Live arts correspondent Bella Todd on the hottest happenings in the global cultural calendar this week, including Halloween happenings and a nocturnal arts festival.
The Main Event: White Night Nuit Blanche
As clubbers have always known, there’s something about the middle of the night that has the power to transform. Perceptions shift, inhibitions fall away, doner kebabs become delicious…
You don’t need mind-altering substances to discover the magic of the wee small hours. And White Night, a nocturnal arts festival which takes place this Saturday in the UK’s seaside city of Brighton and attracts 40,000 each year, is all about making the most of the extra hour of darkness created by the clocks going back.
This ‘cultural reclaiming of the streets’ originated in France and has seeded all over Europe. But Brighton seems to have a particular knack for imaginative, witty commissions. This year a walk-through installation dubbed West Street Story will see The Human League and Heaven 17’s Martyn Ware providing an alternative soundscape to the city’s notoriously crap clubbing centre. Its effect on the behaviour of, let’s be honest, wasted tossers, will be analysed by Dr Harry Witchel (the dude responsible for scientifically concluding that The Drugs Don’t Work is the saddest song EVER!).
Elsewhere visual theatre company Periplum will be casting solitary audience members in a cinematic thriller using iPod films and Brighton’s darkest alleyways. Environmental installation group Red Earth will be waging an artistic battle with the elements down on the beach. Antik will be animating a quiet building with shadow puppetry. And genuinely edgy underground venue The Basement will be recreating heaven and hell and giving audience members the choice of which to visit (we suspect hell will be a little oversubscribed).
You can also play a round of ‘Urban future golf’ using the city as your course, draw life models to music in a church, attend an Alternative Village Fete where everyone from Boogaloo Stu to macabre immersive storytellers Copper Dollar will be exploring the darker side of folk tradition, and join post rock duo Nordic Giants for the annual Dawn Chorus on the beach. Not that we want to compromise our independence here, but there’s so much to pack in between dusk and dawn we might need our vodka and Red Bull.
Best Of The Rest
- The only festival at which you can see Snoop Dogg and operate a giant mechanical bird, The Voodoo Experience takes place over Halloween in New Orleans’ vast City Park and, unusually, combines a predominantly rocky music lineup (Soundgarden and Blink 182) with large-scale installation art and a dedicated family vibe. Glowing inflatable shapes by Olympic Games-commissioned artist Doron Gazit will float above the main stage, while Christian Ristow’s Fledgling involves climbing into the ribcage of a stainless steel eagle whose wings you operate using bicycle pedals. This year the organizers are promising ‘unique artist collaborations you can’t see anywhere else in the world’. We’re holding out for Snoop Dogg and big bird…
- Alice Cooper shows are always two parts theatre to one part greasy rock, and you can expect him to crank the grand guignol up a notch for Halloween. With comforting predictability, the gentleman devil rocker is touring the UK all this week with a fire-themed show called Halloween Night Of Fear, climaxing with a show in Glasgow on October 31 itself, and including a date at London’s Alexandra Palace on October 29 for which he’s been auditioning amateur sideshow acts like a sick-ass Simon Cowell.
- Multi award-winning young playwright Polly Stenham is collaborating on a piece of immersive theatre as part of Battersea Arts Centre’s Halloween celebrations. Described as ‘part ritual, part rebellion, part rave’, it’s just one element in a music, comedy and DJ-packed art party curated by Nabokov Arts Club, whose ‘happenings’ are distinguished from the often substandard pack by the fact that lots of stuff actually, y’know, happens.
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