The Nature of Why is not so much a concert as a multi-discipline happening. To assess it is to relate a human experience rather than just an aesthetic appreciation of the new orchestral work by Goldfrapp’s Will Gregory which is at its heart. On the surface, it’s an hour-long piece in nine short movements, interspersed with old BBC recordings of the Nobel Prize-winning American physicist Richard Feynman explaining how magnetism is unexplainable in layman’s terms.

Will Gregory (b.1959) is best known as one half of the alt-pop duo Goldfrapp but has a long career in music that dips into many areas. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s he was a working musician who toured with multiple bands, notably, Tears for Fears, as well as playing on sessions for albums by artists ranging from The Cure to Portishead. He is a multi-instrumentalist valued for his saxophone and woodwind playing (from Moondog and Michael Nyman to Peter Gabriel and it’s him on Spiritualized’s Lazer Guided Melodies), but as much for his general studio and arrangement abilities.

Torso Hell tells the story of an American soldier whose limbs were blown off in Vietnam. Amazingly, he and his buddies survived, and in the ensuing medical chaos his arms and legs were re-attached to them rather than him. The narrator says “At the hospital, it’s so crazy and confused that when these guys come in, the doctors and nurses don’t know what from what … they just start sewing. The main guy stays a torso, but they put his arms and legs back on the other guys.

Writing in 1980, the musician and musical theorist Chris Cutler said that “without the support and patronage of the culture-establishment, The Residents were able to exist, continue to exist, grow, find their public, hold that public – and expand it – until the pop establishment was forced to take notice.” He contended that as they were neither musicians or part of music sub-culture they “exemplified a new type [of development], specialising in nothing, turning their hands to anything: a type whose aims were no longer conceived in terms of music, theatre, film, writing or the visual arts, b

Despite the Welsh repute for singing, the Festival of Voice in Cardiff has always been more than just music.

The welcome to Glasgow audio-visual artist Robbie Thomson’s performance engenders a hefty sense of anticipation. It’s almost nervousness-inducing as we’re handed ear-plugs and warned about how very loud it’s going to be. Then, walking into the main hall from the bar, all is gloom. From 1849, for a century-and-a-half, this venue was a church and attached school, its claim to fame a dismissive mention in Jane Eyre. But this evening the stained glass windows are blacked out, blocking the evening sun.

Yorkshire theatre company IOU have a tool in their armoury that most of their peers do not. It’s an open-topped bus with tiered seating, as pictured above, built in Halifax and the only one of its type, replete with headphone sets for every seat. It is at the heart of Rear View, their show which takes to the streets of Brighton and puts the participant right at the blurred connecting point between art and reality. It’s a unique experience.

Rear View starts at a barge venue in Brighton Marina. The Marina is a gaudy, ugly place of clunky, mismatched modern buildings and tacky, American-style restaurants and bars. It 100% confirms the prejudices of anyone who thinks money can’t buy taste. Today, however, this large, Dutch houseboat-style barge is a funny little oasis of artiness amidst the plastic, high money tat. Our group, is herded into a life-drawing class, which gradually, via means it would be spoilsport-ish to reveal, leads to the main event.

Aboard the bus, we strap in and put on our headphones, which play a soundtrack of ambient piano seguing into chilled, occasionally spooked electronica. The form the event takes is a 40 drive around west Brighton, stopping every now and then so that the show’s solo performer, playing a 65 year old woman looking back on her life in poetically wrought stanzas, pops up somewhere on the roadside and talks directly to our headsets. At one point she continues narrating as she's driven along behind us in a blue Fiat. Mostly, though, she finishes then disappears. The mind cannot help but wonder at the logistics of whipping her around ahead of us so efficiently.

The show is co-written by Jemima Foxtrot and Cecilia Knapp who take turns giving the performances. It is the turn of Foxtrot when theartsdesk attends. Clad in a plain burlap-style cotton dress, she has a precise northern enunciation, a touch of the child about her voice which suits the story she weaves. It’s impressionist prose-poetry that touches on a tattoo, a song, a lost love, letters and events of long ago, emanating nostalgia and wistfulness.

In itself, in a small venue, it might pall quickly, but the way it blends with everything going on around, as Foxtrot stands at a bus shelter, in a café and so on, brings it to life. At one point she delivers a monologue right next to a very active motorbike workshop with amused geezers looking on, occasionally revving their machines very loudly (possibly on purpose!), drinking tea and chatting in the lush afternoon sun. The din adds to what Foxtrot is doing, as it’s supposed to, making the viewer genuinely start thinking about the nature of the planned experience versus the random in art, bringing to mind the ideas of Tristan Tzara, John Cage and other restless creatives who've pondered the matter.

Greater than the performed show itself is the experience of moving around, backwards, the world receding before our eyes all the time, cut off from the noise around in our soundtrack bubble (background sound is only audible during the acted sequences). The busy bank holiday streets are filled with people pointing at us, seated in rows in our bulky headphones. They wave. They take camera photos. We are on view. We are part of the experience. It is a flash of narcissism, there we are and then gone, a happening, with the lovely weather only adding to it all somehow.

Everything the eye takes in, with that soundtrack playing and the constant movement, becomes akin to a dream sequence in a film. It really does. That, for me, is the best bit about IOU Rear View. It’s a trip, in the best sense, and one well worth taking.

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Overleaf: Watch the trailer for IOU Rear View

When an acquaintance heard my first review of the Brighton Festival was a circus event they snorted, “Oh dear.” It’s strange; for a couple of decades there’s been a default setting among broad swathes of otherwise artistically-inclined Boho sorts: that circus is embarrassing and naff. Think of all those sniping jokes about jugglers at festivals and circus skills workshops. It’s all rather bizarre, especially pondered in the post-performance glow of Wales-based collective NoFit State Circus’s fantastic new show Lexicon. It’s hard to see what could possibly be naff about the human body doing things that seem impossible, beautifully lit, with vibrant live band accompaniment, amid a wild, carnival sense of spontaneity.

To start with, Lexicon takes place in an actual big top on Hove Lawns, by the seafront which, given it’s a gorgeous sunny day, is a great start. The big top itself is initially underwhelming from the outside, not a bright Victorian-style, fairground-themed affair but a giant, grey, domed nipple. Once inside, however, that’s irrelevant, with the performers mingling, doing walkabout theatre, hyping the atmosphere.

Things begin with the whole troupe sat at three rows of desks set on rails, naughty schoolchildren throwing paper about to a mesmeric Philip Glass-ian soundtrack provided by a band set to one side. That is until “teacher” arrives floating over them in a green housecoat. From there things quickly turn to anarchy as the desks float off into the air, like triple-headed sky-sledges, their inhabitants throwing more stuff about. The tone is set.

Over the next couple of hours, the eyes are soundly boggled. The show balances wild silliness and clowning with slower, more balletic acrobatics using silks, ropes, swings and one performer walking elegantly about on a pair of metal plates with handles that act as walking stick controllers, which he then hand-stands on and gives an astounding display of strength and balance.

It should be added that the word “clown” is used to encompass the skill set rather than any It!-style figures with white face-paint and red noses. Chief among these is a wildly curly-haired fellow in braced-trousers (to my shame, I’ve no reference programme to tell you names) whose energized antics are vitally dynamic, especially when clambering and flipping up and down a tall steel pole in the most outrageous, dangerous-looking fashion.

A high octane swing act towards the end may be the most viscerally nerve-wracking moment but there are multiple acts that defy belief. Chief among them are a female performer who, playing drunk, does a stunning balancing act on what looks to be a slack washing line, and the unicyclist Sam Goodburn whose trickery and skills are beyond anything this writer has ever witnessed in this vein. All the wacky antics involving NoFit State’s ensemble of demented bicycles is euphorically fun.

If pushed to critique Lexicon, small muffed moves and errors seem not to matter as they’re built into its earthy, anything-goes spirit, but the first half does seem more dynamic than the second, which is a curious way of doing things, and the second might even benefit from a trim. But these are truly minor quibbles. Overall, Lexicon is as delight. I've taken away a multitude of deliciously surreal memories, such as two performers playing chess on a single moving bicycle followed by a bobble-hatted servant on a unicycle worriedly trailing after them bearing a lamp to light them. It’s not the sort of thing you see every day, and nor is Lexicon.

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Overleaf: Watch a trailer for Not Fit State Circus's Lexicon show