“Careful, there’s a hole in the floor.” The warning’s an unusual one, passed along conscientiously by the stewards at the door of the tiny Orange Tree Theatre.
Anyone familiar with psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk’s bestseller The Body Keeps the Score (2014) will recognise the ghost of his title in Lucia Osborne-Crowley’s My Body Keeps Your Secrets. His book is an essential text for understanding the physiological changes wrought by trauma and the techniques that work to recalibrate body, mind and brain in its aftermath. Through a blend of memoir and reportage, Osborne-Crowley explores the same subject while indicating her own emphasis: the experience, and grammar, of shame.
The endless circles and spirals that dance music moves in can take you to some strange places.
I’m one of the women in the pages of Elinor Cleghorn’s new history of the female body, Unwell Women: A Journey Through Medicine and Myth in a Man-Made World. I’ve dealt with strange chronic pain throughout my early twenties. Still, I’ve always felt like I could articulate fairly clearly what I felt was wrong with my body, at least in my own words, if not in a medical sense, and have been lucky enough to see a series of compassionate GPs, gynaecologists and physiotherapists (all themselves women).
The latest album from Marina Diamandis, her fifth, is a startling explosion of vim and attitude. It mingles speeding, wordy, indie-tinted dance-pop bangers, tilting at all manner of contemporary ills, with sudden moments of broken-hearted piano-led contemplation. When she last appeared two years ago, it was with the lengthy Love + Fear album, Paloma Faith-ish songs whose tastefulness masked real character.
Absorbed meets Allison at the end of her relationship with Owen. They are at a New Year's Eve party when she realises that their 10-year partnership has wound down. So far, so normal. But even within this introduction, we are drawn into Allison's head, the promise clear that the anxieties she hears on a daily basis will become secondary characters to the plot itself.
Introduced by Brighton Festival 2021 Guest Director, poet Lemn Sissay, Josie Long, clad in blue denim dungarees and a black tee-shirt, initially hits the stage for a celebratory introduction. She’s here to perform her Tender show about pregnancy and childbirth, but this is her first show in well over a year, due to COVID-19, and she’s keen to say hello first. She’s excited and it’s contagious.
In the first short story of Lucy Caldwell’s collection Intimacies, “Like This”, one of the worst possible things that could ever happen to a parent occurs. On the spur of a stressful moment in a café, an overloaded mother takes her screaming toddler to the toilet and leaves her baby in its pram with a woman she barely knows. When she returns, the pram is still there, but the baby is gone: “You have left the most helpless, precious thing you own with a complete and utter stranger.”
From deep within the bowels of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop came the sounds of the future. Strange howls and beeps, unnatural yet recognisably human-made. And while this was the dawning of a new epoch for music, it was also the frontier of a larger societal shift. A space where women could invent, compose and lead.