The Demon Barbers Roadshow, performed in York last Sunday having created a stir in the leading weeks with participatory workshops at York Dance Works and morris sides dancing round some of the most famous attractions in the city. Our Malcolm Poole reviewed the show...
“Time Gentlemen Please”
By Macolm Poole
Sometime, somebody, somewhere, sat down and thought that it would be a
really good idea to mix lager and cider in the same glass. At first blush, not
the most appetising of mixes, and yet the Snakebite is here to stay as a
refreshing and enlivening heady brew.
In similar vein, Damien Barber sat down one day (probably with a Snakebite)
and thought that traditional folk dancing needed livening up if it was going to
appeal to a wider audience, and decided to blend it with hip hop. And
amazingly, like Snakebite, it works.
Barber is a highly respected musician with a Radio 2 Folk Award winning
reputation for producing innovative folk music by seamlessly intertwining it
with an electro edge and modern production. The Demon Barber Roadshow
“Time Gentlemen Please” takes the concept one step further,
The melting pot for all this cultural fusion is the Fighting Cock’s pub where
three hapless hip hop dancers manage to find themselves. The pub isn’t the
kind of place where you’d expect to find an open mike night and its
customers certainly don’t wear baggy sweats and 110 trainers, favoring
instead sword and clog dancing whilst attired in breaches and waistcoats.
What follows brings to mind dueling banjos but with clogs and beat box. As
one side shows off their skills the other retaliates with a display of their own
until both become harmonised and complement one another.
The fusion works so well that at times it’s hard to discern who’s sampling
who; is it a hip hop beat with a folk melody or is it the other was round? And
that’s the beauty of the show. As Barber says himself, the more that the
performers worked on the dance, the more the seemingly distinct styles come
to resemble one another, to the point where regardless of whether the stomp
comes from a clog or a Reebok Classic the rhythm is one.
Time Gentlemen Please starts off as a car crash between what appear to be
two hugely different styles of music and culture. Barber’s skill as a director
and his openness as an performer to embrace differing styles allow him to
pick through the wreckage and build a vehicle that performs well, looks good
and feels good; think Pimp my Ride meets Massey Ferguson tractor.
Anyway, I’m off to the bar for a few Snakebites and to practice my clog steps.
