EVEN - Norwich
Just as the 2023 Norfolk & Norwich Festival readies itself to kick off on Friday of this week, another series of concerts and performances are already occurring, buried within the subterranean spaces of the Norwich Undercroft Gallery. Organised by EVEN-Norwich, the programme launched on Monday 1st May with an afternoon of film and music presented by the East Anglian Film Archive along with DJ Reg Tubby. Another seven events will culminate with a mixed film and performance event on Friday 26th. But, on a moist and stormy Wednesday night, I am here for a sold out performance that features Suffolk composer Laura Cannell, London writer Juliet Jacques, and Suffolk guitar legend Robert Cox.
I first visited The Undercroft back in May 2014, when Bristol-based audiovisual artist Kathy Hinde had installed a piece of work called 'Tipping Point', as part of that year's Norfolk & Norwich Festival. For those that are unfamiliar with the venue, it is a multi-purpose gallery space situated behind Norwich Market, and underneath what is now the Memorial Gardens. Previously used as storage space for the market traders, it now provides space that can be used for exhibitions and live art performance.
With a capped capacity of fifty persons, the organisers had screened off the Guildhall end of the space, and were using the accessible entrance at the St Peter Mancroft end of the market. (Warning – this ramped entrance can get very slippery if there is a heavy downpour). There are no toilets, but the local pub that overlooks the market have kindly offered the use of their facilities, meaning that there is no excuse to hold back from using the EVEN pop-up bar situated within The Undercroft.
The evening opened with the welcome return to Norwich of Laura Cannell, a prolific composer and musician whose works are typically recorded within unusual spaces – lighthouses, church towers, dovecotes, even a disuded shipping container. Tonight she performed a selection of pieces within what can now be added to her list of acoustically unique settings, and was playing on both violin and recorder. Beginning on violin with 'All The Land Ablaze', her rustic, folk-infused tune with just a hint of gypsy rhythm, she next switched to overbowing for her composition inspired by medieval French music. Then followed the first of several tunes from her new 'No Sound Is Lost' EP, the sense of confinement and echo that she discovered in that shippng container now seeming absolutely perfect for The Undercroft's incommodious spaces. With twin recorders we were treated to birdsong-inspired pieces from last year's 'Antiphony of The Trees', and the beautiful 'Marshland Lullaby', before the set concluded with the panoramic 'Winter Saltings', from 2016's 'Simultaneous Flight Movement'. This was an atmospheric and gorgeous start to the evening.
Juliet Jacques is a writer, author, and long-suffering Norwich City supporter, whose blog posts for The Guardian led to her memoir 'Trans' being published in 2015. Tonight she read excerpts from a short story called 'Standards of Care', a fictionalised account that referenced both punk music and gender reassignment, and is set in late 70's London. It is taken from her new collection, 'Variations', a witty and acerbic history of transgender Britain that I now intend to seek out and read in full.
Closing the evening was a virtuosic performance from multi-instrumentalist Robert Cox, incorporating guitar harmonics, looped sounds and cathedralic synth lines. Even though the moisture and dampness that had inevitably pervaded the Undercroft from the storms outside were causing havoc with instrument tuning (at one point the water pouring through the downpipes sounded rather like an ambient waterfall), Cox got into his groove and delivered a set that was engrossing, spiritual, and at the same time, strangely redemptive. One got the impression that he would have continued playing long into the night, were it not for the time constraints of the venue booking.
Congratulations to EVEN-Norwich for such a brilliantly curated evening of live performance. I look forward to many more of the same. Check out the rest of this month's programme at www.even-norwich.co.
