Sheer Pleasure

If there is one thing you should NOT miss at the Festival for the sheer pleasure of the experience it is Stompin’s WeTubeLIVE.100 performances staged by fifty young people live and simultaneously – re-enactments of their favourite YouTube clips inside metre square stages, marked out in rows on the floor, their own individual IPods pumping through little speakers.


Wandering through the Albert Hall’s magnificence in between and around the performances I think, it’s wild, it’s mad, it’s endless, like a hoard of the most outrageous buskers gone feral. These young performers are focussed, engaged ,alive and having so much fun inside the private world of their little squares.

Sometimes reminiscent of a 19th century mad house scene with girls screaming, boys talking to themselves, manically laughing and frantically dancing , but equalled by moments of exquisite beauty – a girl painstakingly folding an origami dove , a boy in a bear suit playing gentle folk songs on guitar , a ballerina intensely focussed on her meticulous moves. Solos, duets, multiples, sometimes they all stop together – silent, resting, still – only to start up again like a flock of chattering wild birds.

The performance is constantly changing, it is chaos, it is enchanting, it is disturbing, it is SO focussed and it is hilarious all at the same time. And the audience are grinning from ear to ear as they wander in amongst the chaos. It’s such a great idea, there is so much more to see than you can possibly take in at one showing …I think I’ll have to come again tomorrow.