The Seb & Fiona Blog

Frauke Requardt presents…
ROADKILL CAFE
A dance work in two parts set to a searing jazz score from John Zorn, performed in full for the first time on 18 & 19 April 2008 at The Place



“And then the Prime Minister approaches me and says ‘Daniel, you’re jazz. What do we do? There’s a war on. We need to win it.’ I think and then I say ‘Just play man, just play.’”

In ROADKILL CAFÉ Frauke Requardt thrusts us into an unworldly, jazz-fuelled meeting place. Here we encounter a ukulele man and his kooky cowboy sister, twitching twins who swing in, play out psycho-sexual dramas and disappear, and a sense of secret trauma that threatens to meander its way to the surface.

Produced during residencies in Venice, Portugal and London, this is a darkly humorous, surreal piece of mimicry and mayhem, seduction and shock with superbly choreographed fantasies.

The piece is Requardt’s second full-evening work, coming after JAMMY DODGERS, which was seen first at The Place in 2006 and was also performed at the Royal Opera House. In that piece Requardt and her dancers collaborated with some of London’s most acclaimed jazz musicians, using live performances by The Ingrid Laubrock Quintet and Leafcutter John in an exploration of identity, entertainment and invention.

Roadkill Café takes these themes in a new direction, exposing a Lynch-esque world of both self-consciousness and wild abandon. We see a dog doing a dog dance, a tale of jazz overcoming the military, a tale of paranoia overcoming jazz and a round of subverted line dancing.

The piece was made during three residencies: one in a rural Portuguese town, at Rui Horta’s space O Espaco do Tempo, one in a foggy and mysterious Venice at the intimate Teatro Fondamente Nuove and most recently one in London at Greenwich Dance Agency and The Place, as part of Choreodrome. In each location there was a work-in-progress performance, introducing the work to a new audience and inviting comments and discussion. Each residency has served to enrich the work and leave its own individual fingerprint on the final result, turning it into a truly international work.

Frauke Requardt is a choreographer and dancer based in London. She completed her Masters in Choreography at the London Contemporary Dance School in 2003 and went on to be an Associate Artist at The Place until 2006. Earlier this year Frauke created work in Bogota, Colombia as part of a three-month residency organised by Visiting Arts. Together with dancers from Danza Cumon she created ‘Pequenas Delicias’, a piece made especially for restaurants. She was also commissioned to make a piece for a special fundraising event at Sadler’s Wells, ‘Back to Front’ where the auditorium was reversed with the stage for a three tiered chase scene.

Requardt has also been a dancer in Lea Andersons’ ‘The Cholmondeleys’ since 2004. She is really very German.

Listing information:

April 18&19 2008
as part of Spring Loaded

The Robin Howard Dance Theatre
The Place
17 Duke’s Road
London WC1H 9PY
Box Office: 020 7121 1100

For more information, guest list, images etc please contact Seb at Seb & Fiona: seb@sebandfiona.com

Teatro Fondamenta Nuove is a small performance venue in Venice. It looks out over the north east perimeter of the city towards an austere-looking island called San Michele. I was there last Thursday, during a fascinating five-day escapade, and as I didn’t take a picture of the theatre, here’s a gratuitous one of San Michele, which is also known eerily as ‘The Island of the Dead’ consisting as it does entirely of a cemetery.

On the Thursday, I saw an unfinished version of choreographer Frauke Requardt’s new piece ‘Roadkill Cafe’.

The culmination of a two and a half week residency, the performance was to unveil the latest stage in a creative process that will come to fruition later this year. I already love it. It’s like the cheese-fuelled dream of an alternate David Lynch (this one a jazz critic rather than a director). There’s a mysterious pair of twins, a dog who does a doggy dance, a tale of jazz overcoming the military, a tale of paranoia overcoming jazz and a round of subverted line dancing. A soundtrack dashes from experimental jazz to screwed up country and western, but it is all by John Zorn.

For anyone interested in jazz music, it is a synaesthetic treat. For anyone at all, it’s a brilliant show. It’s on in London on 18 and 19 April, at The Place in Euston.

Seb

So Last.fm, the website-radio-network-thingy, has decided to release a Christmas single. By itself, the fact that they’ve got 20 million users (compared with 7.1 million X Factor viewers) is a challenge to the drab sense of inevitability resulting from the existence of both a Christmas number one spot and Simon Cowell. A user poll was set up to decide which track to release, and on Monday it was announced that the winner was Lucky Soul’s extraordinarily catchy ‘Lips are Unhappy’.

Now preordering at 40p a download from Last.fm via the indiestore, the bookies have immediately given it shortening odds of 16/1. If any independent band can be a David to Simon Cowell’s acid-tongued Goliath, it’s Lucky Soul, whose lush, lovestruck songs have stolen thousands of hearts across the world this year. Like Radio ‘name your price’ head, they release their music via their own label: if the unthinkable were to happen and the campaign snowballed to success, this would also be a defining moment in the march of new media vs old. In any case it’s a delightful instance of grassroots guerilla vs nasty, high-trousered dictator. Liberté, egalité, musique pop!

Seb

Portobello Space is a large area just next to Portobello Rd. Its ceiling is an urban motorway, its south wall is the Hammersmith and City Line and its neighbours are the fashion-y bit of Portobello Market, and a skate park.

As part of this year’s Architecture Week (15 - 24 June), we’ve arranged for Portobello Space to play host to one of Amenity Space’s ‘Sonic Sheds’, in which visitors will be transported - aurally speaking - to the countryside, via sounds and images beamed in direct from an equivalent shed in Yorkshire. Similarly, visitors to the other shed, which is in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park will be able to experience the noises of motorway, railway, and possibly skaters desperate to get a message to them.

Urbanism, who operate that section of the market, and the Westway Development Trust, who administer the land beneath the motorway, have asked us to help bring some interesting cultural activity to Portobello Space and this was our first idea. Anyone else who has a shed, an installation, some theatre, an ice rink, a record breaking attempt, a mass book club, or anything else in need of a home for a while, we’d be delighted to hear from you.

Sunday, 8pm: went to the Tate Modern turbine hall.

Monday, 3.40pm: emerged, into the freezing windy rain.

What had I seen? A five and a half-hour film, by Andy Warhol, looped over and over, showing the poet John Giorno, asleep. What had I heard? An identical 52-beat piano segment played live, again and again, 840 times. It lasted 18 hours and 40 minutes. Why did we go? For various reasons, not least the basic desire to see what would happen but admittedly also so Richard could write about it for the Evening Standard… Click for photos - the first is from about 8 or 9 in the morning and the second is all the pianists (they worked on a ‘rotating watch’ system) lined up at the very end:

And here’s Richard’s column, featuring a shattered-looking shot of us taken by a very nice Tate promotions man at about 9 in the morning.

Seb

…Brunel, Fish and Chips, Blackpool Pier, humbugs, Carry On Films, breakfasts, The Pythons - ah, the great British institutions.

Women’s Hour and Paul Morley - you could add them to that list too. Over the past few days the cultural linchpins have had a thing or two to say about Cabaret Mechanical Theatre and Led Bib.

If you’re interested, you can hear CMT on BBC Radio 4’s Women’s Hour again here

And read Paul Morley’s great feature on Led Bib in yesterday’s Observer Music Monthly online here

Fi

When I was working in Auckland for the Tasman Orient shipping company, my job as a temp in Container Control was to record many hundreds of eighteen-digit shipping container codes, each corresponding to an individual ‘flat pack’ or ‘reefer’. Perhaps it’s strange, given that the only time I ever saw the actual containers was out on the roof terrace looking at the docks in the distance, but I’ve always remained slightly affectionate towards those big, mysterious boxes of who-knows-what.

For this reason I find myself quite excited to actually be representing a 16-tonne shipping container, albeit one that doesn’t contain four cars or 50,000 Monopoly sets, but a state-of-the-art multimedia lab. A project by Creative Partnerships, it’s touring schools in the Thames Gateway and teaching kids media skills, plus giving them an understanding of the issues involved in development and urban regeneration: Futurecity Arts, Channel 4, the Arts Council and the East of England Development Agency are all involved.

It opened its doors to the children of Chalvedon School in Basildon today, and will be moving to Southend in around eight weeks’ time. I think it’s a brilliant idea. See www.billboardproject.co.uk.

In the meantime, I think I’m going to look into the form of the shipping container a bit more…

Seb