EIF music and theatre reviews: Breaking Bach | Dunedin Consort & John Butt | Faustus In Africa!
In our latest round-up of EIF music and theatre reviews, we sent two critics - one who specialises in classical music, the other in dance - to the same show to see what they made of it.
Breaking Bach ★★★★★
Usher Hall, Edinburgh
There is a timeless quality about JS Bach’s music that resonates with our times and makes for great dance music. The partnership between the Breaking Bach company – which includes current and former students from Acland Burghley Comprehensive - and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment who are resident at the North London school, is an inspired one.
For this world premiere, choreographer and director Kim Brandstrup brilliantly updated the dance vocabulary with the jerky, slightly robotic, movements of hip hop and break dancing which synched perfectly with Bach’s metronomic beats.
There was a compelling synergy between the period instrument orchestra on an upper tier of the stage and the young dancers below on a shiny silvery surface which reflected and refracted their every agile move.
The Concerto for Two Violins and Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 showcased the focused energy of this amazing ensemble, their foot stomps adding a thrilling percussive edge to the music. For the Oboe Concerto, with soloist Leo Duarte, the dancers seamlessly combined the classical elegance of ballet with street-wise rough and tumble.
However, the highlight was the beautiful fluid interplay between a solo dancer and cellist Andrew Skidmore in three movements from Bach cello suites.
Susan Nickalls
Breaking Bach ★★★★★
Usher Hall
Before we dive into the particulars of this ground-breaking breath of fresh air, let’s take a moment to simply acknowledge the concept.
A composer dead for over 250 years, an orchestra so rooted in history they play on period instruments, a choreographer renowned for creating contemporary dance, and a group of young breakdancers. All performing to an audience relaxing on colourful beanbags.
It adds up to a night Edinburgh International Festival can be proud of, and one those watching will never forget. Bach is known for his rhythms but not his beats, something ordinarily so key to breakdancing. But every twitch, jerk, jump and flick the 13 dancers delivered felt like a beat in itself.
Brandstrup’s choreographer didn’t just set Bach’s music to movement, it turned his notes into bodily responses. Fast-paced bowing was met with dynamic L-kicks, quick turns, and synchronised group work, while slower pieces were matched by gentle solos.
Perhaps most beautiful of all, was the mutual respect between orchestra and dancers, as they watched and applauded each other’s skill. This unlikely coming together felt like the most natural thing in the world, to the point that next time any of us watch an orchestra, we’ll be wondering why there aren’t any breakdancers.
Kelly Apter
Dunedin Consort & John Butt ★★★
Queen’s Hall
While promising a barrel of laughs, they were a long time coming in Handel’s early dramatic cantata Clori, Tirsi e Fileno. That’s the danger when expectations are raised in the marketing blurb and not quite delivered.
Yes, there’s some sauciness in the triangular love tangle, musical gems en route that Handel later raided for other operas. But despite a typically punchy performance by the Dunedin Consort under the ever-insightful direction of John Butt, little that was genuinely stimulating emerged before the second half.
It was as if the three soloists themselves sensed as much. Soprano Nardus Williams and countertenor Reginald Mobley as vying male suitors, Tirsi and Fileno, strived to bring sparkle to their characters yet seemed unconvinced of any such qualities.
Only Julie Roset, with the odd teasing wink, a coquettish delivery, and some of the best music, shone initially. Her joyous duet with Fileno, the first half finale, heralded a turning point.
Sure enough, post-interval the music sizzled, extreme degrees of ecstasy, wretchedness, quirkiness and virtuosic showmanship now bringing the performances vividly alive. The show-stopping final Trio - a later revision by Handel - supplied what was missing at the start, proving much more than simply a welcome relief.
Ken Walton
Faustus In Africa! ★★★★
Lyceum Theatre, until 23 August
Eleven years ago, they thrilled Edinburgh Festival audiences with their magnificent political satire Ubu And The Truth Commission; in 2023, many of the same team returned to the Fringe, with the beautiful and unforgettable Life And Times Of Josef K.
And now, the wonderful Handspring Puppet Company of South Africa - the world’s pre-eminent puppet theatre makers - return to Edinburgh with a thrilling new staging of their 1990s show Faustus In Africa, directed, designed and animated by the great William Kentridge, whose fractured charcoal-drawing images - now still, now exploding into fierce animation - form the essential backdrop to the show.
Based on both Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus and Goethe’s Faust, Handspring’s version of the story focusses on the Faustian bargain involved in the colonial rape of Africa, for its land and resources. Played out in a library stacked with books and instruments of knowledge, the story is therefore set around the mid 20th century, when many African countries were gaining a technical independence, but new leaders often sold the future of their land and people back to the custodians of the existing economic system.
The puppet version of Faust therefore has the face of the Belgian explorer after whom Brazzaville on the river Congo is named; and the story unfolds, after Faust’s pact with Mephistopheles, in a bloody safari of destruction, in which Faust and Mephisto fly about the continent in a 40’s style aeroplane, destroying not only wild animals, plants and landscapes, but everything else that stands in their way - including the peace of the beautiful and intelligent young woman Faustus seduces, and in the end, even the leading icons of European civilisation.
All of this is conveyed in a fierce torrent of theatrical brilliance - from the sheer beauty and communicative power of Handspring’s astonishing puppets, through the mind-blowing brilliance of Kentridge’s animations, to the absolute poise and force of the show’s one non-puppet performance, from Wessel Pretorius as Mephistopheles.
And the audience can only fasten their seatbelts and prepare for an astonishing 90-minute theatrical journey; every second of it packed with the riveting and unexpected, and with a purposeful, passionate political intelligence that the world desperately needs, as we try to come to terms with colonial horrors of the last 300 years, and begin - perhaps too late - to repair some of the terrible damage done.
Joyce McMillan
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