Seven amazing live videos from seven acts at Meltdown Festival

This year’s Meltdown festival, curated by Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons, is perhaps one of the eclectic, off-the-wall and fiercely intellectual line-ups that the musician-curated event has ever seen. Taking place at the Southbank Centre between 1st – 12th August, the line up is heavy with formidable, intellectual and talented names, all bound to provide shows that move between art, music and discussion with a seamless, elegant ease.

Joan As Police Woman, 3rd August

Maine-based artist Joan As Police Woman is a long-standing collaborator with Antony, and has been known to wear skin-tight leather for her live shows, while flicking between multiple instruments and cracking jokes with her rapt audience. Watch her here performing the track ‘I Defy’, originally recorded with Antony himself, in Berlin last month.

CocoRosie, 4th August

This ramshackle live video sees sisterly duo CocoRosie sling together a song out of toys and twee trinkets. It might be a bit mad, but it also sounds beautiful – which is quite an apt way of describing the general experience of watching these two perform, as they fuse together elements and influences that ought to crumble under the weight of each other. Instead, the result is always a bit mystifying, and a bit magnificent.

Marina Abramovic, 5th August

This clip shows snippets of performance artist’s Marina Abramovic’s iconic exhbition ‘The Artist Is Present’, in which she performed for over 700 hours at New York’s Museum of Modern Art – “performing” here meaning “sat in a chair looking terrifying.” At Meltdown, she’ll be presenting a women’s only event (all male ticket holders will be refunded), which will presumably last a bit less than 700 hours, but at which she may or may not sit in a chair looking terrifying.

Laurie Anderson: Dirtday!, 3rd August

Experimental performance artist Laurie Anderson curated her own Meltdown festival in 1997, performing with 200 violins and inviting her mates Brian Eno, Michael Nyman and Lou Reed to take to the stage. This year she graces Antony’s line up with her electrifying presence, and she’s bound to deliver a captivating show, with or without a hoard of stringed instruments. Watch her in action in a clip from her 1986 concert video ‘Home of the Brave’ above.

Anthony and the Ohnos: A celebration of Kazuo and Yoshito Ohno, 5th August

In this elaborate tribute to the late Japanese dancer Kazuo Ohno, who passed away in 2010, his son Yoshito Ohno will perform alongside Antony and the Johnsons, Johanna Constantine, and film and tape loops by William Basinski. In the above clip, Yoshito stuns in a fragile performance set to some stripped-back, painfully cool jazz.

Tea with Janet Suzman, Kim Cattrall and Jude Kelly, 5th August

Three formidably talented actresses have been invited by Antony to discuss the female role in drama, and the figure of Cleopatra in particular, at Meltdown this year. To get a taste of the sharp incisiveness of this event skip to 3.57 in the video above, and take in Suzman’s refined depiction of the queen in the BBC’s 1974 adaptation of Antony and Cleopatra.

Elizabeth Fraser, 6th August

Elizabeth Fraser was not only the voice that made the Cocteau Twins, but she was also the voice that made the song that made Massive Attack – that is, she’s the woman behind the iconic vocal on ‘Teardrop’. Watch her gentle, nuanced performance of it in the YouTube clip above, taken from Later With Jools Holland; if this is how magical a recording can sound, then a live performance with a voice like this would be unshakeable.