Latest news with #Keli
USA Today
14 hours ago
- Sport
- USA Today
Cal edges out MSU for commitment from 3-star Hawaiian OL Koloi Keli
Cal edges out MSU for commitment from 3-star Hawaiian OL Koloi Keli A Michigan State recruiting target has announced his commitment to an ACC school over the Spartans. Koloi Keli of Honolulu, Hawaii announced his commitment to the Cal Golden Bears on Sunday afternoon. The commitment came after Keli took official visits to both Michigan State and Cal, with the Golden Bears ultimately edging out the Spartans for the recruiting battle victory. Keli is a three-star interior offensive lineman in the 2026 class. He holds a recruiting rating of 86 on 247Sports. Keli ranks as the No. 85 interior offensive lineman in the class, according to 247Sports. He is also ranked as the No. 9 player from Hawaii in the class. Michigan State was one of more than 10 schools that offered Keli, according to 247Sports. He also held notable offers from Cal, Oregon, Hawaii, Arizona, SMU, UNLV, UTSA, Washington State and San Diego State. Contact/Follow us @The SpartansWire on X (formerly Twitter) and like our page on Facebook to follow ongoing coverage of Michigan State news, notes and opinion. You can also follow Robert Bondy on X @RobertBondy5.
The Courier
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Courier
Star of brassy new play 'knocks it out the park' as Keli heads for Dundee and Perth theatres
Both the play and the star bite off slightly more than they can chew, and that's part of the fun of Keli. The National Theatre of Scotland's brand new touring play, which began in Edinburgh last week and will next be seen in Dundee and Perth. Set in a fictional Scottish ex-mining town halfway along the M8, a lot of people from similar towns and villages in Fife and across the Central Belt will recognise the setting. The place's glories are behind it, and teenage Keli's (Liberty Black) days are filled with working in the local supermarket and struggling to look after her mentally unwell mum (Karen Fishwick) alone. Yet Keli lives for playing tenor horn in the local brass band, a remnant of the town's colliery days, and she's really good at it. When a chance comes for the band to play the Royal Albert Hall in London, it's make or break – but with the pressure she's under, Keli seems likely to break. Seeing what Martin Green, one-third of celebrated folk trio Lau, does with this self-penned play which stems from a fascination with the brass bands around his local area in Midlothian. The results are a mixed bag, with the inclusion of a dragged-up rave sequence in the heart of London and a ghostly visitation by long-dead local brass band legend Willie Knox (Billy Mack) amid designer Alisa Kalyanova's stark coalmine set suggesting the play's trying to do too many things at once. Yet there are real moments of beauty, especially in the way four players (including MD Louis Abbott, of indie group Admiral Fallow) provide a haunting soundtrack throughout, with director Bryony Shanahan cleverly placing tenor horn player Andrew McMillan alongside Keli when she 'plays'. Incredibly, this is young actor Liberty Black's professional stage debut, and she knocks it out of the park, bristling with tension, dark humour and anxious energy. Similarly, young Olivia Hemmati also steals her scenes as blunt, vaping shopworker Amy and posh London raver Saskia. The finale, a hymn to the uplifting social power of music soundtracked by a real brass band (Whitburn or Kingdom, depending on when the play's seen), is also incredibly uplifting. It's almost worth the admission alone. You're looking for a heartwarming, Brassed Off-style tale of working class grit and determination. Keli is uplifting in its own way, but its darker, more dreamlike style and the sweary Scots dialogue give it an edge all of its own. 3/5
The National
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The National
KELI review: A rousing brass-band odyssey of grief, grit, and ghosts
I was reminded of this insightful quote while watching KELI, writer and composer Martin Green's fine new play for the National Theatre of Scotland and his own cross-artform company Lepus. There is, you might think, a considerable cultural distance between Harlem, New York City and West Lothian. However, like the Black jazz musician alluded to by Malcolm X, Keli Wade – the 17-year-old, working-class protagonist of Green's drama – derives her greatest spiritual fulfilment from playing the tenor horn in a brass band. The play is set in the former Scottish coal mining town of Anston (a mildly fictionalised Whitburn). The last coal mine in the area may have closed 39 years ago following the Great Miners' Strike of 1984-85, but the mining community's brass band is still going strong. We meet Keli, who is juggling the demands of shop work at the local Scotmid, a college course and her mother's severe mental distress as she and her fellow members of the Snaresbrook brass band are preparing to travel to London. There the West Lothian musicians will take part in the finals of the National Brass Band Championships in the Albert Hall. Green – who made the brass band documentary Banding: Love, Spit And Valve Oil for BBC Radio 4 – has long immersed himself in the culture of colliery community brass bands. In KELI – which is set in the present day – we hear resonating echoes of the community's past. The band lives by its traditions, and there is great pride in the legendary miner, trade unionist and band leader Willie Knox, who, in the years immediately after the Second World War, led the Snaresbrook band to its famous trio of national titles. There is pride – and considerable anguish – in the memories of the strike of the mid-1980s. During that bitter dispute, current band leader Brian Farren was badly beaten and fitted up (to the point of serving jail time) by the police. From this mix of intriguing and combustible material, Green and director Bryony Shanahan have concocted an engrossing and, ultimately, deeply moving theatre work. Keli's journey – both literal and emotional – is like a modern reworking of the classical tale of Orpheus's adventures in the underworld. It is not giving too much away to say that our tenor horn-playing hero's travels and travails are conducted within the frame of her encounters with the ghost of the great Willie Knox (who is played with tremendous dignity and humour by the excellent Billy Mack). His interactions with 'comrade sister' Keli combine powerfully with the angry memories of Farren (Phil McKee on convincingly gruff-yet-decent form). Throughout the piece – from West Lothian to London and back again – the play is blessed with beautiful live playing of Green's marvellous brass score (which segues between lovely music and intelligent, atmospheric sound). The scene in which brass playing combines with hardcore electronic pop music in a London club is remarkably inventive, both theatrically and musically. The cast is universally impressive. Led by Liberty Black (who is gloriously driven-yet-vulnerable in the role of Keli), it includes deeply affecting performances by Karen Fishwick (as Keli's mother, Jane) and the Whitburn Band. If the production has a flaw, it is in designer Alisa Kalyanova's maximalist coal mine set, which is too literal and lacking in versatility. Nonetheless, this piece is a captivating triumph. As the Lepus company says: 'If the mines are dead, the music and the people most definitely are not.' Tickets can be found here. Touring until June 14.
The Herald Scotland
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
KELI at The Royal Lyceum: a bittersweet mix of sadness and euphoria
When the massed ranks of Scottish brass champions the Whitburn Band join forces at the end of Lau accordionist and guitarist Martin Green's new play, alternating with the Fife based Kingdom Brass, the sound they make together is one of unity laced with a bittersweet mix of sadness and euphoria. As the culmination of a show about working class experience in a former mining town decimated by the 1984/85 Miners' Strike, it is a finale that speaks volumes about everything that went before. This is embodied by the seventeen-year-old firebrand who gives Green's play its title. Keli's everyday life may be in chaos as she tends to her mum inbetween shifts at the supermarket and a failing college course, but when she plays her tenor horn with the local brass band she comes alive. Keli's musical skills are recognised by bandleader Brian, who promotes her to soloist for a competition at the Royal Albert Hall. Read more reviews from Neil Cooper: While Keli makes it to London, trying to make the Megabus home takes her on a different path, and she ends up playing her horn at a techno fuelled fetish club. All this is framed by a back and forth between Keli and the ghost of miner and trade unionist Willie Knox after Keli ends up falling down an old pit. Willie's own tenure in the band is spoken of with awe, and his presence is a wake up call for Keli to channel her own talents. Developed from an audio drama and a one off live rendition at the Celtic Connections festival, Green's play taps into the power of music to reclaim and reinvigorate a local culture. Artist Jeremy Deller did something similar in the late 1990s with the soon to be revived Acid Brass, in which a brass band played arrangements of Acid House classics from the post-industrial north. Keli's own clubbing experience here confirms Deller's belief that both brass bands and techno are cross-generational forms of folk art rooted at the heart of specific communities. Forty year after the Miners' Strike, they remain vital forms of expression in a play where music becomes salvation and totem of hope. Green's brass-led underscore played live by a small ensemble led by tenor player Andrew McMillan runs throughout Bryony Shanahan's co-production between the National Theatre of Scotland and Green's Lepus company. Liberty Black gives a mercurial performance as Keli, with Phil McKee making a touching Brian, who understands the need to believe in something in order to survive. Billy Mack as Willie Knox believes this too. It's only life that gets in the way, be it in the form of Keli's mum Jayne, played by Karen Fishwick, or Olivia Hemmati's Amy, who works with Keli. If the band steal the show as they preserve a sense of belonging rooted in the past, Keli's getting of wisdom points to a brave new world beyond.
Scotsman
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Keli, Edinburgh review: 'magnificent'
Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Keli, Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh ★★★★★ Ten days, and two new shows about the scars left by Scotland's mighty coal industry, and its bitter end in the miners' strike that was called off 40 years ago this spring. The first was Sylvia Dow's Blinded By The Light, premiered in Bo'ness last week; and now, here comes the National Theatre of Scotland's Keli, a bigger and even more theatrically ambitious exploration of very similar themes, built around the brass band music that was such a vital part of mining communities' lives, and written and composed by Martin Green of the acclaimed Scottish-English band Lau, whose company Lepus co-produces the show. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Liberty Black in Keli | Mihaela Bodlovic Like Blinded By The Light, Keli sets up an interaction between a younger generation living with the aftermath of coal, and those involved in the industry decades ago; but whereas Dow places her two time frames in parallel, Keli goes boldly for the more surreal option of bringing past and future face to face. Its heroine, Keli, is a fierce 17-year old girl growing up in a former mining town half-way between Edinburgh and Glasgow. Her language is ear-poppingly obscene, and her life desperately stressful, with her mother suffering a long-term mental breakdown that makes it almost impossible for Keli to juggle her home commitments with both college and her rubbish part-time shop job. Keli, though, also has a gift. She is a brilliant horn player, the best her local brass band - a long-term survivor of the mining era - has ever seen; and her life reaches crisis point when she is chosen to play a supremely difficult horn solo at a major UK competition in the Albert Hall. It's on her return from this traumatic trip to London that, through a bruising chain of events, she suddenly finds herself underground, talking to a 20th century man who should be dead, but whose life as an acclaimed horn player in the band both mirrors and contrasts with her own. Keli | Mihaela Bodlovic All of this is handled in brave and spectacular style in Green's play, many years in development, and based on what was once a lockdown audio drama. The story has a flashback structure which places Keli's conversation with the man from the past, one William Knox, front and centre; while the events and stresses that lead to their encounter emerge from the darkness around them, on Alisa Kalyanova's powerful underground cavern of a set. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Martin Green's music, directed on stage by Louis Abbott, is quite extraordinary, sometimes played live on stage by brass musicians Andrew McMillan and Hannah Mbuya with support from the cast, sometimes involving a full and glorious brass band (either Whitburn Youth Band or Kingdom Brass), and sometimes integrated into George Dennis's powerful sound design; but always combining the familiar harmonies and strains of brass band music with passages where those sounds refract and shatter, spinning off into aural images of chaos and breakdown. Director Bryony Shanahan orchestrates all these elements to perfection, in the edgy, bold-brush-stroke style Keli's story demands; and the five-strong acting cast rise to the challenge magnificently, with Liberty Black heartbreakingly raw, angry and quick-witted as Keli, and Karen Fishwick superb as her broken Mum, among other roles. A beautiful metaphor to do with pressure runs through the show; a reflection on the pressures suffered by miners then and Keli now, and how extreme air pressure from the lungs - harnessed by brass players - can help build something beautiful, what Keli calls great cathedrals of sound. And the play also captures how those pressures were and are entangled with questions of class, even in an age of individualism bereft of the political solidarity and high moral aspirations that gave William Knox's generation hope; leaving survivors like Keli with only the band music, celebrated in the play's glorious finale, to offer them a glimpse of what might be possible, in a more humane and convivial world. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad
