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ABOVE : SOAK Live Art at The House January 2025

SOAK Live Art | 31 JANUARY 2025 | The House | Devon and Cornwall Art and Event Photography

Opening up the evening with transcendental musings , Piano and the cumulative distancing of delay, was MC Happy. Slight, funny and ethereal, his performance faded us up into proceedings with a nuanced and ghostly hand, Pianissimo Infinitesimal.

Living completely in the moment is not so hard for a performer under such circumstances, but it can be for the audience. While it was a little hard to focus on his gentle philosophical reflections from a cave wall under the bright lights of a stage at first, his whispered utterances like his beard grew slowly with time, and by the end I had begun to embrace circular breathing...

 

ABOVE: Mc Happy at The House Plymouth 2025

Light hearted, but more importantly, pure hearted, checkout Mc Happy's (nirvanmakesmusic) Instagram feed for his beautiful musical interpretation of Prospero's speech Act IV, from The Tempest

'We are such stuff as dreams are made on and our little life is rounded with a sleep.'

The poetry of Andrew Martin in which dreams and the lovely idea that everything dreams everything else into existence, was presented over a subtle ambient soundtrack by composer/producer Riigs, in the form of Andrew's poem 'A DREAMING'.

ABOVE: Andrew Martin at The House Plymouth 2025

Martin, who is also a wildlife illustrator, used his own digital artwork as a back projection, imbuing the reading with the same contemplative and transportive feelings you experience when losing yourself in an open book. The hypnotic nature of poetry at it's best offers the promise of getting lost in another literary dimension. That promise was fulfilled here in a daisy chain of memorable musings from an adept and original wordsmith, who proficiently teased and cajoled the everyday into flights of otherworldly potential.

From the invocation of the never-world of the insomniac and the waking daydreamer with the opening line 'The halfway place dreams of shipwrecks' the poet takes us on a long pilgrimage of the imagination before closing with the confession 'and I dream of you'.

This is not just a list of antipodes and places, there are lovely moments that light upon the inner life of objects 'stones that dream of being smooth and flat enough to be chosen to skim ripples' and the transformative' dreams of clouds petrified within slabs of marble' both stuck in my head.

Themes of redemption and re-invention punctuate the prose and the inviting offer of an alternative time or place, a situation that would provide stark relief to other ways of being, is repeatedly reflected on. Great lines like 'Fresh Bread that dreams of caves' kept us all submerged in rapt reverie.

ABOVE : Junghee Borthwick at SOAK Live Art in January 2025

Junghee Borthwick, who was not the last performer this night to encourage audience participation, explored the immigrant experience with dance, movement and song .

Before leading us through stories of places and people from her Korean childhood, and encouraging the audience to join in with a popular song from her homeland with the gestures that accompany it, her performance opened with her conversing through movement.

BELOW : Junghee Borthwick at SOAK Live Art in January 2025

Initially by moving in a way that seemed to me like walking through a city or an urban space. In that way in which ones movement mirrors the somewhat frenetic and random energy of a place alive with a myriad of stories overlaid on top of each other , intersecting at multiple points. Alert and looking around in both stylized and natural ways with her head movements, she seemed to be referring to what she calls 'The illusion of assimilation'. Something many of us will rarely, if ever feel, unless we are living as a minority in area where people's very limited experience of our kin, has reduced us down to lazy stereotypes.

ABOVE : Anna Ling 'The Buzzard' SOAK JAN 2025

Bringing the first half of the evenings performances to a close was Anna Ling with her spellbinding evocations of three birds. The Owl, the Buzzard and the Blackbird. With quiet skilful determination, she drew us into her confidence with her intricately adorned and intimate aviary anecdotes. Like the intense but minute spiralling spat sparks from a camp-side fire, and their tiny falling ash parachutes, each feathered fact drifted down and landed on unsuspecting shoulders, the Shamen's lint gifting us with insights that made the birds all the more real.

Inviting us all into her virtual musical Yurt, this accomplished storytellers determination and infectious enthusiasm for her subjects, drew you into the birds world and made joining in almost inevitable. The call and response song cycle between Anna and audience, was soft, harmonious and measured, and mirrored the burbling bird songs that fuel our rural dreams. Songs from on the wing, reminding us all that this land is not ours and we are not alone.

ABOVE :Anna Ling at SOAK JAN 2025

Really not alone.

After the interval the audience gathered in a seated circle on the stage area . Ready to be transported onto the moor and then potentially onto further interstellar journeys as Crab and Bee discussed alien beings and UFO stories.

ABOVE : Crab and Bee at SOAK Live Art The House January 2025

The Scoriton Mystery specifically, and it's human protagonist Arthur Bryant. Whom I could not help picturing as Arthur Dent or at least the BBC TV Simon Jones version of him , dressing gown and all. Threescore years now since the 1965 incident and it is the feeling of travelling back in time that permeated the performance more than the interstellar.

The ambiguity that clothed Mc Happy in a comedic shroud, so slight and gentle that it were as if the impression of Jacques De Molay ( whom he did spookily resemble) were playing the keys, was here too, but in a more upfront no nonsense fortean fashion.

I am not sure what I made of it but nobody there will forget the buildings roof flying off at the end of their performance and Orion's trousers floating down.

ABOVE : Crab and Bee at The House SOAK January 2025

The manic Pierrot drag antics of Noodlez, with her 'Boyz' assisting her in moving props, regaled us with a checklist she worked through, castigating and chiding both the audience, and the sound and vision techs, in a kinetically explosive arch performance that explored themes of representation, self love and chaos.

ABOVE : Noodlez at SOAK 2025

The Spoils Collective were triumphant in, if there is such a thing, the best sense of the word. Jubilant and exultant it was almost impossible to disagree with Antonia's rendition of 'Facebook (My Life)' from within the onstage giant TV, that her characters life was indeed much better than ours.

Divine and alluring in the most Spoils infused fashion, she reminded us all of how dreary and predictable our own monochrome lives really are in comparison to the thrilling and fabulous social media existence friends like her like foist upon us.

This stage was born to host The Spoils Collective whose Wizard of Oz like technodelic dream state, was coaxed out across the space, like a forceps assisted disgorging of the contents of a green recycling bin lorry, in an alternative version of Chelson Meadow. The recycling centre of your dreams. Somewhere on the backlot of a long forgotten film studio, where B-Movie props and the detritus of forgotten dreams, weep on being given a new life with this eclectic group of performance led musical guardians.

ABOVE : The Spoils Collective at the January 2025 SOAK

To call Mo a local treasure would only end up making him a target for Indiana Jones and the New Years honours list, so I will stick with calling him a bedazzling and beloved versatile trinket, a fascinating factotum, an essential cultural polymath in this tricky cities creative quagmire. If the rest of us could summon even a fraction of the enthusiasm with which he spat out the Stacey Dooley song we could probably help rebalance the FA cup half-time tea break electricity deficit on the National Grid.

I do not wish anyone to try and live their life vicariously through others, but the stage is there for actors to do so on our behalf, and Mo is very much at home there. The miasma of despair conjured in each 'Ooof Melania' would make even Frankie Howard blush.

ABOVE : Mo From The Spoils at The House in 2025

Maz continues to amaze in amazing ways, kicking off her shoes and throwing chairs, invoking both audience , security and the demon host himself in a stonking rendition of 'Jeremy'. A now nostalgic nightmare of daytime soul stripping TV that must leave some younger audience members as perplexed as the guests who were informed they needed to 'get a life' by a television vampire, so leech like, he probably didn't even show up on the studio floor monitors.

Matt's bass playing was, as always, sublime and provided that melodic and rhythmic framework on which everything else hung. Often embodying the everlasting ennui that suffuses this fleshy walk through a crumbling world his melodic playing and Chris' dependable, though sometimes appropriately collapsing rhythm section, helped impose some sense of order to proceedings.

In a lesser, or possibly greater band, it would have been primary school macramé plant pot hangers out of which would have tumbled the inspired nonsense that these troubadours of trauma present. In Matthew's capable hands though, the tense lines strung a strong steel cradle that held it all together. The Tamar Bridge still safe, even when faced with a million marching ducks dressed in tuxedos.

ABOVE: Matthew from The Spoils Collective The House SOAK Live Art January 2025

The entire band, (Wheelie and all with his ridiculously sexy glasses), are like the musical equivalent of a parabolic curve. Straight boring lives are strung across right angles and pushed into service creating the most interesting and beautiful of curves. With multi-coloured cotton and fast escaping melodies, there are a few threads that are pulled tight almost to breaking point and others discarded when sometimes going quite a way past it.

Like a cultural snowball picking up intellectual litter or a toddler collecting infections, habits, half eaten lollipops, beautiful leaves and dog bark impressions as it progresses, the Spoils set unfurled randomly and finished with the widescreen redux Blue Peter cereal box social commentary project to end all others.

ABOVE: Marion from The Spoils at SOAK 2025

These (SOAK) shows, give you permission to abscond and absorb and make me want to make, despite society telling me how unnecessary that is when I could be consuming.

And that for me is more than enough.

ABOVE : SOAK at The House 2025

ABOVE : THE SPOILS at SOAK LIVE ART 2025

ABOVE : Crab and Bee at SOAK LIVE ART

ABOVE : ANdrew Martin at SOAK LIVE ART in 2025

 

ABOVE : The Spoils Collective at Soak Live Art at Plymouth's 'The House' 2025

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You can find more SOAK Live Art JANUARY 2025 photographs in the facebook gallery here

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