymath Samson Young, and you might just hear something you’ve never heard before. This is possibly because it doesn’t exist, just as the giant monumental His Master’s Voice style horn that dominates the Georgian Gallery seems to have been washed up like some retro-futurist steampunk dinosaur. The siren’s call that intermittently emanates from the circle of state-of-art speakers beneath mood-enhancing lights that reflect the wordless fanfares form the remainder of Possible Music # 2 (2019), a fusion of sound and vision that offers up worlds of possibilities. Co-created with the University of Edinburgh’s Next Generation Sound Synthesis (NESS) research group, this is as much a leap into the void as Muted Situations # 22: Muted Tchaikovsky’s 5th (2018). Samson’s forty-five-minute film fills the entire wall of the White Gallery with images of an orchestra in full

Jackie Kay was in John Lewis when she was made aware how much people related to her memoir, Red Dust Road. “I bumped into this man,” says Scotland’s Makar on the eve of the National Theatre of Scotland and HOME Manchester’s new staging of her book as part of Edinburgh International Festival’s You Are Here strand. “He came up and said, ‘excuse me for interrupting your private life,’ and he said he’d read Red Dust Road and loved it, and would I mind writing a new chapter for Christmas telling him how everyone got on.” Kay’s book charts the poet and novelist’s twenty-year search for her Nigerian father and Scottish mother after being adopted by Glasgow communists and growing up in Bishopbriggs as a mixed-race child in a largely white community. When it was first published in 2010, the effect of such an emotional story tapped into a universal sense of recognition epitomised by the likes of the man in John Lewis. “It’s been kind of surreal,” Kay says of watching the play come t