fringe: cadence

This was the second to last show for Cadence by a brilliant new quintet of performers, the last show is next Saturday, and I cannot emphasise enough that if you don't have a ticket, you are definitely missing out on one of the best and most unique shows of the 2015 Fringe.

This is one of the few shows I've been to where the audience broke into a spontaneous standing ovation at the end.

And it's just not like anything I've seen before. It's circus but it's not, it's music but it's not, it's five very unique performers bringing their very diverse skills together to make something greater than the sum of it's parts.

I've mentioned before that I'm not always a fan of just pure circus done for the sake of pure circus, but this was almost so distilled down to it's essence that it had gone all the way around and come back the other way.

But to take a step back for a moment, the quintet is made up of circus performers Daniel Liddiard and Rhiannon Cave-Walker, drummer, musician and sampler Elliot Zoerner, digital artist and remixer Tom Brown and brilliant (and not to mention gorgeous... those hands, oh my stars) guitarist Geordie Little. And the show goes through each of their talents and skills one by one and then like the work of Zoerner and Brown, it remixes and splices it all together at the end in an incredible way.

Liddiard and Cave-Walker tumble and balance, Liddiard stands on his hands like a champion and Cave-Walker blends dance and circus... Zoerner takes a single sound and warps, weaves and bends it until it's an entire song of it's own... Brown samples TV chefs and turns Jamie, Nigella and Gordon into an amazing hip-hop inspired sound... and Little weaves those lithe fingers and sharp little fingernails across the strings and body of his guitar, teasing out sounds I didn't even realise that you could get a guitar to make.

And like Gravity and Other Myths, which Liddiard, Cave-Walker and Zoerner are all members of, they do it all in street clothes.

The best part of the show was the finale where they bring all the elements together... Liddiard starts tumbling around the stage, Zoerner and Brown use a microphone to sample his landings and body slaps to turn it into a beat, Little provides the melody and when Cave-Walker arrives to join Liddiard you realise that he has been running a duet without a partner the whole time.

If there's a single flaw in this show it's the fact that it only runs for thirty minutes... but mark my words, we have definitely not heard the last of Cadence, and I cannot wait to see what they do next!

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