The blurb:

It’s whiteboy indie-hop, playing live at the Garage in Highbury.

Sounds like:

Buck 65 with less of the gravelly voice and more skinny jeans.

Thoughts:

Hip-hop is not somthing I “do”. I have to admit to having preconceived ideas about unnecessarily offensive men mumbling about “biatches” which definitely turns me off the genre. However when I was in Canada some years ago I picked up a record with a nice cover (always a good technique for finding random music) which was Secret House Against the World by Buck 65. Here was a raw piece of work, with a particularly harrowing track about domestic abuse delivered in a wonderfully direct spoken word way. “Wow, hip-hop aint all bling!”, I thought. Guns = bad, angst = clearly a good thing, right?

So my eyes were opened up somewhat by that chance encounter although I haven’t explored the (yes I’m going to say it again) indie-hop avenue much since then. So, apparently Why? are a very “in” band at the moment. Indeed, the recently re-opened Garage in Highbury was full of skinny jeans, Converse and checked trucker shirts. I didn’t let my lack of 50s revival hair-do spoil my evening, however, and once Why? were on stage it was clear this was not just a haircut band.

Their frontman Jonathan “Yoni” Wolf clearly has great rhythm, bashing away with a small selection of percussion while delivering his lines poker-faced into the crowd. Although the few more traditional (and wonderfully arranged) indie rock tracks go down well, the crowd are here for the smart dry rhymes of big hitters like By Torpedo or Crohn’s. Highlight of the night had to be the perfect execution of the short and snappy glockenspiel-led A Sky for Shoeing Horses Under: “when I’m eyed I tongue my bottom teeth / and look at the sidewalk in front of me / as my tennis shoes go in and out of the frame”. Lovely stuff.

Verdict:

Hip to the hop. I’ll probably be exploring their label anticon in some more detail.

Media links:

• Play Why?’s 2008 album Alopecia in full on Spotify
• Why? at MySpace Music

The blurb:

Take one Flemish-Moroccan dancer/choreographer, a modern artist known for his work with the human form and throw in a very generous helping of kung-fu, and this is what you get. A concise one hour show demonstrating how the very honest movements of martial arts can work alongside the precision of Western contemporary art.

Sounds like:

Szymon Brzóska’s soundtrack sat somewhere between Rachel’s Music for Egon Schiele, Arvo Pärt, and Esmerine’s If Only a Sweet Surrender to the Nights to Come Be True. Beautiful and engaging.

Thoughts:

I saw a lot of Gormley in this. I’m not sure how much of a say he had in the choreography (although I suspect that he and Cherkaoui collaborated closely, given that this at least their second piece together at Sadler’s), but there was so much in there about the body as statue and how someone can move through anonomynity, group membership and true individuality. The monks would move from a semi-chaotic swirl around the set (which consisted solely of a series of moveable man-size plywood boxes against a stark grey stage) to becoming part of a static installation piece on the stage that would remain some seconds and then begin transforming again, and this all being lead by the master and apprentice tale depicted by Cherkaoui and a young boy-monk.

The set itself was notable for its lack of inherent scale. They played with it; one moment it was a forest-like maze, the next the entire thing formed a single blossoming flower, whilst at other moments the forms were entirely abstract or mathematical. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up as the boxes were arranged in a simple expoded triangle, monks atop and cross-legged as they ran through elegant, flowing kata with their hands and upper bodies.

The other joy for me was seeing the contrast between the style of Cherkaoui and that of the monks. There were a small number of sequences where Cherkaoui was integrated into the group kung-fu, and it was clear that he had been training hard to learn the speed and subtleties of their art, yet he delivered those moves with the more delicate arm and body lines of a traditional European dancer.

Verdict:

Excellent. A challenging feast of the pretentious and the unpretentious.

The show is at Sadler’s Wells from 30 June – 4 July 2009.

Media links:

• Sadler’s Wells sample video (also on YouTube)
• Szymon Brzóska @ MySpace Music