Coffee-Table Notes

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars   The Pains of confinement come in many forms in this contemporary chamber pop song cycle – gig theatre if you prefer - devised by director Liam Hurley and singer songwriter Jo Mango. Working with a group of songwriters, they draw from material developed during Distant Voices: Coming Home, a four year research project set up by criminal justice based arts organisation Vox Liminis and three university partners. The fourteen songs co-written with a host of unnamed participants channel the real life experiences of those within the system preparing to return home.    Cosiness abounds on designer Claire Halleran’s array of rugs, lamps and armchairs spread out on a stage filled with musical instruments.  Here, Mango and fellow singer-songwriters Louis Abbot of Admiral Fallow, Kim Grant, aka Raveloe, Jill O’Sullivan of Sparrow and the Workshop, Bdy_Prts and more, Dave Hook, aka Solareye, plus bassist Joseph Rattray, bring empathy and warmth to a moving c

Four stars The figure of Eduardo Paolozzi towers over the contemporary art world as much as his seven-metre tall sculpture of ‘Vulcan’ (1998-1999), Roman god of fire, does in its permanent residence in Modern Two’s café named after the artist. The Leith born pop auteur’s presence is similarly embedded into Edinburgh’s cityscape, be it through public sculptures, the locally brewed beer named after him, the football shirt for Leith Athletic, or the magnificent recreation of his studio in Modern Two.   The latter is the perfect conduit for this centenary exhibition, which rolls out sixty works that not only channel the throwaway detritus of Paolozzi’s collages, but show how his ultra moderne designs made their mark beyond the gallery. This is spread across two ground floor rooms, a library and a couple of corridor showcases. The first room, Paris & London, shows off some of his 1950s collages, sculptures, screenprints and experiments with ink. The second room, Pattern & Print, lea

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars   “Immigrants,” West Indies born Alexander Hamilton and French émigré the Marquiss de Lafayette freestyle in unison in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s globe trotting hip-hop history musical. “We get things done.” American history has gone wild in the nine years since Miranda’s show came rhyming onto the stage like an old-skool block party on a grand scale. As Thomas Kail’s production arrives in Edinburgh for a two-month stint as part of its UK tour, Hamilton still possesses some of the unbridled optimism the Barack Obama era brought with it.   Here, after all, is the American dream writ large, as ‘bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman’ Hamilton hustles his way to power after arriving in eighteenth Century New York. Ushered into society by Sam Oladeinde’s Aaron Burr, who acts as MC, rival and eventually killer, Shaq Taylor’s Hamilton wants to be number one. As he networks all the big hitters,  words are his weapons, as he winds up in a double act of

A wealth of radical mavericks spans the centuries in this year’s Adelaide Festival opera programme. On the one hand, Igor Stravinsky’s The Nightingale is reinvigorated in a new production by Canadian auteur Robert Lepage. On the other, Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera is brought to vigorous new life by former Adelaide Festival director Barrie Kosky.   Just as Stravinsky, Weill and Brecht broke moulds and pushed boundaries in their respective eras, Lepage and Kosky have produced a succession of major works that have applied their own respective contemporary visions onto productions drawn from the classical canon.   Lepage’s take on The Nightingale – first presented by Stravinsky in 1913 -  is an international co-production between his own Ex Machina company with Opéra national de Lyon, Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, Canadian Opera Company and Dutch National Opera. In tune with this internationalist approach, Lepage is working with  Argentinean conductor Alejo Pérez, Am

As the longest running and most pre-eminent survey of contemporary Australian art, the Adelaide Biennial has always attempted to showcase the most interesting work of a particular moment, with a themed approach giving the event a loose-knit narrative that goes beyond individual artists. By naming this eighteenth edition of the Biennial as Inner Sanctum, curator JoséDa Silva is suggesting a meditation of sorts on where we are now.  “ Inner Sanctum came from a simple proposition of wanting to think about what the human condition might be like in 2023 and 2024,’ Da Silva says. “How might we think about the human condition after having lived through three or four years of COVID and all of the experiences of lockdown, and how that might have affected the way we think about our lives, our homes, and our communities.   “It became clear to me very early in the thinking about this show, that there was a way of grouping certain ideas and certain artists together in distinct ways, and that you mi

Laurie Anderson has always sounded like the future. Ever since she scored a global hit in 1981 with ‘O Superman’, the New York based artist has been at the cutting edge of melding her music, words and performances with the latest technology.    It should come as no surprise, then, that Anderson has embraced Artificial Intelligence in I’ll Be Your Mirror, her hi-tech exhibition that arrives in Adelaide after premiering in Stockholm in 2023. While Anderson won’t be present physically during the exhibition’s run, as she has in previous Adelaide appearances, AI Laurie Anderson very much will. This comes by way of machinery that has absorbed everything the real Anderson has ever said to create a writing machine made from her specific way with words and how she delivers them. Activated by viewers feeding in short phrases, new works are created in Anderson’s voice and style.    As the Velvet Underground referencing title of the exhibition suggests, I’ll Be Your Mirror does likewise with an AI

Four stars          Jamie Collinson’s study of those forced out of the bands they sometimes founded makes for a refreshingly insightful, entertaining and at times poignant read. Boldly subtitled An Alternative History Of Popular Music, Collinson’s book mixes research, interviews, personal interludes, and a series of wonderful footnotes that join the dots between more than thirty subjects. At one point he writes a gonzo style first person short story charting Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten’s final days before and after being sacked by Neil Young.     Ousted Beatles drummer Pete Best, doomed Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones and dumped-on Velvet Underground auteur John Cale are all in the mix, as are ‘All the Musicians Kicked Out of Fleetwood Mac’ but Collinson focuses on what are perhaps lesser-known stories that are by turns tragic, absurd, and occasionally redemptive.   While the book moves beyond boys with guitars and bad habits by way of original Supreme Florence Ballard, tw