Category Archives: Music & theatre

Theatre, music, comedy, performance art in its widest sense, reviews, comments and observations.

Thank you music, you keep me flowing

I really don’t have a clue how I would have go through 2020 without music so, to keep the flow of gratitude moving, I really want to share some of the most uplifting, transformational, nourishing musical highlights of my year. Continue reading

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Choosing life: Jig of Life and the Ninth Wave

“For Now does ride in on the curl of the wave,

And you will dance with me in the sunlit pools.

We are of the going water and the gone.

We are of water in the holy land of water

And all that’s to come runs in

With the thrust on the strand.” Continue reading

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1000 stories, a single shared ending

What does Sheherazade have to tell us about where we are now, at the end of “1001 nights” of human history? Are we ready to face a new dawn together or do we throw ourselves back into a perpetual re-run of all those same old stories with their oh-so predictable endings? When this particular story came up for me just so powerfully again, having been such a long-running companion throughout my life, I found myself sitting up and taking note of what it had to tell me about how we are holding a whole new kind of an ending in the palm of our unified hands. Both the masculine and feminine aspects have to be prepared to face up to the fact there are no new endings to the stories they have both already heard; they can only move on by overcoming each of their fears (both equally vaid…yet together, they neutralise) creating a brand new story, together. Continue reading

Posted in Consciousness & evolution, Culture, Divine feminine, divine masculine, History, Life journey, Literature, Menu, Music & theatre, Personal Development, Writing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 10 Comments

When sound spirals through time…

When I first heard Stevie Wishart’s “Hildegard” it blew me away as though this was the delivery I had been waiting for. Hildegard von Bingen has been a wayshower in my life for many years and wayshowers are not meant to remain pickled in aspic…they are the fluid paths of sensation that take us on voyages of discovery outside of time and tradition! I particularly love that Wishart shows no fear in bringing modern interpretation and methods including electronica to this timeless music’s expression which must, surely, be the way music (of all things) is meant to go now; no longer prepared to remain walled up in a dark tower of tradition and stiff academia. Like the feminine aspect herself, “she” is letting herself down from all such brick towers and is now to be found running and pirouetting barefoot across the grass in a garden of a “place” that HvB was more than in communique with (long before her time). At its heart, her music was all about enabling spiritual ecstasy to be experienced here on earth and, well, that’s here now…as long as we let it out of its box. I suspect this music conveys the very frequency of such a release from darkness and hiding and the reunion with a place of the heart that is full of unmitigated light, hence its powerful effect upon those of us who resonate. Did HvB compose for our times as much (if not more so) than for her own? I suspect that, at some level, she did; knowing someone would step up to the task of carry her sound forwards as she intended…. (read on). Continue reading

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Following the unseen river

The sense of all these voices being tuned-in and innately guided towards an unrehearsed harmony that perfectly blended all the various pitches, the personal notes into one unified sound was quite palpable and, as it hit the ceiling, this magnified one-sound seemed to rain down on us and feed back into us all as pure energy…It seemed like I had followed an invisible flow to be here this night. I had been part of a river of great healing flowing freely, had witnessed something incredible, taken part in it, knew for certain something quite wonderful was well underway…. Continue reading

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Needed for the symphony

…I realise, suddenly, there was a feeling or a frequency I was anticipating when I was that child knitting together those colours, that music, all those vivid March associations…and that feeling is truly emerging in me now, as my reality. What this music set up for me was not a simple nostalgia for the past whenever I heard it but an anticipation of somewhere I was heading; it projected me forwards towards something that resonated deeply with me…a taster of what was possible, a preview of what was yet to come, which I would then recognise for having “got there” through the reminder in the sounds I was hearing. Each year at this time, with each layer of associated memory that I had matched and added to that original one, through the reminder in the music, I had inched my way ever closer to myself, like I had been tuning myself against the tuning fork of my own frequency. That frequency is Who I Am and I am getting markedly closer every year, every day now…better and better at expressing it as a clear and confident note.
Continue reading

Posted in Art, Art purpose, Art transformation tool, Health & wellbeing, Life journey, Music & theatre, Personal Development, Recovery chronic illness, Remembering, Symbolic journeys | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

When you lose something you find something

Talking about a day of two loses on a very different scale and yet all strangely synchronistic…joined together by a song lyric. And there’s nothing like the “loss” of a living artist (though their offerings live on and on) to bring their work and motivations sharply into focus as we are suddenly inundated with retrospectives of their life’s output via every cultural channel there is; its like everything they were about is suddenly distilled down into an extraordinarily potent brew that we all get to take a sip of (if we choose to). So, maybe saturation in the mentality of an artist who never feared his most obscure offerings being ridiculed or rejected is just what is called for right now in a culture where popularity is courted as a measure of artistic success; a timely reminder that our best output, most probably, lies in a dark room from which we create our own version of light in a state of oblivion as far as the opinions of others are concerned and with no sense of an audience peering in at us. Maybe true creative genius is only unleashed once we learn to please ourselves above all others… Continue reading

Posted in Art, Art as a business, Art purpose, Art transformation tool, Artists, Biography, Consciousness & evolution, Culture, Entertainment, Life choices, Lifestyle, Music & theatre, Music composition, Personal Development, Social media | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Go into the garden

Through our very actions, our softly treading footsteps into the secret part of the garden, we demonstrate how its not always about having to be in the heart’s racing pulse of everything that seems to going on at such speed and with such drama all around us that we feel, constantly, like we might be left behind. Rather, we go where the little girl inside us leads for she still remembers the way there, knows where the white rose always blooms. This is sacred knowledge and it is coming back into the broader consciousness, led by those who already feel it; by the heart. Continue reading

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Four and three-quarter seasons…

‘The New Four Seasons’ – complete with birdsong, electric guitar and didgeridoo – is all about the total reinvention of a piece of music that we thought we knew by heart…and it is also about very much more than that. When I heard it, I was much more deeply moved than I was prepared for and, in it, I have found an echo of something that is happening on a far broader scale; in our arts, in our world. Is it alright, or even possible, to play with an established composition – one as intricately complex as this – in a new way, to make it your own, to alter it? I find I want to say, the music itself is not sacrosanct; it is our creative urge and the need to allow that free rein that is. Kennedy has dared to show that music is certainly not sacrosanct and all the better for it; its as though the strictly demarcated ‘four seasons’ of our world (even the most intricately complex parts, most learned-by-heart aspects of it) have suddenly found room for something more, their edges blurred and expanded to fit more in, our very experience of them – of everything – softened, leaving us with far more than the sum of their parts. Continue reading

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Winter light

For some time now, like one of those playful little projects saved up for nothing but the enjoyment of doing them, I’d been meaning to compile a video made up my of all the tiny snippets of footage of winter … Continue reading

Posted in Animal art, Art, Art purpose, Art technique, Birds, Landscape art, Music & theatre, Music composition, Nature, Seasons, Social media, Walks | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments