January 10, 2011 - De Standaard
January 10, 2011 - De Standaard
Written by Peter Vantyghem Sunday, 09 January 2011 18:00
Girl choir becomes mature
SCALA OFF TO THE STATES
LEOPOLDSBURG - With ‘Circle’ Scala often reaches a high professional level. This new show is the one they are going to tour with in the USA in April.
After ten years of intense search, of trial and error, of happy moments and hopeless tinkering, Scala seems to have reached the true moment. Its new show ‘Circle’ has been produced for the US tour in April. The whole looks very professional. The choir girls’ dresses are classy, the choreography is elaborate, light and sound reach above Flander’s average, the visuals and movies are well made and the target audience has been accurately defined.
Scala, the charming girl choir has evolved into a fairly dark and mature multimedia production. The lunar black and white pictures, the black dresses and the cold blue light, together with Steven Kolacny’s predilection for prog rock generate an atmosphere near to romantic gothic which appeals to many today. This is a smart move for Scala has realized that the surprise caused by young girls covering rock hits is short-lived. The current concept is much stronger. These women evoke another world. The altos’ and sopranos’ voices intermingle to resist to the electronic zoom tones and the percussion.
Half of the setlist are songs written by Steven Kolacny himself, and really good ones such as ‘Seashell’ and ‘It will never come back’. There were only six rock covers, three songs in Flemish which obviously won’t be performed in the US, and above all, Stephen Hatfield’s ‘Queen Jane’ and Michael Bojesens’ ‘Evigheden’, two top moments in between folk and contemporary music.
To please the local audience, after an our or so, we got Flemish little movies. Singing ‘Ik hou van u’ (I love you) with the choir, laughing at the Kolacny brothers continuously teasing each other, all this was a breach of style. Of course, the whole audience enjoyed ‘Twee meisjes’ (Two girls) more than Marilyn Manson’s ‘The Beautiful People’ and could appreciate Regi Penxten’s beat in ‘I Fail’. These songs are a must with a Flemish audience. But tomorrow in the USA, the production probably will be stricter, in between the cold and dark intro of ‘White Moon’ and the warm glow of ‘Red Moon’ as an outro. We really wonder how this will work out.
Scala has planned 17 concerts in great American venues and will have a lot of TV appearances. 24 girls will go on tour with an extended technical team. This will be a top experience for the choir from the little town of Aarschot in Belgium.
