CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Black Waters, Leeds Playhouse/Touring
Impressionistic approach to colonial crimes muddies waters
CONFUSING HISTORY LESSON: Black Waters
[Zoe Martin]
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
BLACK Waters, Phoenix Dance Theatre’s homage to unexplored cultural histories, focuses on two episodes from Britain’s colonial past – the 1781 Zong ship massacre, during which 130 African slaves were thrown overboard for insurance purposes and the torture of Indian freedom fighters at the Kala Pani island prison between 1858 and 1938.
Rather than present a straight narrative of the events, co-creators Sharon Watson – Phoenix's artistic director – and Shambik Ghose and Mitul Sengupta, from Kolkata-based Rhythmosaic, have chose to explore them through themes of “place, worth and belonging.”
But the impressionistic choreography means that without programme notes it’s virtually impossible to relate movement to subject matter.
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