"It's heavy content made to fit a lightweight form. It's rock + roll. It's foreign and a bit Berlin." (Eddie Ladd)
Club Luz is the event, a short club night of electro songs with visuals and choreography. Shock Corridor is the set, 12 numbers based on Sam Fuller's cult B-movie from 1963. The movie features Trent, a black inmate of a mental hospital, who believes he is white and a member of the Ku Klux Klan. With Fuller's hospital as a metaphor for a nation, Trent is the expression of a self-loathing learned by being on the wrong side of the colonial adventure.
On stage at Club Luz are one of Wales most charismatic and innovative performers Eddie Ladd - "I do Trent like if he were Welsh and a girl" - and composer/D.J. Dewi Evans. Inspired by Kraftwerk, The Fall, Bowie, Brel, Laurie Anderson, and Kylie, the singer at the lone microphone leaves the film behind and walks the theme through 12 songs on the colonised split brain, alienation, aspiration, grief, extreme solutions, and the redemptive power of pop. The dark and haunting interpretation of songs in English and Welsh, ranges from an ironic version of Those Were the Days, a 1960's hit by Welsh singer Mary Hopkins to an unrecognisable take on the Beach Boys' Surf's Up, and offers an enthralling speculative essay on the 'Welsh condition'.
Her utterly distinctive performance work, blending film, high energy physical theatre, the innovative use of technology with an exploration of complex, political themes, have gained Eddie Ladd international recognition. Critics hailed her as 'exceptional talent', with 'angelic, laser-sharp voice', admiring the utter control of her emotional expressions and movements.
Club Luz won the Edinburgh Total Theatre Award (2003) and was featured in the prestigious Battersea Arts Centre Opera Festival in London (2004). In 2002 Eddie was awarded a two-year fellowship from NESTA, the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, to put her performance on the internet.
Appearing in festivals and at venues around Europe, she has taken performance to unusual locations, from farms and fields to opera houses. Her works include Callas Sings Mad Songs (1993), Once Upon a Time in the West (1996), Lla'th (1999), a site specific event set in a farmhouse, weaving together the death of Christ, Yuri Gagarin and the Welsh farmer David Finch, as well as Scarface (2000), an ironic take on the American dream based on Brian de Palma's 1983 film, transferring it to rural west Wales, the region of her upbringing.
Bettina Knaup
