Category: 5. Entertainment

Gavin Elder

Getty Images

Getty Images

Choreographer Dan Daw and the dancers from Candoco are celebrating and politicising the dancefloor, looking for freedom and to shake up the system. Over and Over (and Over Again) is set in a club, to a soundtrack of house, drum’n’bass and dubstep, but it’s not exactly a feelgood bop-along, it’s more nuanced, more thoughtful and a bit less fun than that.

Candoco are a long-running integrated company with disabled and non-disabled dancers. We’re told at the outset that anyone can take a break when they need to and that means the audience and also the dancers, especially one who is currently dealing with pain. This is not a forum for pushing through pain, they say. Like so many things Candoco have done, that’s a quietly revolutionary statement, when pushing through pain is usually seen as a given for dancers.

Throughout the show, parallels are drawn between the life of the club and the lives of the performers, with projected titles: struggle, desire, solidarity. There’s a section labelled “chill-out”, with the dancers all cuddled together on a beanbag and a definition flashes up on the backdrop: “rest as an act of resistance”. There is a lot of gentle resistance happening here, resistance to expectations, the sense of doing things on your own terms. Often there’s not that much happening at all. The dancing feels as much for the dancers as the audience, although there’s pleasure watching Annie Edwards as the beats of the music pulse around her body, or the wild streak of the always excellent Temitope Ajose.

The show doesn’t quite work as a rousing call to the dancefloor, but it has some stand-out scenes, such as Maiya Leeke becoming a human disco ball as the spotlight reflects off her mirrored top, arms flung wide, soaking up the vocalist’s insistent lyric: “I want to feel everything!” It captures that paradox of the dancefloor, when you’re completely in your body, in the moment, yet melted into the music, the self having dissolved. When the lights in the club come up, one lone dancer is left behind. James Olivo warms up into a churning, exploratory solo that finally digs deep. It’s a real moment of finding yourself on the dancefloor, with not a disco light in sight.

Prince William, who is quietly preparing for his destined role in the monarchy, has been making big moves for the future of his reign.

The Prince of Wales stepped out on Wednesday at the Groundswell Regenerative Agriculture Festival in Hertfordshire for a solo appearance. The future king announced major plans that he has for his private estate, the Duchy of Cornwall, after inheriting it from King Charles.

Kensington Palace dropped an update on the engagement after the important royal engagement.

“Dropping into the Groundswell Regenerative Agriculture Festival yesterday,” the statement read.

“Fantastic to listen to speakers on subjects aligning with the work of the Duchy of Cornwall’s tenant farmers, who are exploring innovative ways of farming on the road to net zero, and how to work with nature, not against it.”

Before Prince William inherited the position of the of Duke of Cornwall from his father, the royal had been planning to make improvements on the estate in his ambition for having sustainable resources which are not a burden to the planet.

During the visit, William shared that he believes that regenerative farming should be the “foundation stone of British agriculture”.

As Duke of Cornwall, he stressed on his mission to “rebuild the health of our nation” and “working in partnership to enhance the land we share with nature.”

The update comes as King Charles and Queen Camilla are in Scotland to mark Holyrood Week – the annual royal celebration of Scottish culture, community and achievements.

Richard Winterton

PA Media

Activist movements aren’t all speeches, protests and slogans. Revolutions are made by people – and those people are idealistic and messy and flawed. This is the truth at the core of Ntombizodwa Nyoni’s ambitious new play marking the 80th anniversary of the Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester, a crucial moment in the postwar fight against colonial rule.

It’s a story that’s both global and firmly rooted in the city, making it an ideal fit for Manchester international festival. Set in and around the Congress, Liberation follows the people behind the movement, including veteran activists George Padmore (Eamonn Walker) and Amy Ashwood Garvey (Pamela Nomvete) and future African politicians Kwame Nkrumah (Eric Kofi Abrefa), Jomo Kenyatta (Tonderai Munyevu) and Joe Appiah (Joshua Roberts-Mensah). We see their public speeches, their private discussions and their pub-room debates.

There’s a fizzing tension between solidarity and idealism on the one hand and ambition and interpersonal conflict on the other. Nyoni’s script is alive to nuance and difficulty, staging knotty struggles between different genders, generations and regional loyalties, as well as prodding at complex ideas around political change and allyship. As young social worker Alma La Badie (an impassioned Leonie Elliott) observes, the Congress is a space of egos as much as principles, where righteousness coexists with hypocrisy.

It’s a play that is, by its nature, all talk. Yet Nyoni and director Monique Touko manage to inject the proceedings with some theatricality and verve, recognising that there is no true liberation without joy. Music (composed by Ezra Collective’s Ife Ogunjobi) is central, soundtracking the jubilant entrance of Congress delegates and returning at key moments throughout. With so many people involved, some figures are inevitably given more space than others, but Nyoni deftly juggles the large ensemble of personalities and the strong cast flesh out even the smaller roles.

Like the attractive interlocking hexagons of Paul Wills’s set, evoking the worker bee designs found all over Manchester, the competing aims of the Congress eventually – if only temporarily – tesselate. In many ways, Liberation is a celebration of shared struggle, but one that makes vital room for complexity.