Rosie Clarke

Glowing miners’ lamps lowered down above the stage as lasers spun and mine head wheels whirled, casting theatrically ominous shadows across the rapt crowd at the Dome.

HAIR piled atop her head, wearing an orange and green floral dress and bathed in warm golden light, she could have been a 1960s folk singer.

Christopher Bliss (Rob Carter) is a terrible but bumptiously confident novelist, churning out sub-James Bond action books that he takes immensely seriously.

Reunited for their first ever tour with the original band lineup of Keren Woodward, Sara Dallin and Siobhan Fahey, 1980s pop girl group Bananarama were a retro delight.

GODFREY Reggio’s 1982 film Koyaanisqatsi (“Life out of balance”) is an impressionistic montage, moving from images of the natural world to scenes of manufacturing, destruction, city life and man-made systems.

IT IS unusual to begin a show by announcing its hashtag, but for a musical collective who began online and reached 500 million YouTube views, savvy marketing matters.

*****

This disjointed yet charming site-specific experience links various different performance styles in a creative response to the life and work of James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps.

From their ominous version of Jacques Brel’s Port of Amsterdam in Brechtian cabaret style, gathering pace under dramatic lighting changes, Bellowhead brought high energy and astonishing musicianship to the stage.

This unhurried show loosely linked fleeting moments of startling beauty – a crown of cut-up books, fluttering origami spiraling to the floor, an exaggerated ruff made of books masking a face, the slow see-sawing of a ladder.