I am ten minutes late to my inaugural tap dancing class. The going is tough, but I struggle on. Five inches of rubber platform separate heel from rainy pavement, and my left ankle gives the occasional tetchy twinge when reminded of the agonising, nauseating pain felt when I last fell off said rubber platform. As the old adage goes, footwear appropriate to swaying lamely on a club dancefloor will not necessarily be at home or indeed welcome in a tap dancing class. Boots built to accessorise a statement crop top are not guaranteed to complement ‘riffing’, ‘shuffles’, a cheesy grin or a sparkly cane. Tap is looking increasingly unlikely.

A quick phone call later and I have procured a pair of tap shoes from an unsuspecting fresher. I trip happily across the quad, my ears ringing with the twinklings of metal on stone and a confident, . Memories flood back, of dolefully pounding out ‘Heart and Soul’ in talent shows in the wake of smug nine-year olds in spangled top hats. It is clear now that I am a diamond in the rough, the Eliza Doolittle of the tap dancing world. All I need is a bath and someone to teach my toes to pronounce the letter ‘h’.

I encounter an acquaintance and hastily stifle my chirpy tinkles, manoeuvring my feet onto their sides and crabbing diagonally into the shadows. The sudden change in direction brings the fact that the shoes are in fact three sizes too large crashing home. Each foot is a lone baked bean in a long-forgotten can, rattling from side to side and occasionally attempting to break free. Apprehension courses through me I envisage one shoe shooting across the room after a particularly enthusiastic shuffle step.

But my discomfort is short-lived. Once I enter the tap class, anything goes. Soon we are clicking toe to heel to twist to slide and back two three four like a horde of antsy crickets, inserting arbitrary hand gestures to distract potential spectators from the mal-coordinated mess of our feet.

Led by the effusive Ed Addison and accompanied by a breathless Britney Spears, it soon becomes clear that Ed is right – tap is a lot less rubbish when someone other than Bruce Forsyth is doing it. I joyously discover that I can do the steps, but I seem to be inhibited by some sort of muscle amnesia. Every new step is all-encompassing: it takes every ounce of concentration to grasp its complexity, thereby effacing the previous step. I am a goldfish in tap shoes. It’s okay though; I can maintain the façade, blindly following every step half a beat behind. Then the death knell: ‘Ok guys, so I’m going to stand still for the moment, and I’ll watch you do what we’ve just learnt’. Face red, eyes down, I throw the half-remembered scraps of routine to the wind, resorting to a crude marrying of Irish jig and Macarena.

I know I’m terrible, but I almost manage to fool myself. I feel like I’m actually tap dancing just because my feet are making the right noises. My toes tap tap tap away, my heels blithely go left instead of right, forward instead of back. But that is the beauty of (extremely) amateur tap: even if you do absolutely everything wrong, the noise of fifteen people clicking their feet against a hardwood floor in perfect time is incredibly satisfying. Even as I type I maintain a jaunty rhythm of finger to keyboard- if you’ve ever stopped writing in a lecture and sat back to imagine just how delicious it would be if the skittish, fitful tapping of keys streamlined into a rhythmic and vigorous 3/4, then tap can help you realise all you rhythmic fantasies.

It is a thing both odd and discomfiting in theatre, to enter a performance space with so much and little expectation as I did last Friday to see the John Cage circus on Finnegan’s wake. I felt the same slightly taut apprehension as one might experience going to watch a new production of a venerated and canonical work, Shakespeare, perhaps Olivier, in which the tension snaps back and forth between a static sense of the performance as a relic, something owned, a national treasure – and a self-updating sense of process, in which the perception of audience ownership is recalibrated into a current dialogue, in real-time. My worry was, explicitly, that with such exalted and unassailable bastions of creativity as Joyce and Cage, the process of dialogue and inclusion had the potential to go subtly awry.

Since we live now in an age of such entitled audience autonomy, the first hurdle for any director lies in how to tackle the proliferation and discourse of thought around their work. How can you hope to create a sense of present tense if your audience suspect you are trying to outwit them, and are resultantly trying to stay two steps ahead of you? I went to the later of the two performances that evening, so as I arrived I bore witness to the comments of those who had just departed. Sure enough, the Cage cognoscenti were already composing skits at the expense of members of the audience who had ‘missed the point’, while those who had turned up not knowing what to expect busied themselves trading increasingly protracted and less nuanced variations of ‘it wasn’t what I was expecting’.

Standing in the foyer, my sense of resignation and misanthropy, which typically hovers around ‘what’s the point?’ was ticking dangerously towards ‘homicidal’, when a rather charming lady who I have since assumed to be Lore Lixenberg, who directed the piece, came out. She politely asked for our attention, and explained how our allocated seats worked. Consecutive numbers were not necessarily placed next to each other, and once we had found them, there was a chance that a mesostic (a poem in which a vertical phrase intersects lines of horizontal text in the middle of the lines) might be on our chair. If we had a mesostic, we were told, there would be an opportunity to read it aloud during the performance, if we so chose. I entered the performance space thinking of the mesostic form, and why it meant so much to Cage. In a way it represents the perfect intersection of indeterminacy and precision. The mesostic form relies heavily on the chance encounters of proximate words, yet the construction itself is uncompromising. Similarly, there was an element of absolute ordainment and precision in the knowledge that whoever sat on a certain chair would receive a mesostic, but no guarantee that the occupant would choose to read it, or even that the chair would be occupied.

Each of the four walls was lined with chairs, and I took mine, which was on what would typically be the stage, with some trepidation. For the first twenty minutes or so, we were at perfect liberty to wander the space, and if not interact with the performers, then at least co-exist with them. I did not. I sat still and quiet and alert. We watched things and let them lap at the shores of our consciousness, for by that point, barely five minutes in; we were a ‘we’. As an audience we surrendered our autonomy with ease, collectively, like a family – though it did not feel at all like a capitulation. It was subtle and incremental, and the sleepers on the floor – swathed as they were with a long sheet – created a sweet soporific thrum with movements that were at once random and wholly calculated. Minutes, I don’t know how many, passed. We were aware obviously of a general trend which took the shape of increasingly cacophonous momentum, yet still, each coming and going of a performer felt in some way like an isolated episode. I found that intimate, and at times, exquisite. I was put in mind of an essay Virginia Woolf wrote for Good Housekeeping, entitled The Docks of London, in which she catalogues the bizarre phenomenon she observed when watching the cranes at the docks. Initially, she reports, their motion was startling, spasmodic, and unpredictable, though time and patience gave way to something more harmonious and she grew attuned to their rhythm – for rhythm there was. In watching and waiting, she noticed that the cranes achieved an organic cohesion and prosody. The performance ended, but lingered. The silence which followed the climax remained rich and unbroken for many minutes. It wasn’t what I was expecting.

Cage: Circus on Finnegan’s wake will next be performed  on 20 February as part of the one-day conference ‘Twentieth Century Collaborations: Cunningham, Cage, Joyce’ hosted by St Hilda’s. Tickets can be found here: http://bit.ly/1em1ufK

When I graduated in July I was awarded a grant to travel to Alberta, Canada, to make a solo documentary about the oil/tar sands. Although the tar sands are rarely mentioned in the UK, they are in fact the largest construction project and single site of capital investment on earth, and over the past decade they have become the lynchpin of Canadian politics, more important than Justin Bieber, hockey riots, Quebec separatism and even Rob Ford.

The tar sands are colossal fields of bitumen, mixed in with sand, peat and ice, over an area the size of England itself. They’re the third largest deposits of oil in the world, behind those of Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. They take about four times as much energy to mine as conventional crude, as well as much more water, and no-one has worked out how to dispose of the toxic waste. They also leave heavy metals in the river, which is being linked to a spike in rare cancer rates in native communities downstream. But the energy industry has now decided to refer to them as ‘oil sands’, because it sounds cleaner, and in fact the way one chooses to refer to them has become a sort of preemptive signifier of your allegiance.

While I was there I travelled about 1200 miles by Greyhound bus in -30ËšC, interviewing the Irish doctor who first discovered the rare cancers, a native fur trapper in his shack in the middle of the freezing prairies, a disgruntled politician, and a First Nation (native) community trying to sue Shell Oil. Despite my best efforts, the oil companies themselves declined to talk to me. I’m not quite Louis Theroux, but the experience has been enlightening.

As Bruce Springsteen stepped onto British soil for the first time in 1975, this lost footage, Hammersmith Odeon London ’75, was recorded, remaining unreleased until ‘Born to Run’ reached its thirtieth birthday. It chronicles the start of a glorious career.

Having just graduated from the bars of New Jersey, the E Street band sound tight and surprisingly intricate, more like a Jazz/Funk infused quintet than the representation of the American worker that they would become. The perfectly measured bass and organ parts and the guttural saxophone combine with Springsteen and Van Zandt’s showmanship in ‘Spirit in the Night’ where Springsteen dives into a gap between the stage shouting “where’s my hat?” while the band continues to plod along.

With such a climax occurring in the third song, it is hard to imagine where this set could possibly proceed. But this is no problem at all with a gigantic rendition of both ‘Jungleland’ and ‘Rosalita’ and some impressive extended versions taking the average song time to well over eight minutes. Finishing off with a cover of Gary U.S. Bonds’s ‘Quarter to Three’ begs for the party to continue, as it indeed did. A great find; an exceptional live album.

For a band originally rooted deep in black metal, French two-piece Alcest have come a long way. Their fourth studio album, Shelter, is a post-rock album awash with dreamy guitar tones and liquid vocals and is about as far from the raw tones of their forefathers as it’s possible to get.

The influence of Icelandic producer Birgir Jón Birgisson (Sigur Rós) is clear, with strong layering of multiple guitar and synth tracks creating what multi-instrumentalist Neige describes as “a concept… about shelter as a safe place that allows everyone to escape reality for a moment.” However, the resultant atmos- phere is not necessarily one of safety and shelter. Neige’s soundscapes are fluid and ethereal – indeed, “my own escape was to the sea” he says.

Standout track ‘Voix Sereines’ epitomises this drifting tendency (and, perhaps, the al- bum as a whole) – a dreamy slow burner which never quite develops at the climactic points. Perhaps this rejection of climax is symptomatic of Alcest’s movement away from metal- lic influences, but other ambient projects such as Helios and Deaf Center show that guitars are not required to create a sense of delirious grandeur.

Alcest’s fourth effort isn’t bad, but doesn’t ever feel in danger of exploring new territory – essentially, this album is the Coldplay of the ambient/post-rock world.