Soon after arriving for the start of a couple of free events as part of The Barbican’s Steve Reich birthday celebrations, I was reminded of the introduction to the first episode of Chris Morris’s nightmarish Jam, with the raver dancing furiously to a beep beep beep sound, only for the camera to pull back to show he had been frugging to the sound of his day-old baby’s life support machine. Maybe it was the fault of the advertising materials for the free element of today’s bill, describing Konono No.1 as a Congolese “trance” outfit, but during their performance I was treated to numerous displays of the worst dancing I have ever seen. Not on stage, I must add – some fine booty shaking up there from the female percussionist, even if one of the likembe players did his best to remain hilariously expressionless and emotionless, other than his thumbs which jabbed away frantically.
There is usually one whenever I go to a gig, and for ease of conversational reference, that person usually inherits the sobriquet “the fucking hippy”. The kind of person who gets smashed on Heinz cream of mushroom soup before coming to a gig to show off their interpretative dance skills. “I’m a tree, branches swaying in the wind! I’m a cloud, tumbling along in stratospheric current! I’m a bird, spiralling upwards in a thermal!”. “No, you are not”, I want to say. “You are a particularly smelly fart in a large crowd of people, and no amount of windmilling your arms around will get rid of the stench”. There were dozens of them today, leaping and twirling about as if in a dismal marionette show.
No domestic court can overturn their license to dance (sadly), for Konono’s prescription to move is law of the highest order, some sort of ratified international treaty. A five piece tonight, featuring two likembe (one of which being the bass) shouting at each other in morse code, rat-tat-tat snare drumming, bongos, and banging on stuff. The crazy rhythms begin at 3.45, and continue relentlessly with only minor adaptations over the next hour, by which time the hippies have danced themselves into a tizzy, a pensioner has cast down his stick to groove wide eyed stage right, and a load of small children are rolling around on the floor having burned off a bucketful of e numbers. In fact (and I don’t think I’ve said this about a concert before, I must be getting old) one of the most pleasing things about today was seeing a number of people who had brought young children. Recently I was asked to produce a mix CD for my very young nephew, and Konono were one of the first things I chose to put on it, figuring their straight-to-the-feet beats and chants would be an ideal introduction (and one is definitely required, I must take any opportunity to try to guide the wee fella down an appropriate path) to music from the great beyond.
Quite what Konono had to do with Steve Reich is a bit opaque, although one could creatively extrapolate some sort of link involving African drumming, rhythm and repetition. Bang On A Can’s subsequent performance of works by the likes of Louis Andriessen and Michael Nyman probably did more to set Reich’s contribution in context, but having chosen a stupid place to sit on the floor, and spending an hour with people saying “Excuse me!”, “Sorry!”, “Were they your fingers?”, and “I appear to have kicked you in the head”, I’m not sure I could even begin to determine whether they succeeded.
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October 14, 2006 at 10:42 am
11V
So were you dancing Mapsadaisical? I would have brought my family along except I’d already seen them the night before in the far too restrained surroundings of the Barbican auditorium. They were the last on after an awful Coldcut remix and a pretty mediocre Kronos/Spooky collaboration. The Konono CD’s been a favourite of mine, and I’d rather have seen them on the freestage. I love to dance, but make no pretence of being any good so I’m in two minds about your audience dancing comments – I remember some really irritating dancers at a Jah Wobble gig trying to be trees, but people who can’t dance in time, but are enjoying themselves? Good luck to ‘em.
October 14, 2006 at 11:31 am
mapsadaisical
Oh I was dancing, it was impossible not to. Like you, I make no claims to being a good dancer, but I do not flail and gyrate in over-demonstrative and arrhythmic fashion. I found it quite distracting from events on stage. They didn’t even all look like they were having fun, more like it was quite hard work, and in the case of some, it seemed to make them a bit angry-looking.
I’m glad I missed the Coldcut/Spooky thing the night before by the sounds of it. I remember seeing DJ Spooky dragging down the Arkestra at the RFH a couple of years ago (neatly, the Arkestra extricated themselves with an astonishing free stage performance right afterwards).