As part of the selection process, I attended a showcase event at the garage in Norwich. I watched three acts perform and each of them were completely different, with individual qualities that made them stand out as musicians.
The first act was the 'Acafellas'. They were a male acapella group who sang popular music from across the decades. I really enjoyed their performance; they were very musically talented and they performed songs that I knew and was familiar with. I think that they had a pretty good stage presence and they interacted fairly well with the audience. Visually, however, their performance wasn't as interesting: the performers were mostly very static. In addition, their outfits were not co-ordinated, which meant that they did not look as polished as a group as they could have done, had they chosen a wardrobe theme. In all, it was a good performance, but I didn't feel like they were particularly unique or original in their approach to acapella music.
The second act, the 'Graffiti Classics', were a string quartet who performed classical music with choreography. At first, I really wasn't too keen on them; although their stage presence was good, their interactions with the audience came across as a little rude. The actual performance was brilliant, though - the amount of energy that the group projected was awesome and the combination of dancing, humour and classical music made it a very interesting performance both to listen to and to look at. There was a huge amount of audience interaction/participation and they did a good job at retaining our attention. It was a very enjoyable performance and I would be happy to see them again.
The third and final act was a man named Richard Navarro, who performed his own original songs with an accompanying cellist. What was really unique about Navarro's performance was the fact that he used live looping to bring his pieces to life, right there on the stage, with only two people. His stage presence wasn't quite as developed as the others' and he was less aware of the audience than the previous acts had been, but the emotion and raw talent that he projected into his music was extremely impressive. His original songs were wonderfully and beautifully written. However, his style was so unique that he didn't appeal to most of the people who watched him. It was because of this that he was not chosen for our event.
I thoroughly enjoyed the whole event and it gave me a chance to listen to music that I wouldn't normally and it also gave me an opportunity to critically analyse performances. The ideas that I got from the event will be ones that I will implement into future personal projects. You can find my website here.
0 Comments