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If you would like to
review any of the events in Glossop Mayfest 2004, please send your review
to mail@glossop.com
An Evening at the Cabaret
Voltaire
Partington Theatre Club Room
Saturday 1 May 2004
by Richard Fair
"Bossa Fataka" isn't a phrase I'd normally use, well not in the presence
of company. So to find myself shouting it in the Club Room of the Partington
Theatre on Saturday was something of an exhilarating experience. This was
the Cabaret Voltaire and Michael Howard and friends were transporting us
back to the short-lived days of an art movement that was to be the foundation
of modern performance and art - Dada.
In the second decade of the twentieth century, at a seedy nightclub in
Zurich, in a room half the size of that packed with fellow "Bossa Fataka"
shouters, Hugo Ball, a poet, and Emmy Hennings, a female singer, opened
up the Cabaret Voltaire as a centre for "artistic entertainment and intellectual
exchange". In the four months it existed, the performers planted the seeds
for an explosion of creative arts ranging from surrealism to punk.
Glossop may well be a long way from Zurich in 1916 but the audience seemed
warmly receptive to the poetry and experimental use of words and vocal sound
that was delivered from the stage, although I'm not quite sure what the
two elderly ladies sat on the next table, crunching crisps, thought of Andy
Hancock's almost climactic shouts of "Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes" during the
performance of L'amiral cherche une maison à louer.
I was hoping that, sat at my table looking at an advert for the forthcoming
production of Cabaret, we'd be offered a sample of what to expect
from a show that also was routed firmly in the genre of the Cabaret Voltaire.
I was not disappointed. Cordelia Howard performed, unaccompanied, a selection
of songs from the show, including a powerful rendition of Mein Herr.
As a celebration of those creative dark days of World War 1, it seems fitting
that this exploration of the Cabaret Voltaire was chosen to open this year's
Mayfest.
As the poet Hugo Ball might say "hollaka hollala, anlogo bung!"
Richard Fair
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