misc

did you misc me?

just back from mcr - have posted some piccies of this ever changing city over at digitalis; what strikes me more than ever is the overlaying of the victorian and the modern - i like this kind of overlaying - very fourth world

on my trip to a garden centre in Bury, i was rather taken aback to see a display of toy Gollywogs:

Now I have fond memories of collecting tokens from the back of jam jars for little pin badges of gollies in various occupations - spaceman golly, cowboy golly etc, maybe even doctors lawyers politicans too. I also remember the point at which Robertson's finally conceded that such images were no longer appropriate. I know that there is a taste for all things grotty 70s (Life on Mars, Made in England etc) but isn't this taking it all a bit far? What next - a revival of "Mind your Language" ?

Eager readers will have noticed my ever expanding list of links - I think this is an important part of my role as educator and facilitator. Can I particularly recommend the ever thought provoking City of Sound, and the work of my new electronic chum, a digital artist called One Eye.

Three Sisters

Three Sisters? Sorry mate. I fort you said Seven Sisters. Why didntya say sumat?

Well I thought we were going a funny way, but you know, you’re the expert and cabbies tend to get a bit iffy if you query their choice of route.

Anyway, after much russian about, the central(ised) line being down, I got to the Barbican for Cheek by Jowl’s Russian Company’s performance of Chekhov's Three Sisters, in Russian, with English surtitles.

The first half was very good. Well lit, superbly acted, and, despite the language barrier, you could appreciate the flow of the words. The set was bare, just a couple of hanging screens, and some furniture, which seemed fresh to me after the visual extravagance of recent outings. Overall there was a rightness and balance to it.

Things deteriorated in the third act. The effective stage area narrowed and the speaking volume dropped. The intended effect was to draw us in and give us a more intimate glimpse into the life of the characters, but the opposite was achieved. You couldn’t keep your eyes on the surtitles and the action at the same time. Someone behind me developed whistling nasals, the noise more irritating for the quietness on stage. The noise irritations around me threatened to snowball as the audience became restless. The pacing seemed awry.

The fourth and final act was better; stage area expanded and volume increased, and I was able to reconnect again with the characters. Needless to say the denouement with the crushing of the hopes and ambitions of those who dare to dream was deeply moving.

Overall I’d say good but not great, although I think some of the pacing problems are inherent in the text. The production gave life to the play and brought out its themes and recurring patterns well. The bare stage signposted how much of the action and how many characters appear only offstage, a kind of writerly metaphor wherein the artist, like the sisters, can never fully realise his ambition.

By the way, the programme, at £3, was absolutely dreadful. It was joint for this production and Cheek by Jowl’s English Co’s Cymbeline, and was full of short, trite attempts to compare the two plays, with frequent use of the word “perhaps” indicating that whoever wrote this tripe was not at all convinced of their argument. More like Cheek by Jowell.

VOLTA

The arrival of a new Björk album is always a moment of great excitement in my house, especially when the limited edition version with DVD surround sound mix comes as beautifully packaged as Volta does.

Who knows – maybe one day I will actually get round to listening to it?

Alvar Aalto

SO what’s a boy to do on a wet Bank Holiday Monday? Instead of dismantling my Corby trouser press, I took myself off (after a vicious beasting by my personal trainer) to the Barbican for the Alvar Aalto exhibition. Alto was one of the leading architects of the 20th century, although not a name I had come across previously. The exhibition focussed on several key buildings, plus his furniture, light fittings and door knobs. It seems he was particularly well known for the shape and construction of his stools.

One of the buzz words at the moment is neuroplasticity (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity?dm_i=113838564) or, as the Nintendo generation know it, Dr Kawashima's Brain Training. Well Doc Grebson prescribes a different (bad) medicine, which is getting out there, learning knew things, learning to see properly again. I don’t have a lot of knowledge about architecture but what I got out of the exhibition was some heightened perception of the nature of architecture – Aalto’s achievements, so it seemed to me, were about introducing organic shapes, bringing natural light into buildings, and bridging the urban with the natural world.

I particularly liked his Villa Mairea which encapsulated his belief that a building should have different moods in different parts, just as a play has different acts or a symphony different movements. For example, the forest outside the villa was mirrored inside by the different spacing of banisters and columns.

I took this awareness back into the lovely concrete forms of the Barbican: as the weather changed during the day from overcast to bright sunshine, so new views and vistas opened up, which despite the many hours I have spent in the Barbican, were new to me.

Alto was also (one of or the) first to bend pieces of wood into chairs in that Scandinavian style – he noted that a chair was about the meeting of the horizontal and the vertical. Unfortunately, like almost every other designer, he failed to notice it was also about posture and support. I enjoyed watching several Japanese visitors wincing as they tried out one of his classic designs. Earlier in the day, I had found myself not enjoying a particularly hard stool.

All in all, a pleasant afternoon finished off with a nice cup of coffee and some cake.

The Gormleys are coming

The Gormleys are coming.




Figures are appearing across the rooftops of central London.

They stand proud, but inert. Guardian angels, or sinister aliens?

The epicentre is the Heywood Gallery.







These are the Gormleys.

I confidently predict that they will become the craze of this early summer. Virtual Gormleys will spring up all over the internet, as people try to record the location of each Gormley, and to photograph each Gormley from each possible angle. Accidents will happen because Londoners are wandering around, dazed, their eyes fixed on the skyline.

On one level, the installation by Antony Gormley of tens, if not hundreds, of statues of himself naked is a grotesque act of egotism, the apotheosis of our “look at me” culture.

Someone has already tried to steel the Gormley on Waterloo Bridge.



We will all fall under the spell of the Gormleys. Gormley has the knack of producing bold, simple art which somehow captures the imagination of the great British public. They say the Angel of the North is Britain’s best loved piece of public art.

The Gormleys make the living statues of Gilbert and George seem dead. The Gormleys make you rediscover things you’ve stopped seeing – architecture, the skyline, the colours of the sky, the play of shadows on a wall.


They are our defense against the coming Terracotta Army



We will all learn to love the Gormleys.

The Gormleys are coming.


there are more gormleys over at my sister site, grebson:digitalis

Attempts on her Life

Attempts on her Life

I am back in the National, and we are back in the world of experimental theatre. We have a text, by Martin Crimp, which is divided into sections to be spoken by different (unspecified) actors, but thereafter everything is up for the director (here Katie Mitchell) and the Company to decide, such as who says what, and what the staging is to be.

And the staging is certainly all busy busy. Busy busy bees. Sometimes the whole cast recite lines in the theatrical equivalent of a first person plural narrator, sometimes smaller groups. Some of it is sung / played. For the most part, the performance is filmed and projected, with some manipulation. The effect is of a collection of pastiches, of cheesy pop videos, of news, of funny foreign daytime tv, of Newsnight Review. The trouble with this is that it’s all been done before, and much better, by programmes such as The Day Today, and the Fast Show, programmes which managed to combine biting satire with prophetic vision of the way consumerist / pop / contemporary life was / is going. Here it all seemed a bit lame, and despite all the busy busyness, rather dull. People all around me were stifling yawns, or taking sharp irritable intakes of nasally breath.

Further more, the staging removed any effectiveness in the text – lines were barked in a single, flat register, devoid of emotion or variation, reducing it (and the text itself does this at stages too) to just a list of random words.

The text itself seemed all a bit clever clever to me – as characters discussed the meaning of experimental art, all viewpoints were presented to try and head off and delegitimise any audience viewpoint – you think this is pretentious – well we’ve already admitted to that possibility and shown the counter-arguments so that’s your simplistic reaction undermined! What the text fails to recognise was the possibility that an audience might find it all, well, a bit tedious.

So what is it about? The difficulty of art, mostly, how elusive it is to try and portray a realistic psychology of a character, how any characterisation is necessarily artificial, unsatisfactory, simplistic, and dependent on artificial plot mechanics. In part because of the limitations of the tools of art, in part because an individual’s personality is a fragmentary, contradictory, ever changing entity.

The text’s solution is to produce fragmented discourses by multiple narrators – we may be seeing a dozen short dialogues about various women called Anne, or it may be a that these are aspects of the same person. The “Attempts” are those of the artist to capture the Annes, and also refers to several of the Annes attempts to commit suicide.

Fair enough, but I think you’ll find the The Wonderful World of Dissocia dealt with these matters in a much more satisfactory way. And I find myself keeping going back to what that play’s author, Anthony Neilson, said in the playtext (isn’t that a kind of bra?) about experimental theatre: “the danger is that work of this type can easily become impenetrable. I will never believe its right to send an audience out feeling confused and stupid. It’s a needless failure of communication…”
I also found myself thinking back to Alan Bennett’s “talking heads”, a master class in how a character can speak about one thing whilst revealing more and more about themselves, warts, contradictions and all.

Before the play, I went to see an exhibition of work by Philippe Parreno at the lovely Haunch of Venison gallery off Bond Street. Entitled “What do you believe your eyes or my words” the centrepiece was a video piece of an antique automaton writing out the title of the show. The doll’s hand shook, its eyes moved in macabre fashion. The sounds of the gears churning and clicking filled the space. I loved it, but mainly because of my interest in the sinister world of automata. Other pieces were a little flat: four flickering pencil drawings, each one tenth of a stop start animation piece – the drawings are changed each day, so it is very slow animation; a room filled with black helium balloons in the shape of speech bubbles; a picture of the artist giving a lecture to some penguins. The gallery blurb was interesting – “in a series of open-ended propositions, he challenges the viewer to interrogate all that is placed before them”. ‘Scuse me, I tend to interrogate all that is placed before me anyway, and much that is not. “The artist is sceptical of constructed narratives with their claim to authoritative experience, preferring to deliberately blur the line between reality and fiction, and to entertain a panoply of perspectives, each as unreliable as the next.” Really? Well Mr Perrano, there’s this play you might want to go see…

Parreno's balloons

GREBSON:DIGITALIS

RGGFTP IS DELIGHTED TO INVITE YOU TO THE OPENING OF ROBIN GREBSON'S BRAND NEW DIGITAL ART GALLERY.

THE ADDRESS IS http://grebson-digitalis.blogspot.com/

DRESS CODE: BLAZERS / KIMONOS

Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes: 10 Days on Earth

This was a curate’s egg of a performance, albeit a polka dot curate’s egg which hatched before our eyes to reveal a little duck so cute as to make Orville look like the Elephant Man / Duck. This was the Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes and their latest performance, 10 Days on Earth. It was the story of a “simple” middle aged shoeshine man called Darrel who lives with his elderly mother in a creepy grand wood panelled mansion, and the 10 days he spends without realising that she has “gone to sleep in the ground”. It is intercut with the tale of Honeydog and Little Burp (the aforementioned duckling) which the Mother used to read to Darrel as a boy and which the grown Darrel is still obsessed with. Other characters include a foul mouthed tramp who thinks he is God and a ‘Salvation Army’ type lady. This was high camp gothic Americana lubricated with schmaltz.





Burkett towers over the wooden cabinet stage, not just reciting the lines, but living them; the puppets mirror his movements, or maybe he mirrors theirs; he animates by them sheer force of psychic will. In the cold light of day it is easy to quibble about the manipulative sentimentality of the plot, but what Burkett achieves, and this is the wholly grail of almost all art from the Romantic period onwards, is to allow the audience to rediscover the inner child, the wonder of discovery and amazement, to find oneself with one’s chin hanging down and tongue lolling out in delight. Burkett himself comes across like a man who has never forgotten what it was like to play with dolls as a boy; his manic dialogue threatens at times to drift out of control, or to get stuck going round the same roundabout for a while whilst his brain searches for the right exit. It is a bravura performance, intense, crazy, obsessive-compulsive, and at times astonishing. And any show which features a pigeon turning into a hot air balloon in a flash of magic is alright by me.