Festival celebrates five world premieres (From The Argus)

Festival celebrates five world premieres

5:00pm Monday 27th February 2012 in Previews By John Keenan

Five productions will enjoy their world premieres at Brighton Festival this year.

A World I Loved by Wadad Makdisi Cortas will be staged at the Theatre Royal on May 12.

Cortas tells the story of her life, beginning in Lebanon in 1917 under the French mandate and spanning more than 50 years.

It is a life that saw the creation of Israel, the expulsion of the Palestinians and the Lebanon Civil War.

The story is told in a multimedia format combining narration by Vanessa Redgrave and readings with live music against a backdrop of images from a turbulent time.

The performance features two generations of Cortas’s family and is presented in aid of the Barenboim/Said Foundation, which funds the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, a youth orchestra comprising musicians from Egypt, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria and Spain.

Ms Redgrave said: “Music is the best contribution in practical and spiritual terms that I know for conflict resolution – plus a deepened understanding of the history of a conflict.”

Innovative theatre company dreamthinkspeak will debut a work based on Hamlet which will run throughout the three weeks of the Festival.

The Rest is Silence combines art installation and theatre at the Malthouse Estate Warehouse in Shoreham. The production forms part of the World Shakespeare Festival.

The last dreamthinkspeak commission, Before I Sleep, premiered during the 2010 Festival and played to sold out audiences, resulting in a further six-week sell-out run.

The country’s coolest young classical ensemble, The Heritage Orchestra, will team up with sound artist Scanner to reinterpret the music of Joy Division.

The players will perform inside a giant gauze cube at the Concert Hall in Brighton Dome, in a spectacle that turns the tables on the conventional concert experience.

Laura Ducceschi, the creative producer at Brighton Dome and Festival, said: “This project is not about cover versions, classical arrangements or nostalgic recreation. It pays homage to the music, atmosphere and spirit of Joy Division.

“Joy Division embraced the experimental, brought poetry into everyday popular music and became a vehicle for expression and art. In two short years they altered the UK’s musical landscape forever and they remain timeless.”

Brighton Palermo Remix is a new work from British artist David Batchelor based on traditional street festival decorations in Palermo. The work is being created as a site-specific piece for The Regency Town House in Hove.

Batchelor combines items such as plastic pound shop products with a range of light-industrial materials to produce installations which celebrate the extraordinary in the everyday.

After the success of Electric Hotel on The Level in 2010, Frauke Requardt and David Rosenberg return with a dance performance, Motor Show, at Black Rock from May 9-13.

The show focuses on a car arriving in a wasteland in which a young couple are completely oblivious to anything other than themselves. The audience wear headphones which transport them to the interiors of the approaching cars.

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