Cardiff Central Library’s Floor 5 is an intriguing space this afternoon as dancers create figures around the nonchalant and perhaps intentionally blasé public sitting at computer screens, while music gently starts across the walkways and video of work created in another space is shown on the screen.
This interruption is surprisingly un interrupting, such is our way of managing to ignore anything that we are not familiar with or that is not in a familiar space associated with it. Dance and live musician library? Surely not.
Commissioned for CDF17 this is a multidisciplinary and now this review is being written “live” a multi media intervention as part of India Wales and in the lift before the event even started chats were taking place with young people from Mumbai and Delhi and Cardiff.
The volume increased and the combination of bass and percussion with saxophone melds with voices and general library activity from lower levels.
Over my shoulder a girl is watching an Amy Winehouse video earphones plugged in and the live performance blocked out. Others are searching on-line for jobs, while a chap next to me researches census records with a neatly folded pink birth certificate in his hand as the tempo increases and yet attention remains fixed to screens.
The nine large screen unit behind the players, beautiful, multi coloured paint patterns on a floor, some created by pouring from containers, others spread with feet, captured by video continues as the musicians change tone and an ever undulating, changing sensation flows through the space. Interrupted yet? No, my new friend is now is now listening to Chaka Khan but judging from the genteel ripple of applause others have had their ears directed at the band.
The library event followed on from the Central Market and the ATRium, University of South Wales and leads into perhaps the most intriguing element, work at Cardiff’s Central Market….
