PERFORMANCES FOR THE CURIOUS
Performances For The Curious is a seasonal programme for smaller and one-off productions coming to the Wales Millennium Centre. This season includes a highly inclusive and eclectic mix of headlines, such as Against The Grain, brought to you by Wales Arts Review’s Jafar Iqbal as he presents a double bill of artists who defy cultural norms: Dancing Queer and Holly Morgan, whose Madonna Or Whore explores Freud’s complex of that name – the inability to maintain sexual arousal in a long term committed relationship. This is pop culture cabaret with a point to make.
Other performances include Séyoncé – a self-proclaimed “dragtastic seance for those lonely souls in desperate need of the camp ecstasy of cabaret and character-comedy.” Further along the drag-based offerings there’s Connie Orff – a Cardiff local who describes themselves as “an inclusive, asthmatic, bilingual gay dad in a dress.” And FooFooLaBelle and the soloists from Cardiff Cabaret Club join forces to give you Ffresh Burlesque [pictured]. What more could you want?
If you’re looking for things that are a little less smut and a little more sophisticated, poet Holly McNish is on her 2019 tour and will be reading and chatting for her night here. Her poem Mathematics has managed 1.9 million hits on YouTube and explores how we negotiate race, home and acceptance in Britain. Lucie Jones, Welsh X-Factor contestant whose credits include lead roles in Les Misérables and Legally Blonde, will be performing her personal West End numbers. There’s also Blah Blah Blah: Stand Up And Slam, where stand-up comedy squares up to slam poetry. Who will win? The audience decides.
Elsewhere, The Nature Of Why explores physicist Richard Feynman’s search for meaning in the world around us through nine distinct and emotive movements and a Machynlleth Comedy Festival preview gives us a chance to see the best of this year’s festival. Then there’s the strangeness of User Not Found, a sort-of theatre play about our posthumous digital identities. Audiences will receive a smartphone and a pair of headphones as they follow the story on its strange permutations – that one will definitely be a performance for the curious.
words Ruth Seavers
Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff Bay, Fri 15 Mar-Wed 15 May. Tickets: prices vary. Info: 029 2063 6464 / www.wmc.org.uk