If you asked me to sum the night up in a single phrase, I’d have to say it was “Legendarily Acrobatic.” The attractions of the event, the Cardiff WOW festival, were definitely the partly aerobic, partly dance-ical performance that the artists had put up, all stacked together at a breathtaking 50 feet in the air. Not to forget the, what I would call it, amazingly sinful rock performance by a local band filling the background.
The Cardiff WOW festival, which surprisingly had elicited a massive turnout, was what we thought predominantly a Spanish event. I say Spanish because all that we could hear apart from a loud buzz around us, while people were desperately hunting for a place to sit that allowed them a clear view of the happenings of the event, were peppy Salsa tracks taken from a presumably mixed tape of Spanish groove musical hit. It was a quite soothing to be out with friends, after a long time, and be a part of a cultural event.
Colours seemed to be dancing all around the place, the music was adding just the appropriate amount of peppiness to the overwhelming crowd, and a Spanish couple doing a bit of their hip-shaking Salsa piece (with the woman dressed up in a striking pink skirt with its perils floating around to the thumping beats choreographed by her butt) just before the commencement of the event was a delightful watch.
And of course, there was always the stereotypical Indianness sprinkled over – four to five guys lurking around with hands in their pockets. To some people that would sound normal, and as you would imagine, people with hands in their pockets are not oddballs. But, as uncomfortable as they looked, with their butts begging to tear apart the jeans and stick out, and the way we, or atleast I, could see the inescapable outlines of their fingers (which were by the way, inside their pockets) did nothing but accentuate the tightness of the outfit. You may think I sound gay to be describing guys in that manner, but well, spotting Indianness in a crowd full of multicultural people, and ensuing it with a heavy dose of laughter is what Indians are good at.
The evening kicked off at what seemed to be Judgment Day, owing to the ludicrous delay the organizers had subjected the event to. Once it did, the performers made it look like one of the worst events I had been to. The first half of the event was dominated majorly by a narrator screaming a mythological story over his microphone in, what one of my friends called it as, a constipated tone. To add to the boredom, some of which was actually because of the unclear view that we, as back-standers, could buy for ourselves.
The foreground was casted in a badly choreographed play, and the credits included dragons walking around the stage in all possible directions, and the rest of the crew that wore body clinging tees and tights having a Halloween makeup on their faces. The makeup, however, served the purpose if it was meant to highlight the ugliness of the people – not in the Halloweenish way, but of a more “regiment of a Gothic King” way. The consistent mythological rambling went on for an hour, before it gave way to the awesome part of the night.
By this time the night had fallen, and the lights were up. A rock band took its place on the stage (something that is quite quintessential if you’re going to a cultural event). The difference being, firstly that it wasn’t an all-male rock band where the vocalist tries to create new versions of his hoarseness; secondly, where the desperate guitarists and drummers, to prove their individual presence in the band, start playing off in insanely different tangents, marked by constant jumping or unreasonable head-banging.
Along with the music, was the most awe-inspiring piece of acrobats performed by a bunch of eight people. The prop included a spherical cage, with a large opening at the bottom, suspended by a crane. Performers got inside, and before they were lifted up to an unbelievable height of 50 feet, they had elicited enough jaw-dropping reactions.
High above, the performers formed two lines of four, with the top most hanging on to the sink of the cage, and everyone that followed holding on to the predecessor’s feet. Within a minute, the lines had transformed into a double helix. To add to the amazement, the cage began spinning, to demonstrate what some biologists would say, the exact functioning of the DNA. The second heart racing sight was when one of the persons stood in the middle of the cage, while the rest formed a circle on the circumference, jumped down, letting himself a free fall. Of course the strap he was tied to from his waist to the cage did not let him experience a crash on the earth, but his jump in itself gave the crowd a figurative heart attack.
Another staggering inclusion was the impeccable coordination of the choreography with the music that ran 50 feet below, on the surface of the earth. The current of sentiments flowing through with the music was in complete resonance with the happenings in space. For all “Mother Earth” lovers, the night couldn’t have been better.
The band that ran its composition in the background was five piece, with the female as the vocalist, while the instruments were played by guys. It’s an ensemble most of the established bands have adopted – predominantly Gothic bands like Evanescence, Within Temptation and Lacuna Coil and the partial emo, partial punk Paramore.
The music coming out of the band was one of the most coordinated live performances I have ever heard. The riffs weren’t anything remotely close to the earth-shattering rock that you normally expect at any event, but something that I would call as a “progressively soulful rock.” The first two tracks were an inspiration from Within Temptation’s “Mother Earth”, with the vocalist reciting hymns and crying out loud for liberation and deliverance, rather than crashing her guitars over her ex boyfriend. It seemed to be like a perfect extract from a movie that kept Apocalypse or Armageddon as their central theme.
The next track advanced from a serene and soulful form of rock (not to be confused with soft rock) into a stronger version. This is where notes of Rise Against kicked in, with the coordinated set of four moving together to produce a beautiful collaboration and chaos and jeopardy (if you’re a Rise Against fan, you’ll know chaos implies “beauty”).
And the last performance was more or less a combination of these two versions. The vocalist came back in, this time her voice stronger than before, and the background score thumping with a louder impact.
The night ended with a powerful shower of firecrackers shooting in the air. Colours of purple, yellow, golden, green and red sparkled all over the sky – some that looked like a tracer-bullet launching itself into the night sky, some that exploded from a tiny dot and spread out its glitter in all directions around, while the rest whirled around until it gave birth to a small peck of white light and crackling sound.
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