Nights at the Circus

The landscape of performance is changing. Back when I started The Vile Arts Radio Hour, most of my guests were firmly in one camp or another: here's the musician, next up, it's cabaret time, and we'll be joined later by a visual artist. Suddenly, I'm having guests who are working several angles. I mean, we invited Mark from Natalie Pryce on because his band had a new album out. A few weeks later, and they are putting on a variety evening.

I am not claiming that the Radio Hour has been instrumental in this shift towards eclecticism, only that it does suit the show's own short attention span. I shall point out that two of the artists on the bill for Nights At The Circus have already visited me at Subcity this year, and allow the reader to draw their own conclusion on whether the approach of Vile Arts is accurately reflecting this new wave of promoters and artists who are interested in crossing aesthetic boundaries.

In the meantime, let's cut to a shout out for Natalie Pryce. The album is a rough-edged take on the sinister blues that have served Nick Cave so well, given a punkier, youthful vitality, and the event on Thursday 18th October sees them line up alongside fellow creatives of a more DIY, visceral edge. The curation seems to have picked up on what the cabaret revival was always threatening - a genuinely diverse bunch of artists, united only in a broad enthusiasm for the darker side of human emotion.

Rather like Edinburgh's Kabarett, Nights at the Circus aims more for quality than uniformity: three bands (Pryce, the more traditional blues rock of Big Hogg and Dog Moon Howl), live art maverick and sometime Minotaur Calum MacAskill, Derek McLuckie turning out a spot of "short theatre" (last time out, I saw him in a genderqueer reading of Genet's The Maids, a dizzying slap at sexual and social power games), a couple of acrobats and burlesque from Miss Hell's Belle, who has been known to stray into Nick's dark Cave of erotic terror.

It's interesting to see how each of the acts can play off each other: burlesque's downfall was always the ubiquity of certain routines (the fan dance, the reverse striptease) appearing at every show, and rock gigs degenerated into bland rituals in around 1974. Poetry - here read by Claire Askew - is pulled out of its polite ghetto into Stereo's basement and MacAskill always brings the discomfort.