Limbo news
31/3/10: Re-activate!
After what has been a long break even by Limbo standards, the sleeping giant is beginning to stir... Limbo will be back in action very soon, with gigs in Bristol and elsewhere, a new stage show for Limbo vs. Gerald Tyler and another album almost certainly due within the next decade or so. Starting with:
Limbo vs Gerald Tyler presents:
The Monkey Made Me Do It
Chapter Arts, Cardiff, Saturday May 1st 2010
Don't miss the first performance of a new project, a show that sits halfway between music and theatre, mixing narrative and free-jazz free-for-all... More information and tickets on the Chapter Arts website.
5/8/09: Another rare Limbo live outing!
And a previous gig...
11/11/07: Theatre news...
Big Hands, the critically-acclaimed collaboration between Limbo and Cardiff-based playwright, performer and raconteur Gerald Tyler, ran for ten dates in Cardiff in September 2007, in the Lloyds TSB / Black Horse building next to Cardiff Central station. The show was a fully-scored theatrical show featuring live music and both live and pre-recorded film.
Big Hands is (roughly) the story of Mr. Lewis, a private investigator who is engaged by a mysterious client to track down her one and only love. The absent love transpires to be the last remaining Angel still living on earth. Before long Mr. Lewis and the Angel become friends, and the client is discovered to be something other than the pining spouse she claims.
The show was a great success. The Guardian was kind enough to give us five stars - 'a ravishing piece of performance'. Vanity necessitates that we reproduce the full review below. Big thanks are due to our partners, Lloyds TSB, who provided not just a building but also money and support, and of course to the Arts Council of Wales, whose funding made the whole thing possible. There's sure to be more collaboration with Gerald; the plan is to form a proper professional company on the back of the success of 'Big Hands'. We'll keep you posted.
Big Hands Black Horse Building, Cardiff Elisabeth Mahoney Monday September 24, 2007 The Guardian Big Hands, an intensely charismatic piece of theatre noir, isn't performed in the slick corporate surroundings of the Black Horse building. Instead, Gerald Tyler's one-man show, commissioned by Chapter Arts Centre, is tucked away behind it, in an anonymous, creepy warehouse in one of Cardiff's darker corners. When you emerge, after 90 minutes of sense-tingling performance, the full impact of the setting hits you. In the ominous quiet, menacing shadows seem to jump out from everywhere, and it's a relief to get back to the safety of bright lights and the company of strangers. For this is murder mystery, detective story, dream sequence, beat poetry and film noir all rolled into one evocative journey, barely lit and brooding through the chiaroscuro. Tyler plays Lewis, a private detective replete with hard-boiled epithets and hints that his life isn't especially rosy. "I haven't really detected anything in quite a while," he says, swigging whisky grabbed from his filing cabinet. His dreams, which slowly build a poetic, emotional core to the play, are full of worrying stuff. "I get eaten alive by a pack of dogs with the heads of my immediate family," he explains. "Ordinary stuff." What makes this such an extraordinary evening's theatre is the dexterity, and seeming simplicity, with which Tyler illustrates his mesmerising story through film, music and movement. It begins in muted, casual fashion, with Tyler saying: "If you'll excuse me just for a second, I have to go and get something," before driving his car into the warehouse. From this, he drags the body of what appears to be an angel, its wings all speckled with blood, takes it out of sight and - the movement reflected in big shadows thrown all around the space - wraps it up to conceal the body. It is the first of many arresting visual images, and the beginning of a tale of troubled angels who need big hands to catch them as they fall. Tyler ingeniously weaves in video projection to create film sequences of him on a plane, the victim of a hit and run, driving through the night to safety. Backed by live, dubby jazz, this is a ravishing piece of performance that's endearingly free from pretension and self-regard despite its ambition and technical trickery.