Robin Grebson's Guide for the Perplexed

Eonnagata

2009-06-28T11:21:00.002+01:00

Eonnagata (see http://robingrebsonsguidefortheperplexed.blogspot.com/2009/03/eonnagata-sadlers-wells.html) is back at Sadler's Wells, remixed, choreography rewritten, and some of the more obvious technical difficulties fixed (you can hear the spoken parts, the narrative seems to flow better, and it all feels less wobbly.)

It remains an astonishing piece, still one of the very weirdest things I have seen, with a unique pungent flavour. It is mellower and more hypnotic, with a distilled, concentrated, beautiful melancholy. Quite astonishing.

fat cat

2009-05-26T09:57:00.002+01:00

this cat got into my garden

Clod Ensemble UNDER GLASS at the Village Underground.

2009-05-14T16:26:00.002+01:00

I am back in the dark, another cavernous, high-ceilinged Victorian brick storage space, a former warehouse this time. Guided by ushers, we sit or stand or move as they tell us, following the rhythm of the light. All the performers (although specimen might be a better term) are encased in glass: rectanglar cages; an oversized jam jar; a giant test tube.

The superb lighting design introduce us to various characters:

a narrator, grey and faded but still elegant, a gossip, talking and talking away into her phone (who is on the end? Is there anyone listening?);

a pretty young woman in brightly coloured 50s clothes, but she is nervous and on edge and one thinks of Edward Hopper and Dennis Hopper and David Lynch;

a voluptuous woman, her naked belly oozing out over the top of her trousers, then pressed against the glass, water ripples at the bottom of her cage, is it rising?

a young woman, who we realise as the lighting changes is lying on patch of grass inside her cabinet;

a woman trapped inside a jam jar, insect like, she balances on her hands like they were the legs of a stalk, and flashes a scream; a Francis Bacon harpy made flesh;

an office worker, trapped in his office, battling the anglepoise and the routines of drudgery Sisyphus rolling his boulder up the hill;

a vamp on a pedestal in cocktail dress, lonely and forlorn; and

twins, or possible lovers, locked head to toe, like yin and yang, in a circular box, viewed by us from a circle of stools up above.

The text told by the narrator down the phone is by Alice Oswald and is really good – thankfully you get a copy on the way out. She talks of a village, but there is something strange about it, presumably rural, the village seems to be disintegrating, mired in death, as the woman reports what she sees and hears. The text has traces of Beckett and Alan Bennett, but also reminded me of Robert Ashley, it had a kind of symphonic quality.

We gather fragments of each person’s story, a sense of their idiosyncrasies and their pain, no mere ciphers or metaphors these.

This really is a superb performance piece, moving and profound, with real gravitas.

Lovers of Victorian freak shows and cabinets of curiosities, 1940s-1950s settings, steam/cyber punk etc will love this.

Regardless of History

2009-05-12T11:37:00.000+01:00

Here's are some very odd pics I took at Cass on my mobile - its a Bill Woodrow piece called 'regardless of history'

Tunnel 228 - Punchdrunk

2009-05-12T11:23:00.003+01:00

I had no idea what to expect as I gingerly made way down the (officially sanctioned) graffiti lined open tunnel that is Leake Street, the fresh air from the Yorkshire Sculpture Park and the Cass Foundation at Goodwood still in my system and more importantly as it would turn out, the images of the sculptures still pulsing around my head.

I headed down into the arches.

Having donned my anti-Swine Flu surgical mask, and swept through the black curtains into a dimly lit room with the familiar, almost welcoming, ominous drones that tell you that you have crossed the portal into a Punchdrunk world, I was face to face with, no doubt about it, a sculpture, a very fine piece as it happens by Luke Montgomery called Heaven on Earth, an altar form perhaps, or a Neolithic slab for human sacrifices, winged by wire, backlit, with something spooky, like umbilical chord preserved in formaldehyde at its heart.

So I was in a kind of sculpture park, albeit the dark, evil twin of YPS and Cass. This was post-apocalyptic world and I was witnessing either the death of advanced capitalism or its ultimate success. The fat controller was seen being pleasured by a lapdancer in the ladies toilet (seen through slats in the door before they were slammed shut), and appeared as a mannequin overseeing the workers toiling below. And what toil. Running on a giant hamster wheel to generate electricity, or endlessly pushing trolleys along a bleak, and really long railway track.

The workers were dressed in identical uniforms, and moved lifelessly. They collapsed on the ground, and would then twitch into life as though being charged up by electricity. There was a touch of the Planet of the Ouds from Doctor Who.

Up above us, a row of books would collapse like dominos, triggering a system of swinging barrels and cogs and pulleys which in turn released a silver ball which ran along a track before dropping into a bucket near the giant wheel. The ball would be polished and replaced and then the whole thing would crank up again.

I found a room where, on knocking, a door was opened by a pale, thin, Victorian butler who told me “he’s not here. He’s gone to see Yoshuwaaaah” over and over again. By “he” did he mean the fat controller?

But the workers were few in number. What happened to the rest of humanity. Evidence seemed scattered about. Patches of grass marked by stones suggested graves. There was video of humans living in pods, a la alien, enslaved or waiting for salvation. The last few survivors of what? War, disease, or political enslavement?

Much of the art followed a cyberpunk/steampunk theme, with touches of Alien and Doctor Who thrown in. Vessels glowing with lights. A sinister dentist chair turned into a mechanical killing machine . A body was slumped over a table. Tiny shrunken buildings were dotted about the place.

So what exactly was going on here?

This was a collaboration between Punchdrunk, the Old and New Vics and various invited artists. The intention was to combine art and theatre, and give it a sinister, uniquely Punchdrunk theme. What I liked most about the art was how tonally consistent it was, so that you could at least start to patch together a sense of some narrative from these fragment. But it was difficult to really get so excited about the art pieces in the same way as I did say with Lynn Chadwick’s piece up at Cass, or the St Ives Room at Pallant House. And there was a kind of familiarity with much of it, as though the makers had seen a lot of what I have seen over recent years, from the spectral multi-artist show at Belsay a few years back to the weirder outreaches of Mimefest (various mad Russians at the ICA.)

I liked the Punchdrunk element, especially the workers. There was something of Gormley about them, like living sculptures. And if the purpose of the exercise was to explore how art and theatre can work together, then this suggested that the route through is to to do just that, not to have the artwork as a backdrop, set dressing, but an equal, kinetic part of the proceedings.

If much of the art did not or was not allowed to stand out on its own, it certainly contributed to the atmosphere and other worldy feel of the event. But I missed some kind of dramatic impetus, a sense of things building up.

On the way out, I was given a very good brochure about the event. I’m not sure if it would have been helpful to have known more before I went in.

Being in Chichester, I missed the whole London Paper controversy. Apparently there was a big feature in the LP, explaining what was what, and as a result the rest of the 15,000 tickets sold out in a couple of hours. Foul, cried the Guardian. London Paper readers do not deserve to go to Punchdrunk events, ranted the Guardian (now do you believe me about how awful the leftwing media is?!). It might return in the Autumn, as with all Punchdrunk stuff, it’s worth a second viewing. But in the meantime, the Punchdrunk team move to Manchester and I can’t wait.

PS apparently Metropolis was a big part of the inspiration for the event; not a film I’ve seen somehow, but a quick google talks of a “vision of a horrific future with a favoured elite living on the surface of the earth enjoying a life of luxury, and a vast army of nameless workers living in a grim underground city toiling ten hour shifts”.

Here are some "official" pics taken from the Guardian website.

Things to do in Chichester Part II

2009-05-11T17:25:00.002+01:00

After Cass, I headed into town, to the Pallant House Gallery. A fusion of a Grade One listed Queen Anne townhouse and a neat clean modern building, Pallant House boasts one of the finest collections of modern British Art outside the capital.

One of the highlights for me was a St Ives room which matched some fine Bernard Leach (and other) pots with a Barbara Hepworth sculpture, a Ben Nicholson drawing, and a classic Alfred Wallis ship painting; so simple yet so rare to see these artists together.

Elsewhere two very good Lucie Rie pots were matched with a Henry Moore figure. It was all just so right.

They had a big Patrick Caulfield exhibition on, which I kind of whizzed through, finding nothing much to detain me.

The prints room too was good with an exhibition of pre WWII landscapes by Paul Nash, Ethelbert White and others.

Then it was off to the Oxmarket Centre of Arts for a selling exhibition of good work, most done by local artists and very reasonably priced. By this time, the Mrs had sauntered through her 25 miles and I was summoned to Goodwood racetrack to greet her as she jumped the final fence.

We ate like kings in Chichester by the way. Really good fish at the peculiarly named Dining Room at Purchase’s, a lovely open top mackerel sandwich on onion bread at the Field & Fork restaurant at Pallant House, and quite simply one of the best Indian meals I have ever had at Masala Gate. The fish pakora was sensational. My main course came in the kind of traditional meets modern style London restaurants often aim for and fail: a well cooked and flavoured piece of sea bass atop a tower of aloo sag, with a crispy pakora perched on top, and a drizzle of tomato chutney reduction. Marvellous.

Things to do in Chichester when your…

2009-05-11T13:52:00.010+01:00

girlfriend is doing a 25 mile walk

Joy oh joy. Less than a week after my trip to the YSP I found myself in another superb sculpture park, this time the Cass Sculpture Foundation at Goodwood. This park is strictly contemporary, many pieces specially commissioned, so pieces do come and go.

The stand out work for me was Lynn Chadwick’s enchanting ‘ace of diamonds’, consisting of a diamond shape and a square with a triangle cut out, made of heavy stainless steel, which revolved in the breeze. One of the great joys of sculpture is a sense of the work unfolding before you eyes, as you wander around it, different angles revealing different aspects, and different applications of concentration giving rise to new insights. This piece inverses the process; it moves, and a seemingly never ending succession of new shapes emerge.

I also loved Rob Ward’s enchanting glass ‘gate’ a piece that is there and not there.

Another favourite was Manfred Kielhofer’s ‘timeguards’, a scary piece, part religious icon, part Doctor Who, and strangely reminiscent of a carved candle I picked up in on a road trip many years ago now, from a weird Celtic folklore / new age museum somewhere between Inverness and Edinburgh.

The other piece that got me was Jonathan Loxley’s ‘portal’, a piece very much of two halves, one side whirling and scratchy, the other smooth and sensuous.

Against better inclinations, I was fascinated by Thomas Heatherwick’s ‘pavilion’. I’m a bit dubious when sculpture strays into architecture, but walking around the piece with its ever changing angles and reflections, I was convinced.

I also liked Keir Smith’s ‘stefano’, Wendy Taylor’s giant 'sycamore’, Helaine Blumenfeld's vaginalatrous 'spirit of life', and the wonderful Peter Doig like presence of David Worthington’s ‘yo reina’, a tiny white alien ship landed in the forest.

Animal Magic

2009-05-11T13:22:00.007+01:00

Even if I say so myself, I've taken some pretty darn good photos of animals on my travels...

Return to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park II

2009-05-11T13:04:00.005+01:00

With time to kill, and energy to burn after a mighty vegetable soup and huge baked potato in the café, I wondered the grounds of the YSP. Almost all the Henry Moore’s had changed since I was last here.

As I wondered about looking at the sculptures, the sheep wandered about looking at me.

In the lower field, Sophie Ryder was exhibiting a collection of disturbing rabbit/women.

I loved a sound installation in a nearby gazebo where odd noises were generated as you sat down or shuffled on benches.

It’s a magical place. As you wander about, you stumble upon, not fields of daffodils, but fields of sculptures. Each step reveals something new, or a different angle, or a different feeling.

Return to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park 1 - Isamu Noguchi

2009-05-11T12:46:00.005+01:00

I knew I would kick myself if I missed the Isamu Noguchi exhibition at YSP. The closing date had already been put back once, and with the new end date fast approaching, I took a detour across the Penines on the way back from Old Trafford after the first leg of the Arsenal game.

Noguchi, feted in American and Japan, is little known here, even though anyone who was ever a student probably had a piece derived from his famous Akari lamps in their bedsits; remember those folding paper lampshades you’d hang over any going harsh lone lighbulb?

His work straddled many fields: as well as sculpture he worked in design, furnishings, stage sets and delicate drawings through to giant conceptual theme parks. This partly explains his obscurity in the West, where there is too strong a tendency to dichotomise art and craft. Because so much of his best work was functional, he couldn’t possibly be a serious artist, so the argument went!

This was a wonderful as well as major exhibition, the first ever in Europe, with pieces taken from every era allowing you to follow Noguchi's journey.

For me, the best pieces were the coffee tables. One in particular, in the corridor of the indoor exhibition, totally captivated me. It was a jet black L shaped slab, balanced on a soft coloured stone. The top of the slab was highly polished and two oval pools, one larger than the other, had been cut into the surface and filled to the top with purified water, so that the meniscus traced lines along the edge of the pool. Sublime.

The final and best room indoors was also breathtaking. Here was another coffee table, with part of the slab left unpolished, so that a rough raised crater grew up out of one corner. At the far end, flanked my monumental stones split and put back together again, was a raised wooden bench suggestive of Tori gates, supporting three small torsos. And in the corner, a lovely curvaceous stones, bold, yet carved so delicately.

The exhibition continued outside varying from seemingly barely worked chunks of rocks to a lovely Tori gate shape and a delicate spire.

All in all, marvellous.

Eonnagata - Sadler's Wells

2009-03-04T09:57:00.002Z

For the first time in a long time, I have seen something so WOW! that I just had to write about it. To clear my head. To becalm the thoughts swirling about inside.

Eonnagata is about Charles de Beaumont, an 18th Century spy, diplomat, soldier, and transvestite. Someone neither male nor female, but somehow both and something else altogether. And it is a piece that is neither dance, nor theatre, but somehow both and something else altogether.

The work is a collaboration between dancer Sylvie Guillem, choreographer Russell Maliphant and “theatre-maker” Robert Lepage, with wonderful costumes by Alexander McQueen, but what brings all these disparate elements together is the quite breathtaking lighting design by Michael Hulls. Hulls lighting is so dynamic, atmospheric and dynamic it beggars belief.

Given the collaborators, it is tempting to fell that this is a piece which is somehow less than the sum of its parts, the dancing for example never achieves the explosiveness of Guillem and Maliphant’s previous piece “Push” , yet in a way the work achieves something else entirely, as though each of the makers have given up something to achieve something new, something unique, a new flavour, melancholic, introspective, mysterious.

Unique, yet it also reminded me of many of the best things I have seem over the years, the slow intense less-is-more hypnotic world of Butoh, the tai chi inflected movement language of Cloud Gate, the way Complicite segment the stage and define space within it, the lighting effects of Push, the theatrical magic of Philippe Genty, Charles Atlas’s superb lighting for Michael Clark. All of these and yet still something powerful, unique.

The Eastern sensations perhaps stem from the leap that Lepage made between Beaumont’s life of gender confusion and the Onnagata, male Kabuki performers who only ever play female parts. Another element of the hybrid intermingling of ideas: male / female, west / east, theatre / dance.

None of which is to say the work is perfect yet, and maybe it never will be. There were almost two many ideas, and some scenes felt a little rough around the edges. Occasionally the movements were a little awkward, uneasy even, and the sword fighting lacked conviction; there was even the odd fumble. But sometimes something which is not quite 100% can still be so much better than anything else in town.

I immediately wanted to see it again - it is in the nature of projects like these that they develop and mutate in performance. They are back in June and I’ve booked my ticket.

a curious little shop; Punchdrunk take on William Blake, for their Friends only

2008-12-15T16:49:00.002Z

NB plot spoilers

In a little street in the West End, a curious shop has spring up. Clod and Pebble - House Furnishers and Engravings. There is little to see from the outside, just a sign, and a gold telescope in the window (previously it was a stuffed, black, Raven). Looking through the door from the street, you can just make out some furniture and the dull yellow glow of a lamp in the distance.

A bell rings as you open the door. Furniture is piled up all around; but a narrow path has been left to guide you inside. What you can see of the walls are covered in old documents, flyers, and photographs. Somewhere ahead of you, a music box is playing a Christmas tune. There is a smell in the air, essential oils, lavender maybe somewhere in the mix.

Beyond a pile of chairs, shielded from view by an old piano, is a parlour room, but you feel like you are intruding. So you wait by the door, until you remember that this is Punchdrunk, and fortune favours the intrepid.

The parlour is cluttered with all manner of objects, but there is still no sign of life. Then you notice an alcove at the back, and there you find a pale, unshaven man, reading a book. He says his name is Robert. He asks after your health, and says he has no watch, and relies on a goldfish to tell him the day. The goldfish swims in a large specimen jar with a tag marked Monday. Other jars, with tags for the rest of the week, surround this jar. He tells you of the fish’s magical properties, of its abilities to leap out of the jar, and to appear in the correct jar for the day of the week.

He takes you by the hand through a dark corridor, past a solitary candle. His mood changes as he stops underneath a swinging lamp. He asks for news of William, hopes that you can help him.

He leads you into a small, cold room, with a low ceiling. There are two wooden chairs placed opposite each other, separated by a table. On the table is a wooden mirror frame, but no mirror. You sit opposite him, you look at him and he looks at you through the empty frame.

He tells you of his brother William, how close they were, as close as close can be, and how one day a figure came through the snow and took him away. You mirror his hand movements, he clutches you hand to his heart. Ominous drones grow louder, so does his voice, echoing against the ceiling. He falls into a kind of reverie.

He leads you to realise that he is the spirit of Robert Blake, and you further realise that it was Robert who was taken from William, not the other way round, and so what you are witnessing is the agony of separation from the other side, from the afterlife.

Then it goes quiet, except for the tinkling of bells. Something has visited. He brings you back upstairs, to the table where the goldfish was. The jars have gone, and instead there is an old box, with a note. You read the note – it is from William, offering comfort for eternity. Inside the box is a glove, which matches the solitary glove Robert is wearing.

He is happy and grateful, and it time for you to leave.

Notes

This Punchdrunk performance is for registered Friends of Punchdrunk only, and by appointment. Once you have made the appointment, you are sent a riddle with the location of the shop.

From Encyclopaedia Britannica: Death of Robert Blake

One of the most traumatic events of Blake’s life was the death of his beloved 24-year-old brother, Robert, from tuberculosis in 1787. At the end, Blake stayed up with him for a fortnight, and when Robert died Blake saw his “released spirit ascend heavenward through the matter-of-fact ceiling, ‘clapping its hands for joy,’” as Alexander Gilchrist wrote. The occasion entered into Blake’s psyche and his poetry. In the epic poem Vala or The Four Zoas (manuscript 1796?–1807?), he writes, “Urizen rose up from his couch / On wings of tenfold joy, clapping his hands,” and, in his poem Milton, plates 29 and 33 portray figures, labeled “William” and “Robert,” falling backward as a star plunges toward their feet. Blake claimed that in a vision Robert taught him the secret of painting his designs and poems on copper in a liquid impervious to acid before the plate was etched and printed. This method, which Blake called “Illuminated Printing,” made it possible for Blake to be his own compositor, printer, binder, advertiser, and salesman for all his published poetry thereafter.

The Clod and The Pebble by William Blake

"Love seeketh not itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a heaven in hell's despair."

So sung a little Clod of Clay,
Trodden with the cattle's feet,
But a Pebble of the brook
Warbled out these metres meet:

"Love seeketh only Self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another's loss of ease,
And builds a hell in heaven's despite."

2008-07-29T21:34:00.002+01:00

even more haiku-esque

2008-07-28T15:03:00.000+01:00

vaporizer
the balloon inflates
happy days

more haiku-esque

2008-07-28T12:37:00.001+01:00

Chocolate-y chocolate choc-choc cake
Naked Barbie bursts forth
Mmmm tastes so good

haiku-esque

2008-07-28T12:32:00.001+01:00

birthday party
so many happy memories
if only i could remember what they were

Hay Ho

2008-06-03T12:07:00.013+01:00

So the Latte Days Loafers decamped (or camped on mass) to Hay-On-Wye ...here are some memories...

The festival site; we learnt many statistics over the weekend, most impressive of which was that 74.6% of the white middle class literate population between the ages of 50 and 65 were at Hay last weekend

Gill takes the "literary Glastonbury" idea too far by getting stuck in the mud; the girls got more excited than was strictly necessary by the hunky farmhands who came to the rescue. I could tell you more, but what goes on tour stays on tour. Needless to say, they left with a better understanding of the meaning of the references to Greek vases in "Lady Chatterley's Lover"

Mariella does a piece to camera

three litle orphan children playing the violin

I had a lovely cheese scone and pot of tea in this gallery / sculpture garden / tea shop

Hay is where old books and old heroes go to die. Or maybe it is more like a kind of limbo, where they go to reflect on theirs sins and await rebirth.

Captain Jack declared that he wanted to feel what it was like to be a woman. He could have done worse than start by checking out one of Hay's two splendid Dolls House shops

I'll have whatever he is having

Highlight of the weekend without question was the performance of Peter and the Wolf by the Llandiddyllanllandiddyllangugnoch State Chamber Orchestra narrated by "superstar" Gethin Jones

St Vitus' Dance

2008-05-26T14:42:00.016+01:00

My goodness the Last Tuesday Society know how to put on a party. I had such fun at the St Vitus' Dance...

Coffins, naked girls, champagne. What more do you want in life?

Handsome fella; someone said I looked like an Arabian Prince...

lots of lovely ladies in lbds

Dave came too

the wonderful Broken Hearts, breaking hearts and inducing wild dad dancing

the lovely April Angell of kissmypanties.com let me look in her box, and I was in for a big surprise

backstabbers

Chorea sancti viti (Latin for "St. Vitus' dance") is an abnormal involuntary movement disorder, one of a group of neurological disorders called dyskinesias. The term chorea is derived from a Greek word χορεία (a kind of dance, see chorea), as the quick movements of the feet or hands are vaguely comparable to dancing or piano playing.

girls and coffins and monsters

I think they were French

Bjork at Hammersmith Apollo

2008-05-26T14:35:00.006+01:00

here at long last are the the pics I took at Bjork's Hammersmith Apollo gigs...

2008-05-04T22:27:00.001+01:00

You are The Tower

Ambition, fighting, war, courage. Destruction, danger, fall, ruin.

The Tower represents war, destruction, but also spiritual renewal. Plans are disrupted. Your views and ideas will change as a result.

The Tower is a card about war, a war between the structures of lies and the lightning flash of truth. The Tower stands for "false concepts and institutions that we take for real." You have been shaken up; blinded by a shocking revelation. It sometimes takes that to see a truth that one refuses to see. Or to bring down beliefs that are so well constructed. What's most important to remember is that the tearing down of this structure, however painful, makes room for something new to be built.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

April

2008-04-15T22:41:00.003+01:00

is the cruellest month…well I say then – bring it on. What a few weeks I’ve had, and I’m running out of superlatives.

From Russia at the Royal Academy was every bit as breathtaking as the reviews said it was, and a welcome reminder of how uplifting and invigorating beautiful works of art can be. I include in that the fantastic abstracts and cubist-futurists works at the end of the exhibition as much as the Monets, Bonards and Picassos. Just so many wonderful paintings.

Peter Doig at Tate Britain was also stunning – his work kind of lulls you into this odd state of mind - meditative yet also sinister, and in its own way quite beautiful.

Then back to Battersea for my fifth and final visit to the Masque of the Red Death, which climaxed with an intensely unpleasant yet pleasantly intense one on one with Vinicius Salles during which he threw me against a wall several times before strangling me, all the while telling me how he had once hanged a man. I still couldn’t find the séance, but did see the famous puppet of the black cat and had Bon Bon force me to pluck out one of its olive eyes and eat it. Marvellous yet, like the last joint of the bag, the buzz somehow didn’t last long enough.

Modern opera at the Barbican? Hmmm. Yet Ainadamar: An Opera in Three Images by Osvaldo Golijov, based on the last days of Lorca and the memories of his muse, the actress Margarita Xigu, had me gripped from the very first note through to the last. This was a concert performance rather than a full staging, but still, having the projected libretto and the singers to focus on really helped and the music was, well yes, beautiful, full of flamenco and Spanish and latin rhythms, touches and flourishes. An opera with a sampler and a fantastic percussionist – what’s not to like?

Golijov is apparently one of Bjork’s favourite contemporary composers so it was fitting that the opera should come the day before the big one. I’ve been virtually following Bjork’s lolloping world tour for over a year via the excellent blog on her website written by keyboard and harpsichord player Jonas Sen, but at long last the crew rolled into the Hammersmith Apollo and my goodness me I was excited. I must have been waiting 10 years to see her ladyship live, having very stupidly not got my act together for the Royal Opera House show which I believe was her last visit. But this gig was something else – all was full of power – the big beat numbers really rocked, but the set up of the band meant they could switch from crazed techno-pagan fury to delicate madrigal like folk song in the flash of eye. We had Toumani Diabaté and Antony (minus his Johnsons) guesting. It was just…AWESOME. I arrived home covered in glitter and found myself raising my own little flag to Bjork. Higher and Higher.

Here are some piccies I stole off the web.

Mitsuko Uchida - RFH - 2 April 08

2008-04-04T12:34:00.000+01:00

I think I’ve just about had it with piano recitals at the Royal Festival Hall – just about all the things I hate about the experience came into sharp focus during this one – the constant, unashamed coughing, the terrible sight lines forcing me to have to keep constantly craning my neck in the hope of getting a brief mono-eyed glimpse of the performer, the “soft” sound, and all for £38 and supposedly one of the premium seats.

The behaviour of some of the audience was astonishing. I watched someone – from the rear I couldn’t tell if they were female, she-male or trans-something-or other – kind of Germaine Greer looking anyway - constantly opening and closing a sketchbook and drawing in it until the bloke next to here finally exploded and grabbed her arm. Next to me a greying couple who’d brought packed lunches played ring-a-ring-a-roses on each others palms. As well as the incessant coughing, enough said the Times reviewer to have justified Uchida walking off, there was the regular patter of programmes falling off laps whilst their owners snoozed.

I tried my best to enjoy the concert but in such circumstances it is hard for me. It comprised a Schubert sonata, some modern pieces by Kurtag interspersed with Bach, and for the second half Schumann Etudes. There were some sublime moments, especially in the encores, the best being Mozart so I gathered from the Pinter Hat wearing buck toothed chap sat in front of me.

But really what’s the point? And I later found it is broadcast next week on Radio 3 anyway, so I think I’ll listen again in the comfort of my own home, sketchbook ever ready.

Generous Dreamer

2008-03-19T12:47:00.001Z

a classical week

2008-03-16T20:24:00.001Z

a quieter week, by recent standards, but still time for 3 classical concerts:

at the RFH – Leif Ove Andsnes performing Beethoven , Sibellius, Grieg and Debussy;

at the Wigmore Hall – The Zehetmair Quartet performing Schubert, Holliger and Schumann;

at the Barbican – Piotr Anderszewski and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra performing Mozart Haydn and Beethoven.

What can I tell you?

At the Wigmore Hall I was sat in seat C13, just 4 along from the seat made famous in Ian McEwan’s ‘On Chesil Beach’ – as far as I could tell, none of the Zehetmair string quartet looked longingly in my direction.

The Holliger piece was a newly written piece. It was atrocious, buttock baringly bad. Sounded like a dreadful soundtrack to a gormless horror movie, full of atonal tuneless clichés. The rest of the evening was sublime.

The Barbican audience were the friendliest. And the baldest. I’d estimate that 4 in 5 of the blokes had some form of male pattern balding. These are my people.

Best encore was at the Barbican too, performed solo by Piotr Anderszewski, Bach if I’m not mistaken.

I drank too much coffee. This is because I am anxious about falling asleep. It doesn’t stop me nodding off though, but it does make me anxious about being anxious and my mind go whirling. Well the music makes it do this too, but I think the coffee enhances the effect. I should do what the regulars do, have a couple of glasses of red wine and just let it all hang out.

I should tell you what the pieces were but I can’t be bothered. You are not reading this anyway.

Also at the Barbican I checked out their latest exhibition, the Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art . The central conceit (I think that’s the right word) is that we are on Mars, looking at a museum the little greenies have put together from their foraging on Earth. But they get things wrong, and make weird connections. So far so – crap, but bearable. The problem is that the whole thing is put together in this weird alien accent – ho ho such funny mistakes the Martians make – but it is a bad accent, totally unconvincing, and one which keeps slipping when the curators feels the need to tell you something about the artist or work. So early impressions were as depressing as the not very funny art and humour shambles at the Heywood. But at least here some of the art is interesting – I liked the totem poles, weird masks, and generally a preponderance of peculiar wooden boxes with strange things in them – fake cabinets of curiosities. And for all the curators’ knowing irony, I wonder if they haven’t unwittingly stumbled upon another truth, that much contemporary art is in fact pants and completely unfathomable, that it might as well come from another planet.

A Literary Week

2008-03-07T19:21:00.003Z

yes another busy week...

The highlight of Jewish Book Week for me was Simon McBurney, the main force behind Theatre de Complicite, and what a force. He came across like a hyper-caffeinated cross between Patrick Marber and Boris Johnson, and all the better for that. Ostensibly he was taking part in a discussion about diaspora and Bruno Schultz, but really it was his passion and drive and wonderment for the world of the imagination and of words that shone through, in great contrast to the rest of the rather drab offerings at JBW. Adam Thirlwell, in the same event, came across as a bit plain and somewhat newsnight review-ish. Earllier in the day, Amy Bloom lectured us in how not to write, but seemed to have not heard the the one about not writing historical fiction in the present tense when it came to her own latest offering. And we got a delightful glimpse of Bernard Malamud in an event by his biographer Philip Davis with readings by Janet Suzman, but in an event which drew ties between his writing and his life the absence of anything from the Fidelman stories was a bit of a surprise.

Let us go then, you and I, to the British Library where, as part of a series of events linked to its Breaking the Rules exhibition of European avant-garde book artistry, this month’s Josephine Hart’s Poetry Hour was dedicated to T.S. Eliot. The great and the good were all there. As well as me, I had that Harold Pinter and his lady wife in front of me (I didn’t think it appropriate to ask where he used to get his Pinter Hats from), the Michaels Portillo and Howard were in the cheap seats, and Maurice Saatchi (who it turns out is married to the said Ms Hart) nearly accidentally invited me into the room next door for drinks with the elite. Harriet Walter and Damian Lewis were our readers and a very wonderful job they made too of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Portrait of a Lady and the Wasteland, though sadly nothing from the Four Quartets nor from Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. There is something about Eliot, those weird and wonderful phrases which once read are somehow never forgotten, for ever liable to lurch into your conscious mind at unexpected moments. Who is the third who walks always beside you?

I was back at the BL later in the week for a performance by Cindy Oswin entitled “A Salon With Gertrude [Stein] and Alice [B. Toklas]” and really rather marvellous it was too. Ms Oswin began with extracts from “The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas” before reporting how Toklas emerged from under the shadow of her lover/patron with the Alice B Toklas cookbook, whereupon an intermission was declared and waiters emerged bearing trays of nibbles from the said cookbook. They were delicious – stuffed aubergine topped with olives and anchovies, cucumber boats bearing cheesy peas, and little round mushroom sandwiches, and some good wine. All for £7.50 and all these extras completely unadvertised. In the second half Ms Toklas was joined on stage by Gertrude Stein in puppet form (jokes about whose hands were going up where were avoided) and we enjoyed tales of the famous Paris Salon, of Picasso and Hemingway, Matisse and Scott Fitzgerald. It made for a wonderful night.

Whilst at the BL I gave the Breaking the Rules exhibition (Breaking the Rules: The Printed Face of the European Avant Garde 1900-1937 to give it its full title) a second go but still found it frustrating, all those books behind glass unable to yield up their secrets. But something else I noticed, a different narrative, emerged from the way that the exhibition was structured around various cities –– Paris, Amsterdam, Vienna, Berlin, Warsaw, Krakow, Vilnius – and so it went on - all names associated with great pre-war Jewish communities - and all leading inevitably to the final “scene” in the exhibition - footage of the Nazis burning ‘degenerate’ books. It seems a shame that nobody picked up on the opportunity to explore the Jewish contribution to the European avant-garde movements when it was lurking so clearly under the surface.

a Long Week

2008-03-01T14:39:00.002Z

Well it’s been one hell of a week, so much to report.

Jewish Book Week opened on Sunday with barely anything to do with reading, writing or literature in the programme. I think the organisers must have got confused and thought they were programming Limmud, not JBW. Still I had an enjoyable day with sessions on mysticism, Spinoza, and secularity. The highlights as always were the questions from the audience. At the end of the Spinoza lecture, in which we had learnt of his extraordinary achievements in philosophy and his struggles with community and identity, a lady asked if Spinoza had got married and had children. When told he hadn’t, she heckled ‘well he didn’t have much of a life then’. Prof Rachel Elior explained the correlation between different mystical movements and the tragedies that befell the Jewish people – mysticism was the creation of the losers by way of imaginative response to their own tragedy; this hadn’t happened after the Shoah because of the creation of Israel. It was such a shame said an audience member desperately trying to find a question to justify the sound of his own voice that she had POLITICISED the lecture. Err sorry she said she was just stating facts based on her academic research. Anyway we all noticed it was him not her who was trying to politicise things - he faced death by a thousand tuts. Touchy these lefty secular anti-zionists.

Things became even weirder in the evening session with Willow Winston who makes “book art”. I really liked her work and the ideas behind it – kind of variations on pop-ups rich with mathematical and spiritual thinking. For her workshop we were encourage to cut up, mash-up, remix and just generally destroy old books. We were all uncomfortable with the notion, but dealing with our book angst was part of the experiment. I stuck to cutting up my JBW booklet. It was great fun, and a large room of people took to the task with relish and some of the work was really rather impressive.

On Friday I was back at the JBW for more tales of mystical madness from Howard Schwartz, a session which turned into a workshop on storytelling as we all struggled to finish a fragment of story attributed to Reb Nachman of Bratslav. As a writer I was of course fairly hopeless, seeing myself as neither a storyteller (I follow EM Forster on this, oh yes, oh dear, the novel tells a story) nor a performer, but by then I was so far out of my comfort zone not to worry.

It was events at the Arts Depot that brought this odd mental state into being. I would love to know what the thought process is at the Arts Depot. It must be something like – lets put on a festival of physical /visual theatre; we’ll invite some of the most exciting up and coming companies and performers in the land; we’ll get some of the leading theatre companies in London to hold workshops; and we’ll put on some talks as well to give general advice to aspiring performers; and then what we will do is hold the festival midweek, mostly during the day, so that no-one can come, and we won’t bother to actually tell anybody about the festival anyway just to make absolutely sure that the place is all but empty. And with no apparent irony we’ll call the festival “depot untapped”.

So it was that I found myself in a workshop hosted by Sarah Dowling of Punchdrunk; max 15 places, and it was half empty! I had tried to ignore the bit on the programme which said “come prepared to move” but once committed, there was no escape. So it was that I found myself on an intractable projectory leading to myself and a poor lovely lady who had the misfortune to be partnering me preparing and performing a piece of physical theatre in one of the public lifts in the Arts Depot. Thank goodness LaLa Latte Days didn’t walk in that moment. I have to say I just had the best time; the whole experience was really liberating and fun – everyone else in the group was really talented, basically they were other performers taking part in the festival, drama students, or people who go regularly to acting classes, and no-one seemed to mind the fact that I was performing with all the grace of an elephant in the room. I had nothing but admiration for Sarah; not only did she make it such a fun experience, but she had to repeat the workshop again (the second one looked half empty as well) and then get off to Battersea to perform for 3 hours.

That was Wednesday morning. Thursday I found myself in an even emptier workshop hosted by Peter Glanville of the Little Angel Theatre Company, the country’s leading, and probably only regular, venue for puppetry. This wasn’t so much fun somehow, it all seemed a bit too serious, but I learnt a lot about puppetry and was really glad I went.

I caught 3 shows at depot untapped. First was the Levantes Dance Theatre with a piece called Gin & Satsumas, which seemed to be about the terrible boredom of everyday housewife drudgery seen through a prism that verged on the camp / burlesque; there were some lovely images and moments, but overall it was quite a short piece and had the feeling of being the start of something rather than finished product.

Over the two days I grew very fond of the Lost Spectacles, who had been in the Punchdrunk workshop, and their performance, Lost in The Wind, blew me away (no pun intended). This was physical / visual theatre on a large scale, full of imagination and ambition, and was as wonderful as any of the many wonderful things I caught at LIMF last month. A man steps out of his house (always a bad move in these kinds of worlds) into a storm and gets lost, finding himself amongst a very strange ‘family’ who to me felt as though they had been orphaned at an early age in some remote land and had managed the difficult business of not growing up, free from any adult intervention. There was a great sense of play, some wonderful theatrical magic, for example conjuring up a mountain snow storm and an underwater scene from the simplest of materials. And the soundtrack was great. I think this lot could really go places.

Last up and running very late were two puppeteers from Manchester, Mishimou, with a version of The 3 Little Pigs. The puppetry was excellent and again there was just a wonderful vibrancy and sense of imagination. Unfortunately they were plagued by technical difficulties – the lighting kept going wrong, some of the shadow puppetry was out of focus, and ultimately the intercostal animation broke down altogether. My heart really went out to the performers, because, as we told them, what they had done was really good. They managed to limp on to the end of the show, but it was a real shame.

Well if all of this wasn’t enough for one week, I managed to go to a Tea Ceremony at the British Museum held by the London Branch of the Urasenke Foundation, Japan’s leading exponents of Chado, the Way of Tea. I caught a Richard Goode recital at the South Bank - Chopin, with some Bach, Debussy and Mozart. I found it all a bit soporific – I don’t know if that was a good or a bad thing, but it didn’t seem very melodic, all a bit kind of difficult to hold any focus on. I thought I was being plagued by a phantom snorer, but it turned out that the heavy guttural wheezing was actually coming from Richard Goode onstage. I went to Ceramic Art 2008, a fantastic selling exhibition at the Royal College of Art with many of the best ceramic artists from Britain and Europe showing. And I went to the most dreadful exhibition at the Hayward – Laughing in a Foreign Language – supposedly about art and humour but which was not in the slightest bit funny, nor was the art interesting in any way. The artists on show could have learnt something from Lost in the Wind about using humour in art. I just about managed to climb up the stairs at the Hayward to the Alexander Rodchenko exhibition, - what I saw of his graphic art / photography / montage work was really good, but I was too knackered to really appreciate it, and hope to go back again.

I’ve got some random photos from the week to stick up when I get a mo.

Over and out.

Pina Bausch – Café Müller / The Rite of Spring

2008-02-22T11:09:00.003Z

It was the lovely Persephone who first put me on to Pina Bausch, when we went to see Compagnie Philippe Genty as part of LIMF last year. Since then I’ve lost track of the number of people telling me that I’d love her work, that I must go and see her if I can, that she is the originator of much of the contemporary dance and physical / visual theatre that I love.

So I was pretty excited as I made my way to Sadler’s Wells last night, and judging by the vibes in the audience, I wasn’t the only one. We don’t really “get” this kind of work in this country – in both senses of the word “get” - critics and promoters and arts institutions would much rather put on the kind of work that features, say, the stars and stripes to a soundtrack of guns and screams, than something more complex, elusive, less obviously “political” and “realist”.

So this was a pretty rare visit by her company, Tanztheater Wuppertal, to London, and the first chance ever in this country to see her two seminal works from the 1970s in a single bill.

Taking the second half first, The Rite of Spring was, quite simply, awesome. For somebody who doesn’t really do “classical” this managed to be the 3rd version of The Rite that I have seen in a year, and although the Michael Clark and LPO/Julia Mach versions were both great in their own ways, this was something else altogether.

The scale was breathtaking, a huge bare stage, immaculately lit, covered in earth, and a cast of nearly 40 performers, but it felt like ten times that number at times, such was the effect of the staging, the angles, the physicality, the energy.

The dancers were extraordinary, whether operating as individuals, or as masses (the tension between these two states was one of the central motifs of the piece). There was a lot of the animal about the work, powerful, unselfconscious, beasts thundering about the stage, kicking up a dustbowl of dry earth into the air, savage rituals of mating and slaughter. It was appalling, horrifying, gruesome, in the way that a David Attenborough documentary can be appalling and horrifying and gruesome, and as gripping and wonderful and alien too.

The two key protagonists had amazing presence – in selecting and capturing the victim the prime male was majestic, brutal, proud and irresistible, like a stag, all muscle and sinew and grace; the victim, once chosen, became birdlike, fragile, full of fear and torment, wounded, alone and afraid.

The first piece, Café Müller, was very different indeed, with just 6 performers, and a stage littered with chairs and tables. It was a much more elusive piece, built like a symphony with learned and then repeated motifs, physical phrases with repetitions and variations. Couples come together, fall out, fall apart, drop each other, fling each other against a wall, fight, come back together. A man desperately flings chairs and tables out of the way of a woman running just a fraction behind him.

The piece had a feeling of mortality about it, and although it was apparently based on Pina’s childhood memories of her parents cafe and the people who went there and the liaisons that took place there, it had the feeling to me of being a projection from the mind of an old woman, near death, looking back on a lifetime of romances, good and bad, often both, the remembering of incidents which at the time seemed so awkward and embarrassing and significant, but which with the wisdom of age, seem now just to be part of the ebb and flow of life.

It had a delicious melancholy about it, a sense that moments in life which seem so important at the time turn out to be minor in the grand unknowable scheme of things. Only really now, in thinking and writing about it, does the depth and impact of the piece start to work its magic on me.

Loss - A Valentine's Day Ball

2008-02-19T16:30:00.009Z

Well what better way not to celebrate Valentine’s Day than at London’s most miserable night, Loss, hosted as always by the Last Tuesday Society. It was all a bit of blur really, and still is. I remember there was a great cheeseboard, a fantastic chap called the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table who sang traditional Japanese folk songs, I know I found a business card in my pocket the next day from somebody I couldn’t remember describing himself as an Aesthetician, there was somebody who thought he was Bogart and kept telling me he had to go back to work, there was a gorgeous string trio in burlesque costume and legs right up to their fiddles, there was a very nice chap called Orlando who sang a song about the North End Road with his fine and very intense looking band, a seminar on broken hearts, oh and the lovely Broken Hearts and the fantastic Alan Weekes Quartet, and some bloke in a kissing booth who just could not stop snogging the girls. I dunno that’s about all I can remember. But it doesn’t account for 6 hours does it? Here are the photos…

self portrait with peacock feather and urinals

Persephone, masked

the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table

the Broken Hearts

dolls and coffins

A Life More Ordinary

2008-02-17T23:23:00.002Z

Over at the ICA, the Japan Foundation has put together a programme of 6 films under the heading “A Life More Ordinary”. The films, all from the last few years, are intended to show a more realistic side to Japanese life, free from ghosts, gore, geishas and the like. I managed to catch four of the films (in for a penny, in for a pound!)

Kamikaze Girls was a teen girl buddy movie, the girls friendship being unlikely because they hailed from two very different yoof tribes – Momoko being a “Lolita” who loves to dress ‘rococo’, all frills and bonnets, and Ichigi being a ‘Yanki’ biker chick who spits and headbuts people at the slightest provocation. The film was glitzy and high energy, perhaps not the deepest film but delightful nonetheless.

The Cat Leaves Home was just about as different as it was possible to be, minimalist, moody, sketchy, but at its heart also lay an uneasy relationship between two girls, older this time, who since their schooldays have always fallen out over boys, the prettier of the two always getting the guy. A film of subtle gradations, where not an awful lot happens, the frumpier of the two manages to get some revenge on the prettier girl, who herself has to come to terms with her own fallibility and limitations.

Kaza-hana was an odd couple road trip, the couple being a hostess who wants to return home to see her child whom she hasn’t seen for five years, having left her in the care of her own mother after the father’s death, and a disgraced and deeply unpleasant bureaucrat whose drunken shoplifting of a can of beer has made it into all the papers. When the hostess attempts suicide having been rejected by her family, you really don’t know which way the film is going to go. Had this been Hollywood you would be pretty confident that it would all come good in the end, and/or the hype surrounding the film would have given you a pretty good idea of what the outcome was. But with no prior cultural knowledge, predicting the outcome was impossible, making the finale truly gripping.

No One’s Ark was probably the most difficult film to watch of the four. A black comedy who’s humour frankly felt very alien to me (the Japanese in the audience found it hilarious though!) and yet a film which in some ways, for all the jokes about snot, had the most incisive moments. It was a film about a couple dreaming of business success selling a new health drink, but the problem is that it tastes disgusting, and they refuse to sell it in small quanities, thus alienating the few potential customers they manage to attract. They return to the bloke’s hometown, where he behaves very badly indeed to his family and his girlfriend.

Some interesting themes emerged across the various films, even though they were all very different. Most characters were either dreaming of going to Tokyo or if they had gotten there, were now dreaming of escaping it. A sense of failure, in business / career and in relationships, pervaded the films, with an undercurrent of unfulfillable pressure to live up to the way of life of previous generations. The women in particular seemed trapped in unsatisfactory relationships, unable to escape because the prospect of starting out again seemed a worse solution than sticking with what they had. The men on the other hand seemed withdrawn, slightly out of time. Universal themes but at the same all the films seemed uniquely Japanese.

CSSD/Punchdrunk - A Guest For Dinner; Array / Darren Johnston - Outre

2008-02-17T14:06:00.003Z

What a glorious day Saturday turned out to be. Watching United thumping Arsenal 4-0 in a pub near Waterloo was the glorious meat in a sumptuous cultural sandwich. Van Morrison said there'd be days like this but frankly I’d stopped believing him.

The day began with “A Guest For Dinner” up at the Arts Depot, for what was, to all intents, a mini-Punchdrunk performance in Finchley. Regular readers of this blog (oh if only!) will know just how extraordinary and exciting that concept is to me. So exciting that I have to say it again, as if aurally pinching myself to believe it. Yes. Punchdrunk in Finchley.

To be precise, A Guest for Dinner is a collaboration between final year degree students at The Central School of Speech and Drama and Maxine Doyle (director/choreographer) and Livi Vaughan (design / details / atmosphere) of Punchdrunk. But this was no student drama production, this was the real McCoy. Continuing Punchdrunk’s obsessive investigation of Edgar Allan Poe, A Guest For Dinner takes as its starting point Poe’s story “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether” about the lunatics taking over the asylum. The story is also used as the basis for one of the most powerful set pieces in Masque of the Red Death.

We weren’t given masks, but otherwise the entrance into the theatre was classic Punchdrunk. We were led into a goods lift lined in red fabric, with a silent actor with moody beard rocking on a child’s wooden horse; the doors were slammed shut and we descended, emerging from the lift into a pitch black space, following a path inside a desiccated bonsai forest which had magically sprung up inside the Arts Depot. We were led into a tiny anti –chamber where a stunning ethereal ghost told us the story of the little boy who went to the moon (first encountered by me in Faust, but which I now know to come from Woyzeck) whilst dabbing a silent man’s shaved head with TCP. In the flickering light one could just make out various specimen jars with unidentifiable organic matter inside.

We were then led into the main space, where the lunatics / doctors) were assembled around the dinner table. It was a full on sensual assault – the actors passed over to us bits of papers dipped in essential oils with strange sayings – “who put the din into dinner”. The normal spectral equation was reversed – as if we the audience were the ghosts - occasionally one of the actors would just glimpse us out of the corner of the eye, and strain to see or hear us.

Just as everything was starting to feel familiar and comfortable, at least for a Punchdrunk obsessive, we were moved on again – a curtain opened to reveal what ordinarily is the auditorium, and we were ushered off the stage and into the seats, whilst the lunatics/doctors gave us a show, an interlude one might call it, perhaps recalling the vaudevillian Palais Royale inside the Masque of the Red Death. After a crazy song, some mesmerism and some quackery, the show took a further turn as the cast, now all in white, turned what had been the dining table into hospital beds, and a long and quite brilliantly choreographed scene emerged, the actors exploring the duality of the patient - doctor theme in the Poe Story. The choreography reminded me of the Woyzeck I saw earlier in the year and last year’s Icelandic Peer Gynt (set in a lunatic hospital), especially the way the beds were hurled from side to side of the stage to create an extraordinary energy and visceral visuality.

It was a tremendous production – light and sound and smells were of course magnificent, and I cannot praise the cast highly enough given their relative inexperience. As with all Punchdrunk stuff, they are really challenged hard, acting, dancing/physical theatre-ing, singing, some playing instruments, interacting with the audience and performing in tight narrow spaces. It was difficult to believe they were still learning their trade. Not everyone was equally brilliant at everything, but everyone excelled at something.

After heading down to the South Bank and watching the footie, it was into the QEH for Darren Johnston / Array and a piece of visual theatre / dance called Outre. If my Martian cousin were to come down from the skies and say to me “Robin, I’ve been reading your blog, in fact I am that regular reader you have been dreaming about, and I really like the sound of this thing you humans call culture - oh and before I forget, yes they do have Jews on Mars, anyway I really like all this stuff you go to see - can you take me to see something, maybe - cos it’s short visit, you know what with the costs of accommodation on Earth and all that – something that has a bit of all the stuff you keep going on about, please, will you, please?” then I would take him/her/it to see this.

Outre seemed to be a summation of everything wonderful I have seen in the past three years. In no particular order it was: uncanny, gothic Victorian, ghostly/hauntological, fragmentary, macabre, sinister, and extraordinarily, intensely, mentally stimulating. It had touches of the freak show/circus. It suggested automata and living puppets. It had elements of David Lynch and Angela Carter. It was sound-tracked with specially commissioned abstract electronica and contemporary classical. I connected with it on a deep unconscious level, yet it remained elusive, forever just beyond the tip of my tongue. It had touches of those classic Doctor Who episodes, The Talons of Weng Chiang and Spearhead from Space, and brought out memories of Bagpuss. It made me think (and dream) of Von Kleist’s famous essay “On The Marionette Theatre”, with its discussion of grace and the unconsciousness of inanimate objects in movement. It had intimations of Noh and Kabuki theatre and tapped into that uniquely Japanese strain of supernatural/ghost story, in particular reminding me of Kaneto Shindo’s two wonderful supernatural movies of the 1960s, “Kuroneko” and “Onibaba”.

But more, more than this, it was absolutely exquisite, with some of the most beautiful moments I have ever seen conjured in the theatre. To manage to be tough and physical yet at the same time delicate and fragile is the sign of a truly masterful piece of work.

What it was is of course hard to describe. The first section seemed to be set in the freakiest of freakshows; we saw a living automaton, conjoined twins, a headless man, and a lithe erotic dancer who was revealed to have a gruesome witch’s face. Each act was preceded by a projected introduction from a sinister distorted MC. Then there was some kind of breakdown, a rift in the ether, and we were watching a crazed and tortured Japanese ghost figure. Finally all the pieces of the nightmare seemed to coalesce before the figures collapsed in a heap in the centre of the stage, like de-animated children’s dolls.

The production took place behind a gauze screen and the air was heavy with dry ice. Minimally, but very carefully, lit, the haunting figures seemed barely there, drifting in and out of the blackness and the mist and the beams of light.

Like I say, exquisite.

Blugging

2008-01-28T18:27:00.000Z

This passage from Doris Lessing's Nobel Prize acceptance lecture caught my eye:

"What has happened to us is an amazing invention, computers and the internet and TV, a revolution. This is not the first revolution we, the human race, has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, changed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked "What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?" And just as we never once stopped to ask, How are we, our minds, going to change with the new internet, which has seduced a whole generation into its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging and blugging etc."

The whole lecture is fantastic, and thought-provoking - the sections on Africa are so moving.

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2007/lessing-lecture_en.html

EAR

2008-01-28T18:10:00.000Z

One of the nice things about LIMF is that none of the performances outstayed their welcome; most were about the hour mark. Coming out of the QEH on Saturday, I saw there was some free music event going at in the RFH so, enhanced with January positivity from my reading of the Power of Now, I thought, I’m here, let’s check it out.

Well I was amazed. First of all, I had no idea there was a whole ‘nother level (in a downwards direction) to the RFH. The Spirit Level, in the basement, featured
a blue room, a gamelan room and lots of hip young things lounging about on very uncomfortable looking white blow up cushions. Plus a load of stragglers coming in from LIMF.

EAR stands for the “emerging artists in residence” at the Southbank. They have a microsite at www.southbankcentre.co.uk/ear.

First up I saw Japanese sound artist Mieko Shimuzu. To be honest, her first number was pants. I thought about toddling off. Luckily I didn’t cos the rest of her set was fantastic – kind of electronica influenced soul-pop in a Matthew Herbert / Jamie Liddell vein. Her recorded stuff on her myspace sounds really top notch: http://www.myspace.com/micouk.

Mico in the gamelan room

All this was as nothing to the jaw dropping set from cellist / composer / singer Ayanna Witter-Johnson. As soon as she started to sing, I saw the heavens open. It was one of those moments when the noisy room of over-excited kids all shut up at once. It was one of those rare and delicious moments when you see someone and know instantly that they are going to be a star. I thought she came across as the secret love child of Stevie Wonder and India Arie (yes that good!!) and, found myself telling her so later when I bumped into her in the main hall (the Power of Now has a lot to answer for). What I should have added though is that yes she sounded like that and also managed to fit in a dollop of contemporary classical into the equation, but also that she sounded completely unique, with her own distinctive sound and vibe. I’m not one prone to messianic fervour, but I think she could the one, the saviour of all that is good in music. http://www.myspace.com/ayannawitterjohnson

AWJ (centre) and friends in the blue room

Still reeling from AWJ, I caught the end of a performance by Natascha Eleonore which sounded great – great tunes, brilliant production and meaty samples/backing noises. And I read she is working with high end producers and various Afro-Cuban legends, and you know what, she sounds fresh and funky and I guess will be hugely popular. If they still have charts, she will be in them. http://www.myspace.com/organicurban

Back in the ballroom, I caught a set by Nila Raja. Hard to judge her on this; there were too many people talking / moving about and it was too big a space. It sounded good but you know, everything is relative, and maybe I was losing focus and presence in the now, so I came home for a nice cup of tea. http://www.myspace.com/nilaraja

The next EAR is in April.

The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment is available from all good bookshops, new age outlets, and Amazon right now. It should come with a health warning.

LIMF Modes II

2008-01-28T17:16:00.000Z

Wow. The weird and wonderful world of the London International Mime Festival continued.

First up this week were BlackSkyWhite from Russia with a production called Astronomy for Insects, one of the most peculiar, disturbing and downright sinister things I have ever had the (great) pleasure to see. Impossible to describe except by reference to the Other; imagine vintage doctor Who choreographed by Punchdrunk, or Kafka’s Metamorphosis performed by the Teletubbies/In the Night Garden people, or Quartermass animated by the Brothers Quay and you might get somewhere close. We may have been on a space ship peopled by our ancestors or descendants; or witnessing life from the consciousness of a still born puppet/human/Pierrot hybrid. Or maybe not.

Next up was Dead Wedding, a collaboration between puppeteers Faulty Optic and the very wonderful abstract electronica /contemporary classical composer and performer Mira Calix (see previous posts, especially http://robingrebsonsguidefortheperplexed.blogspot.com/2007/03/mira-calix-man-of-mode.html). Mira must be one of my favourite musicians of the last few years. This was a haunting, uncanny, troubling and often moving re-creation of the Orpheus myth, imagining his desperate attempts to be reunited with Eurydice where the Greek legend ends, after his previous rescue attempt has resulted in failure and death.

I guess what this show, and LIMF as a whole, proves, is that the theatrical space is and should be a magical one; that you can create magic from two padded envelopes with minimal faces drawn on. In Dead Wedding the envelopes came to represent the hopes, dreams and agonies of the central characters. Excellent all round from the live score performed by Mira and her three person mini chamber group, brilliant puppetry using all sorts of different puppetry techniques, and some excellent animation thrown in as well.

Saturday’s double bill was a last minute booking from me because on the travels I had heard much talk about the companies, and was having such a great festival I thought why not? In the afternoon I caught a pared down version of Woyzeck by the wonderfully named Sadari Movement Laboratory from South Korea. Performed on a bare stage, the cast in black vests and tights, the only props were chairs, which were used as evolving metaphors for Woyzeck’s plight, from cages of the mind to physical imprisonment to twirling flashing symbols of mental breakdown. The soundtrack all Astor Piazzolla which gave the work a fresh, vibrant feel.

Similarly minimal, and again using chairs as a main prop, were the Collectif Petit Travers with their show Le Parti Pris Des Choses. I was initially a little worried that I was at last going to have to watch some real mime, and even some juggling, but I was quickly grabbed by this eccentric trio. Their main thing was try to make what was virtually a contemporary dance piece out of juggling and physical movement and some spectacular and scary trapeze work. I’ve never scene a Cirque du Soleil show but I have rather gotten the impression that their shows are empty, soulless, spectacles, carnivals of nothingness. Certainly in the intimacy of the Purcell Room, the trapeze work here seemed genuinely dangerous and thrilling. The narrative seemed to be a love triangle; the moral: never come between a man and his balls. The said (juggling) balls) were used in the climax in vast quantities to produce a spectacle of cosmic proportion. This was a show with a menacing undercurrent of violence and perversion, which of course how we used to think about the circus before cirque and their ilk sanitised them. It was also wonderfully, nostalgically French (you could all but imagine Gerard Dipidoo or Daniel Hotel walking on stage). And great chamber music before and during too.

On the closing day of the festival I caught Silent Tide, a collaboration between various instrument makers/musicians and puppeteers/performers. There was something odd about the scale of this performance – the giant industrial instruments and the tiny puppets, so tiny we were issued with opera glasses, and this was in the tiny theatre in the ICA. The puppetry was exquisite, but hard to watch in these conditions. Overall this was production somehow didn’t quite add up to more than its parts. The hand-out spoke of a show contrasting mankind’s need for movement with the immobility of urban life, but the scenes themselves – people marching to a city in the dessert (foot festival or invaders or nomads?), the dessert sky becoming filled with the cranes of the oil industry, the Manhattan skyscrapers full of restless unhappy people drinking / shopping / arguing themselves into extinction, somehow they were too familiar, too politically pre-loaded to work in such an abstract setting. The music was ominous and drone like but not that transporting. The finale however was brilliant, in which a female puppet figure starts to ape the movements of an angel that we saw crawling out of the dessert sand at the start (perhaps discovering the angel within her); she then climbs up the side of her apartment building, then up a kind of Oval type industrial building, before launching into flight, exploding into flames as she does so. It was an image of transcendence and enlightenment, and a magical way to end the festival for me this year.

LIMF modes 1

2008-01-20T15:29:00.000Z

Akemashite Omedeto Gozaimasu, as they say in Japan. Or Happy New Year to you.

As I have promised/threatened previously, my primary writing this year is on my novel, so I am attempting to adopt a more succinct approach to recording my out and abouts.

Everyone seems terribly depressed at the mo, but not me. I find myself in fine fettle. One of the reasons for this is the superb extravaganza that is the London International Mime Festival (LIMF). The name is wonderfully misleading; there are no starving drama students running into invisible walls or golden glitter encrusted living statutes to be found, just the finest companies from around the world specialising in visual / movement theatre, object manipulation and puppetry. OK there’s a guy called Pep who does things with balloons but I shan't be going to that.

First up were Mossoux-Bonte, and a show called Nuit Sur Le Monde. It was a kind of triptych, and moments in the first and last sections were as stunning examples of visual theatre as I have seen for many a year. In the first part, multiplying members of the cast e-merge from and back into a thick set wall. They move a little like good old Morph, evoking claymation, puppetry, and Ray Harryhausen style animation. Sometimes they sink back into the wall, disappearing into it like bass reliefs, and when they re-emerge it is as if the three dimensional effect is heightened. In the final part, lit in a weird harsh red light, they shuffle out towards the audience on their knees like damaged puppets or demented mutants. The middle section is not as successful for me – the cast are dressed in white robes, and perform movements evoking uneasy awakenings and awkward interactions which made me think of the innocents before the fall; then stripped naked they seem to discover the pain of childbirth, hardship and death. Overall a stunning start to LIMF.

Next up were sculptor Mique Barcelo and performance artist Josef Nadj and a stage comprising ten tons of clay. Each night, in a work called Paso Doble, the artists attack the clay, and attack themselves and each other with clay, producing an ever evolving three dimension action painting/sculpture. It may lack the cerebral quality of Mossoux-Bonte’s work, but nonetheless was absorbing and the work produced (images below) was surprisingly stong, evoking thoughts of Picasso, Gaudi and Dali. The performance itself had touches of Godot, and Laurel and Hardy (high praise indeed).

Finally for this report, Teatro Corsario’s adult fairy tale Aullidos brought hard-core puppet sex to the ICA. If (like me) you have ever dreamt of mermaids performing cunnilingus or wanted to see a puppets penis go from flaccid to erect in front of your very eyes, then this was the show for you. It was like a Brothers Grimm tale retold by Angela Carter and then staged by a 10 year old Pedro Almodovar. The puppetry was excellent – I particularly liked a superb fight scene which managed to incorporate Crouching Tiger and Matrix style slo-mo effects, and the final scene where the wolf-boy hero (having given the heroine a good licking with his remarkably long tongue) carries her off at high speed.

Inspired by LIMF I have dug out my old black polo neck, a look I haven’t sported since my youthful prime. Also in my sights is the perfect theatrical-type black shirt; nipping into Selfridges I was amazed to see that the place was full of black shirts. It is this season’s big thing. Weird how this has happened. Did the fashion world know LIMF was coming? Is mime going to be this year’s dubstep/ kate and pete / new black? Are we to be treated to Celebratory Come Miming or Puppets on Ice? I do hope so.

More reports from LIMF next week.

Gimpel the Fool

2007-12-20T12:02:00.000Z

Gimpel the Fool at Spiro Ark

The final cultural event of the year and somehow it is fitting that it takes place in a small basement room, which by the power of art is transformed into a Polish shtetl; the transformation is attained by the accumulation of simple things done well– props, sound, lighting, clothes, and of course fine acting.

Howard Rypp of the Nephesh Theatre of Tel Aviv brought remarkably subtle gradations of meaning to his adaptation of Saul Bellow’s iconic translation of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s story, playing Gimpel as part Shakespearian fool, part the simple son of the Haggadah, part an almost Christianic innocent, part wide eyed Ancient Mariner. Marvellous and magical.

On the bus home, a man in a big brown hat and big brown coat and a leopard print scarf took out a harmonica and started playing Christmas tunes in a soft, understated, swampy kind of way, not for money, but because he too was a wandering troubadour, cursed to travel the globe telling his tales. It is the sort of thing that happens when you open your mind to the power of art.

who was the mysterious troubador on the bus?

Grudgemonkey, Tutankhamun, Madness and the Dome

2007-12-16T22:26:00.000Z

There’s a title.

So Friday I was down the Dome – my goodness what a G-dforsaken place that is. It must be built on an old plague burial pit or something, it just feels so dead there, even the air is dead. Cold and soulless.

Inside the Dome, it feels like any other identikit plastic retail and leisure destination environment experience, save that you have to go through airport style bag and body scanners, before being confronted by masked ranks of merchandise stalls trying to sell you fez’s. At first I thought it was a bizarre tie in for the King Tut exhibition, but it soon became apparent that Madness were playing that night, and attendees were obliged to buy either a fez or a cheap felt imitation Blues Brother’s style hat in black. It must have been obligatory because everyone we saw gathering in the malls before the gig had purchased one. But more of those sad fuckers shortly.

I love Múm. I love my mum. But I don’t care much for mummies. For this reason I was somewhat reluctant to go the Tut exhibition, or Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs to give it its full title. But Big Dave was in town and wanted to go, and in that spirit of saying yes to everything I had agreed to come, even agreed to get the audioguide thingy. The words “My name is Omar Shariff” were whispered softly in my ear, in the way that only an old man with a moustache can, and I promptly fell off the escalators. Apart from Omar, there were no mummies, not even the famous death mask. Thankfully.

I enjoyed it, then got a bit bored. As with the First Emperor, the objects were amazing, the effort, the hubris, the Ozymandias effect, all powerful, that same ambiguity that these things were done because of a belief in a living god set to rule the afterlife, and had succeeded, ironically, in creating some kind of immortality, had willed immortality into existence.

Then back out to face the behatted hordes of Madness fans. I’ve commented before about the curse of my generation, namely that at every house party I will now ever go to, there will always be a bloke, probably with no hair, loudly getting drunk on cider, waiting for his moment, his moment being the playing of a Madness song. He will then spring into life, claim his rightful place on the dancefloor (ie area of carpet cleared of furniture) and do the Nutty Boys Dance. This is the only exercise he will ever get. Each year it gets more difficult for him to raise his legs to the requisite height. Each year his heart and lungs hurt more. Each year he aches more and worse on the morning after. But he can never let us down by not doing the dance. Never. He is destined to die doing it. Quite literally.

And here they all were, like cybermen out of Doctor Who when they gather for the final battle, the hordes of the Nutty Boys, in their silly hats. I’ve nothing against Madness per se, they entertained me in my youth when I didn’t know any better and some of their songs were actually all right. But it is their moronic fan base that I object to. These can only be people who hate music. It’s a Pavlov’s dogs thing - hear music - dance badly - behave like twat.

Compare all this with the Adelaide Pub in lovely North London the previous evening and the live debut of Grudgemonkey. It was through the Grudgemonkey myspace page that I finally go back in touch with Ollie P. Probably the highlights of my university days were listening to records with Ollie P. 17 odd years later and Grudgemonkey were channelling all this stuff into one of the most powerful and passionate sets of the year. I could taste electric period Miles Davis, “Is It In” period Eddie Harris, Mizzell Brothers, various Hammond Organ grinders in this very tasty soup. No Acid Jazz light was this, but heavy and funky, honest and authentic, even aggressive and muscular. I can see big things for them in 2008.

Múm - the Scala - 11/12/07

2007-12-12T12:55:00.000Z

When I saw the latest (re)incarnation of Múm back in August I felt it was very much the start of something,a slightly messy rebirth, band and fans getting used to life post–Kristín. Now, after touring the USA, they’ve developed and honed themselves into an awesome and spectacular unit, though sadly Ólöf Arnalds seemes to have gone missing now too.

This feels a very different band to the one fronted by Kristín – the fragility of her personality has been replaced by something more robust, her playful seriousness has flipped into serious playfulness. Live, there is less electronica – just some samples used for colouration and a bit of knob-twiddling in some of the instrumental numbers, and no fiddling about with strange sound generating devises or digital manipulation. There is less of the brooding sweeping strings, more guitars and drums, and much more melodica. There are some tango like patterns, throbbing beats, and unashamed passion. The sound is more global, and warmer for it.

They mostly play the new album and some reinterpretation of older instrumentals. They don’t play any of the Kristín vocal numbers.

A sold out crowd at the Scala were on impeccable form, quiet during the quiet numbers, crazed in the louder ones. You could tell the band were blown away by the response. It is this feedback loop between audience and band which marks the legendary gigs out from the just great. And the set draws to a stupendous finale – three flutes, then (as members of the support acts rush on) there are five flutes...

then a dozen harmonicas

and finally a fifteen or so kazoo salute. A great encore builds into blistering throbbing sinewaves and everyone goes mental.

This was (heaven!) - an all Icelandic bill, support coming from Seabear (Múmsy but a bit more folky in a fiddly kind of way) and Benni Hemm Hemm (a touch hysterical in a Sigur Róssy kind of way but with brass rather than strings) – both are great and warmly received by the crowd. There is much intermingling throughout the night of members of the 3 bands.

What can I say? Gig of the year, no question.

Loss, An Evening of Exquisite Misery

2007-12-08T14:35:00.000Z

With some excitement, if not trepidation, armed with noms de guerre and a range of costume strategies, myself and the lovely Persephone and Michelangelo found ourselves in the curiously wonderful world of The Last Tuesday Society.

Persephone and Michelangelo, scaring the tourists and Christmas shoppers

Loss, An Evening of Exquisite Misery, is London’s, if not the world’s, premier crying club. On arrival at the Art’s Theatre we were reminded in strict terms of the official no smiling policy. A pigs head hanging from a noose above the stairs reinforced the message. The place was decorated with tables overflowing with fruit, turnips, onions, water pistols, deceased game birds and plastic bugs. Abused and battered children’s toys sought new, caring owners. A lady in funereal weeds was selling off the family jewellery.

Virtual deguerreotype of Persephone

We took our place amongst Victorian gentlemen, veiled Victorian widows, Victorian gothics, Goths, the undead, clerics, flappers and slappers, tiller girls and landgirls, 50’s rockabillies, romantics, new romantics, old romantics, sad poets, boys dressed as girls, girls dressed as boys, motorcycle Burlesque performers, and who knows what dressed as who knows what.

We were entertained by divine pixie dj’s and djs in full Marie Antoinette costume. We danced (or attempted to) to big band swing, gospel, tango, and I can’t remember what else but it was marvellous and seemed to cover every period of recorded music ever made. We enjoyed poetry readings, a tantric violinist, a singer songwriter telling bible tales, a ska-punk-Balkan band doing Prodigy covers, and an excellent blues/jazz/dub combo. I’m sure there was a lot more if only I could remember.

Divine pixie djs

We drank too much gin.

Gin Drinkers

We found ourselves wearing too much make-up (again).

I found myself back home at 4 in the morning feeling very weird indeed.

some people say I'm a dreamer. but I'm not the only one.

The Masque of the Red Death 4

2007-12-06T13:02:00.000Z

Red Death IV

On the way to Red Death 3, I was worried about how much more there was for me, whether there would be too much repetition, whether I could face all that traipsing up and down.

Well how much amplified were these feelings on my fourth trek to Battersea, after the extraordinary experience of Red Death 3, probably as full a Punchdrunk experience as it possible to have. And I had had a full on PT session in the afternoon, so I was feeling pretty knackered.

Well I guess the thing about Punchdrunk is that it just never stops surprising you. True I was feeling a bit crowdaphobic and spend as much time as possible lurking in the shadows, mostly in the cellars. And also true that there seemed to be a lot of downtime searching for things to happen. But the scenes I caught were as incredible as ever.

Befitting a man who has just had two gruelling sessions at the dentist, I kept finding myself in the Berenice storyline, about a man obsessed with his new wife’s teeth, so much so that he kills her and extracts them. I had seen the wedding /death dance on the bed before, but it made much more sense to me now as part of the story line and the dancing seemd more dramatic. I caught (twice) the scene were Berenice is carried into the dungeons for further extraction work before being buried alive, follwed by her wonderful resurrection from her subterranean pit.

I spent some time following Ligeia - I think it was her because of a lovely three-partner dance, which I think represented her haunting return to her husband by possessing the body of his dead second wife. Following Ligeia alone in the basement, she turned on me and started to throttle me with the cord of my cape (I thought they were meant to keep you safe) before sniffing my neck and telling me that she recognised my scent, knew it was me before I walked in the room, would carry my scent with her on her journey. It’s Decleor I thought. Good job I had shaved. She also said she could feel my heart beating, which she may have literally been able to do since it was beating so much from her initial attack. Hopefully that’s all she could feel.

I finally found Pluto, the BAC’s black cat, basking by a fire – one time when I popped in it was crouched on the top of one of the armchairs, backlit by the fire, sharp green eyes blazing at me.

Also caught the end of the murder scene in the attic, as the narrator of the Tell Tale Heart wrapped up the body; found her later in the bar still clutching the heart she had removed.

I only caught one of the in-show specials – the Kneehigh Theatre who made a wonderful presentation based on Poe’s poem Annabel Lee. It was staged in a black room, the walls scribbled on with chalk; in the centre was a small beach with candles surrounded by buckets stuffed with sand and the clothes and shoes of the dead Ms Lee. In the corner a troubadour strummed a banjo (I think) and sang the poem. On the beach a man pulled the artefacts from the buckets and laid them out to suggest the body of the deceased, occasionally writing manically on the walls, things like "today I believe in ghosts", before lying down besides the body as the poet does in the poem. He then ripped out his heart, superbly rendered in the form of a rose attached to red streamers - in the violence of the act, the streamers took on a visceral, liquid form. This was superb theatre, the ability to conjure up the sense of a beach and the sea, of a body and a distraught lover, from minimal ingredients in a tiny black space. My only quibble was that the distraught lover was wearing a hoody and jeans, but at the same time it gave the piece a contemporary feel.

The Prospero’s Ball finale was as wonderful as ever, although I sensed that the cast were getting pretty knackered. Some were looking particularly gaunt, and most of the leading ladies were sporting bruises and (non-costume) bandages. All of which of course only made them look more like characters in a Poe story. If the show does my head in so consistently, I can’t begin to imagine what it must do to the cast, physically and mentally. And the run extended til mid April. God help them!

So I had another amazing time. This visit seemed to offer the strongest sense of narrative, and to be the most Poe like. There was a lot more death, a corpsly rather than spectral feel.

Despite it not being as full an experience as the last visit, it was as intense in its own way. I left exhilarated, with a sense of completeness. Not that I had by now seen everything there was to see, but that I had seen most things, or at least had caught as much as it was reasonable to expect. That I had reached a point of diminishing returns.

But I also learnt the joy of repetition. Seeing Berenice married, killed and resurrected twice in one evening, connecting it to the fragments of the same story seen on previous occasions, developing a theme of the inevitability of tragedy, of the endless repetition and recycling of stories that make up narrative art, maybe even suggesting Nietzsche’s idea of Eternal Recurrence.

From wikipedia…

"Eternal return (also known as "eternal recurrence") is a concept which posits that the universe has been recurring, and will continue to recur in the exact same self-similar form an incomprehensible and unfathomable number of times"

"Heinrich Heine wrote the following passage which is said to have been where Friedrich Nietzsche first encountered the idea:

For time is infinite, but the things in time, the concrete bodies are finite.... Now, however long a time may pass, according to the eternal laws governing the combinations of this eternal play of repetition, all configurations that have previously existed on this earth must yet meet, attract, repulse, kiss, and corrupt each other again.... And thus it will happen one day that a man will be born again, just like me, and a woman will be born, just like Mary."

Will I return to the Red Death? Inevitably!

3 Classical Concerts

2007-11-30T17:26:00.000Z

3 Classical Concerts

Like buses aren’t they?

Monday was Lang Lang at the RFH. I thoroughly enjoyed it, especially the first half which featured Mozart’s Sonata in B Flat and Schumann’s Fantasie in C, the latter being my highlight of the evening, its soft haunting melodies transporting me somewhere very nice indeed. The second half began with 6 traditional Chinese pieces. It was interesting to see the different ways the arrangers had tried to adapt the Eastern scale for the Piano, but the pieces lacked the meditative otherworldliness of the real thing. Then we had some Granados, extracts of Goyescas – I was hoping for something a little it more Death In A French Garden, but this was a bit too dramatic, rather than mellow. To finish were two Liszt pieces, Isoldens Liebstod: Schlufszene aus Tristran und Isolde, which I tried not to listen to, it being a transcription of Wagner, and Hungarian Rhapsody No 6 in D Flat, which was ok if a bit bangy. Then much ecstatic applause, especially from the contingent of pretty Japanese and Chinese girls. Overall it was an exciting, stimulating, even refreshing event, rather like popping a couple of Smints for the brain.

So I was surprised when the reviews came in to see that the critics hated it, especially the Schumann. Shows what I know. I could see their point when they complained that Lang Lang only operated in very very quite mode or very very fast and banging mode, and I agree that Lang Lang’s mannerisms, curling his non-playing hand, exaggerated body movements, and much gurning, were a bit OTT and didn’t quite ring true, but I couldn’t quite see how they could say that he massacred the pieces, or that his playing was “empty”. He is a bit of a superstar of the Piano world, and his fanclub get a bit over-exuberant, and I suspect that this has as much to do with his mauling as his playing – you know the British press, they love to try and drag people down to their own sordid level.

Maybe Lang Lang plays with a “pop sensibility” which might explain why I liked it so much?

Wednesday and back to the RFH for the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Beethoven’s Piano Concerto 3 in C Minor with Richard Goode on Piano and Mahler's Symphony 4 in G.

It began with the National Anthem, presumably because there was a Duchess in attendance (no it wasn't Mademoiselle de Latte Days, it was a real Duchess, of Gloucester I believe) . It was great! When I was a lad any night at a theatre would begin with the National Anthem. No singing unfortunately. And you bastards on the platform who didn’t stand, don’t think we didn’t clock you! What with all this talk about integrating people into our English/British identity, I tell you what to do – every public event should begin with the Anthem. It’s great.

Another very enjoyable concert, and I even found myself smiling a few times for no reason other than that I was enjoying the music. But somehow I didn’t enjoy the Beethoven quite as much as the LSO / Kissin version I saw earlier in the year (in fact looking it up I was amazed to see that it was the same piece of music, I thought it was a different Concerto!), nor the Mahler as much as Mahler 2. Maybe the venue has something to do with it? At the Barbican you are somehow closer and it is all much louder. Certainly the song bit at the end of the Mahler wasn’t as in your face as it had been in the Barbican. Maybe it was my mood, maybe it was the piece, maybe it was the Orchestras/Soloists/Conductors. All very perplexing!

Last and least was the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican with an event called “Seeing Debussy, Hearing Monet”, a blatant an attempt to get ignoramuses like me into the place with the promise of a multi-media audio-visual performance. Instead of a full on synesthesiatic experience, what we actually got was the conductor , David Robertson, blathering on for ages, and giving quite a technical analysis of the Debussy, using ideas from Monet as metaphors for describing the music. So certain phrases were said to ‘float like Monet’s water lillies’ or one phrase on flute was echoed by another on oboe, ‘like a shimmering reflection in the water’. Rather than being a way in to the music for a novice like me, it was a bit of a turn off, it was just too much like hard work trying to follow it all, and when we finally got to hear the pieces, Prelude a L’Apres-midi d’un faune, Jeux and La mer, they didn’t do an awful lot for me. I’m not sure quite how much I got from the visuals. I was just beginning to get somewhere with the water lillies, that magical moment when the eye settles and different sections of the painting come to the foreground, just trying to work out whether there was any synchronicity with the music, when the image started to move, it being a triptych, so it was displayed from the point of view of a camera panning across it, so that the eye couldn’t settle. The very nice lady sat next to me, who told me she had been lecturing for 35 years on Monet and Debussy, fell asleep for most of the first half, waking up at the interval and declaring the whole thing to have been marvellous. And she had probably discovered the best way to enjoy the event, asleep and most likely pissed!

the Masque of the Red Death - 3rd Visit

2007-11-22T17:27:00.000Z

My third trip to the Masque of the Red Death, and by a long long way the most extraordinary; the first which gave me that extraordinary feeling of crossing the threshold into another reality, the first to burn out some of the few remaining wires in my head keeping me grounded in what some people call “reality”.

Even before I got there it was turning into an odd evening. Standing at the bus stop, a car pulled up and a youngish bloke got out talking very loudly into his cellphone in that annoying and self important way. He comes up to me and says he’s on the radio and its ‘world hello day’ and would I mind speaking to the presenters? He presses the phone against my ear but I have two layers of woolly cap over my ears so the conversation is a bit disjointed. Did I know it was world hello day? No I didn’t, I thought it was world no music day. Yes it was world no music day. What radio station are they? Sorry say again. Still couldn’t hear. You say hello, I say goodbye.

Even before then, appropriate for a Punchdrunk day, I spent the day trying to clean traces of infection off the computer and defragmenting the hard drive. Norton Ghost is playing up.

At Battersea on a wet windy night, I head straight for the actual entrance. There must have been a problem with communication at the front of the building (where most people go first before being sent round to the side) because I am on my own, and go straight in. It must have been about fifteen minutes into the performance before I saw another member of the audience. This must be every Punchlover’s dream – completely on their own in the building with the actors, but at the same time it is really really freaky, this sense that the whole thing is for you, the awkwardness of the intimacy, Bon Bon insisting that I go down the stairs into the cellar, Roderick Usher ( I think) running down the stairs to whisper something very very fast in my ears and running back up, whilst Madeline Usher drifts by, ghostly faced, staring at me from the other side of the staircase.

The whole experienced seemed to be ramped up from previous visits. I was constantly being brushed, stroked, tickled, by the characters. Veiled weeping women muttered in Latin or Italian as they sought solace in my arms or on my shoulder. In the attic, Madame Salsafette performed an extraordinary dance before scaling ropes up into the rafters. Up there was a hidden backward message - something about Poe and the Red Death - and a mirror which she used to direct blinding light into my face.

Much is made of the famed one on ones and I found myself in two very intense situations. First was the nurse, weeping and clinging to me, stroking my face, and asking if I believed in God, before telling me she could no longer believe in a just God with all the death and destruction in the world ( I felt something very similar in rereading Deuteronomy 28 just the other day).

Even more intense was a scene in the cellar where a spectral lady hanging from the rafters ushered me into a tiny alcove before performing an exquisite dance, using me as support. We sat on a tiny bench whilst she stroked my face before removing my mask and pointing to a mirror; we sat holding hands and staring into each others eyes. She dug a necklace out from a pile of leaves in the corner of the room and wrapped it around our hands, all the time whispering in Italian. She then hung the necklace on the corner of the mirror. At the end of the necklace was a white cross.

I followed her next door into the room where Montresor had been “bricked up”, where she danced across the stonework before taking out the wooden panels and, leaping over into the pit, and digging body parts out of the sand, possibly teeth.

She was definitely not the main Berenice, but maybe she was a ghostly trace, a faint echo, of Berenice – I noticed that the narrative strands seemed to be carried across different members of the cast, regardless of who their designated character was - several members of the casts whispered to me about staring eyes, which comes from The Tell Tale Heart, possibly fused with the Black Cat.

Other great scenes included the Jester’s dance down the stairways, and the marriage scene at the top of the stairways, a fight between Black Cat Husband and another man, culminating in Black Cat Husband (but he will always be Mephistopheles to me) making me crouch down and press my hand against the other man’s forehead, telling me not to let him wake up ( I fail of course!).

Backstage at the Palais Royale I caught the Brothers Barnsby’s crazed sawing dance, whilst in the changing room another character tried awkwardly and failingly to make advances on the equally awkward dresser. Out front I finally caught Roderick Usher’s frankly astonishing mind reading act.

I have been slightly underwhelmed by the guest mini-performances within the show – they have tended to be a bit fey and too jolly - but one of the installations last night was tremendous – two women in full black Victorian widow/mourning wear, in a white room where the walls and floors were smeared in blood. One of the women was painting her legs with theatrical make-up to look like she had been the victim of a most gruesome murder in the Rue Morgue, whilst the other was methodically probing the wall with a metal spatula, pulling away a thin plastic skin-like membrane, then walking over to a metal surgical bowl of “blood” which she sucked into a syringe before injecting the blood into the wound she had made in the wall. All done silently, intensely, slowly and methodically. It was genuinely very sinister!

The grand finale seemed louder and longer than before – maybe my imagination, but added to my sense that the show had been ramped up.

As with Faust, I am finding last night very hard to get out of my head. I am still haunted by the smell of lavender, sweat and blood, and by the spectres swinging from the rafters. Can’t wait for visit no. 4!

Still Catching up

2007-11-06T17:21:00.001Z

My October KultureFest came to a glittering and glamorous end at the weekend.

On Saturday I was at the Barbican for the culmination of MichaelClark Company (as it seems to be called now) ‘s 3 year Stravinsky Project. Previous years' O (Apollo) and Mmm (Rite of Spring), were complemented by a completely new work, I do (Les Noces). This left no time for angular scary dancing to the likes of Wire and Sex Pistols, as in previous years, and left one with a distinct feeling that perhaps the enfant terrible of British Dance, as it is obligatory to call him, may actually not be quite so enfant any more. He barely dances now, and may be growing into his role as choreographer a little, could I say, too gracefully. For the two older works had noticeably improved from previous years, and Les Noces looked great and serious. The stage was flanked by the New London Chamber Choir, and to my ears the discordant and violent score was every bit as frightening as say Laibach (to who’s protofascist hardcore metal Clark danced in the 1980s.)

I’m not happy with the way this review is going – I sound a bit of a tosser. And my syntax is well weird today. Too much stimulation I fear.

Anyway it was great, with some maverick touches, such as the bride in Les Noces being dressed in a giant lacy loo-brush cover. I worry for Michael Clark – last year he was all but destitute until a celebratory artist auction raised some cash for him, and with his 3 year relationship with the Barbican coming to an end, he had to come up with something which suggested he still had the capacity for greatness. And he did.

On Sunday it was the opening of the UK Jewish Film festival, and Shira Geffen/Etgar Keret’s sublime Jellyfish.

Query – would this film have felt any different if I had manage to catch its (sold out) screening at the BFI London Film Festival?

Answer – No.

In fact it probably had more in common with the films showing at the BFILFF than the UKJFF. Jellyfish is a subtle, meditative, swirling film, much closer to my new favourite director Apichatpong Weerasethakul than to films such as “My Nose” and “Kike Like Me” showing in the UKJFF.

It felt so refreshing and so radical to have a film treat its Jewish/Israeli (and other) characters as rounded, complex individuals, often quiet and dignified, with none of the histrionics and stereotypes prevalent in modern Jewish art and art about Jews. Yes the BIG THINGS were here, “we are all second generation [holocaust survivors]” says one character, another has been scarred in conflict, but neither characters nor film are defined by these things, they are in the background, not ignored, but contextualised, in a film about people getting on with their lives. It is a film about relationships: parents and children, husband and wife, a possible lesbian romance – the stories interweave and resonate, whilst a magical/symbolic metaphorical system connected with the sea and boats develops in the course of the film. There are some beautiful moments, my favourite being a picture of “the ice cream man” in a photograph album, the man’s shirt moving gently in the seabreeze (it reminded me of David Lynch’s story about how some of his paintings started to move – you mean they looked like they were moving said the interviewer – no, they were moving corrected Lynch). It’s a film about people, not about Capital J Jews, and it is terrific.

So that’s the end of my Oktober KultureSplurge (I know its dragged on into November) and in a way I am a little relieved to get my life back. The next couple of months are a bit quiet, although there is a mini ClassicalMusicSplurge at the end of the month, and a couple of trips to the Red Death to look forward to. Oh and Múm at the Scala. And Gimpel the Fool on stage. And then there is Mime Fest in Jan. So maybe not so quiet. More importantly, I hope I can make some progress on the book. It wont write itself you know.

Mathew Barney at the Serpentine

2007-11-04T12:54:00.000Z

Before the craziness of Friday evening, I finally managed to drag myself down to the Serpentine for the Mathew Barney exhibition. In preparation I had watched “The Order”, the only commercially available part of his Cremaster Cycle, both without and then with Barney’s commentary. Finally I all but finished the excellent A Very Short Introduction to Postmodernism by Christopher Butler. Barney is not an artist you can approach without doing your homework (this I suspect is not a small part of the reason why he is considered so significant).

In the Serpentine were…

some faint but impressive drawings, close drawn lines of metamorphosising humans, often with a fishy theme, or depicting his three stage analysis of the artistic process, Situation, Condition and Production, Situation being symbolized by ingestion, Production by excretion (an apt metaphor some might say);

videos of his work, often him attempting to draw under conditions of physical difficulty, such as using a trampoline to make marks on a ceiling;

objects, some small, some large scale, particularly those used in the Drawing Restraint 9 film;

a central room, with foot and hand holds built into the corners, and markings on the ceilings above those corners, and in the centre, the restraints used to hold him back whilst attempting to make those markings.

Barney’s voice-over in The Order gave me the best path into understanding his work; despite the masculine/physical posturing of the work, all that stuff about hypertrophy training etc, in speech here was all the weasely anxiety of classic postmodernism, talk of gestures, interventions. I lost track of the number of times he said “I wanted to think about…” without ever telling us what it was that he actually thought about. The other classic symptom of chronic postmodernism is here too, art about making art.

But there is something more here as well, which explains why he is feted by sections of the art world. Most postmodernist work is weasely in content as well as idea – often reductivist, minimalist, posing a trite question with a single banal or obvious answer – take the crack at the Tate – its about, says the artist, the haves and the have nots. How tedious say I. It is as though the artists of postmodernism have lost the ability, or the confidence, to say anything other than the very simple and the very trite. But Barney produces work which is complex, multi-dimensional, large in scale – big budget films, huge sculptures, a prodigious outpouring of the stuff, about the act of making art, the materials of art, the process of production, the quest for metaphor.

But ultimately it is work which is cold and for me does not satisfactorily repay the effort required to get a foothold on the greasy slippy vaseline coated self lubricating slope of understanding. The postmodernists say art doesn’t have to do anything, but for most of us, it does. I still prefer aesthetic art, but am happy with purely conceptual art if the concept excites or stimulates. Ultimately, very little of Barney’s output stimulates me in any way, other than to admire the sheer intensity of his world.

Outside the Serpentine Olafur Eliasson (the man who did the wonderful shimmering sun thing at the Tate a few years ago) and Kjetil Thorsen have built this year’s temporary pavilion and what a wonderful thing it is too. You go round and round a ramp, before realising that by some optical magic, on the way up the string supports are open, but on the way down they are closed. Weird lights seem to hover inside and outside the building. It is a wonderful stimulating space, in sharp contrast to the stuff inside the gallery next door.

Crazy Night

2007-11-03T11:40:00.000Z

Even by my standards, Friday was a crazy night!!

I had chanced upon an event by the Last Tuesday Society entitled An Evening of Phantasmagoria, held in subterranean Victorian vaults on Chiswell Street. It could easily have been another Punchdrunk installation – the barely lit vaults were decorated with gloriously overflowing bowls of fruit, rotting pheasants, blood stained severed dolls heads peaking out from tiny battered sackcloth bags, assorted animal skulls, and a wide range of tempting sweets. In the toilets, surgical gloves and water pistols had been carefully laid out. The audience included various intellectuals and believers, members of the London Institute of Pataphysics in resplendent Lytton Strachey beards, Oxbridge drinking club types yearning for the good old days of Empire, glamourous ladies, Goths, thespians, decadents, romantics, fantasists, and me.

i didn't feel it appropriate to take pictures of the attendees, so here is a picture of Lytton Strachey

The evening began with a talk by Marina Warner on the quest from the Age of Reason onwards for the understanding of the soul/lifeforce, or at least how the imagination has devised certain metaphors and images for the soul, taking in Phatasmagoria, Magic Lantern shows, waxworks, automata, and the performances of various mediums.

I then donned 3D glasses to watch an extraordinary film by Zoë Beloff called
“Shadow Land or Light from the Other Side” based on the 1897 autobiography of Elizabeth DEspérance, a materialization medium who could produce full body apparitions. All I could think whilst I was watching it, surrounded by gorgeous ladies in costume varying from Victorian to Gothic rubberwear, with many and varied gashes and wounds and injuries about their personages, was that this was fucking insane! The intensity of the effort that went into the film, and the evening as a whole was staggering.

this is a picture I borrowed from the Last Tuesday website which i think captures the mood of the evening

In another room Professor Mervyn Heard, a leading authority on such things, presented a Magic Lantern Show using a genuine and beautiful golden projector and original Victorian slides, including some wonderfully ghoulish images, a bit of psychedelia, and a touch of the bawdy.

By the end of all this I was certainly in an altered mental state, for a mad-cap dash across the City to the Roundhouse for the Super Furry Animals. It was like being transformed from gas to solid, vapour to liquid, walking in on this gig (SFA had been on for 20 minutes). I could only circle the outer perimeter of the performance space, taking in the spectacle of a superb band at full throttle and a gloriously inebriated and ecstatic crowd. SFA rocked hard and loud, looking and sounding great. I caught just under an hour so it was worth the effort, but the circumstances meant I was somewhat removed from the core of the gig.

What a night. In many ways it sums up this blog – the growth of my appreciation of SFA frontman Gruff Rhys from something of a running gag to a musical genius, the search for sensation, the rise of the mind-altering performance space. These conflicting yet somehow connected (by their crazed protaganist) worlds, of the ghostly Victorian gothic and the manic son et lumiere power of the rock gig, are at the core of my novel-in-progress and this crazy night may yet serve as the ultimate expression of it all.

BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL

2007-11-01T11:52:00.000Z

I have had mixed results with the BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL.

DOES YOUR SOUL HAVE A COLD? was a documentary about people suffering from depression in Japan. The subjects all impressed with their honesty, bravery and dignity, which is more than can be said for the film maker, who throughout kept making snide insinuations in a pathetic attempt to prove his Michael Moorish credentials – he desperately wanted to have an anti-American, anti-Pharmaceutical Companies agenda, but produced nothing to back up the little snide comments he threw in from off screen. Did the woman who learnt about depression through a website know that it was sponsored by Glaxo? No she didn’t. But so what? The question is whether or not the website was misleading , but this wasn’t asked. Similarly some of the sufferers said they were now much worse if they stopped taking the medication, but there was no clinical analysis of whether they were on the right medication and whether it was helping them There may well be legitimate questions to be asked, such as whether doctors are too quick to prescribe drugs, whether marketing encourages more people to think of themselves as depressed, but this film had no expert of clinical viewpoint and hence was manipulative and underhand.

MID-AFTERNOON BARKS was a peculiar film from China. Three parts in which not a lot happens to a variety of small town / rural people. Little dialogue, even less action, save for the mysterious telegraph poles which featured in all three parts, a symbol of changing China. I went because it sounded a bit like Apichatpong 'Joe' Weerasethakul’s work, but it wasn’t really. There was no particular resonance, nor an overall sense of mystery or relationship, between the parts. It was enjoyable if a bit slow, idiosyncratic, charming, and a little flat.

THE PERCIPIENT IMAGE was a selection of short 16mm experimental avant-garde films. The first 4 were totally silent leaving everyone in the cinema a little uncomfortable, especially me, tormented by gurgling stomachs, aqueous swallowing noises and a ticking watch from the row behind! Lots of grainy close ups of shadows and plants, but noting really beautiful or breathtaking.

Best of the bunch by far was FAR NORTH, a dark folk-tale filmed on Svalbard (Spitsbergen) and starring Michelle Yeoh and Sean Bean. A mother and her adopted daughter struggle to survive in the frozen wastelands. One day, a mysterious walks across the ice. There was much that felt familiar about the film, until its final descent into the heart of darkness. In hindsight there was a sinister thread running throughout the film, but it stays just below the surface until the end. Unbelievably beautiful cinematography.

The Masque Of The Red Death

2007-10-30T15:45:00.001Z

me, masked

i 'ave caught the plague

anything can happen

Late October pics - gigs and shows

2007-10-30T15:37:00.001Z

tunng

laub

the stage after the Shen Wei Dance Arts Company

Late October Catch-up - Part Two

2007-10-30T15:36:00.000Z

My bro and sis-in-law and my 7 year old nephew were in town. We went to MADAME TUSSAUDS and the NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM. Being half term, both were unpleasantly heaving. I remember being underwhelmed by MT’s as a kid and I still feel the same way now, but what a sad indictment of our society this place really is: plastic images of plastic people; when their time is up, melt ‘em down and reform into the latest celebrity. It is the museum of modern living. The Natural History Museum is great for kids, and we managed to sneak into the Dinosaur section the back way, avoiding the hour plus queue.

THE COUTRY WIFE at THE THEATRE ROYAL HAYMARKET is a tremendous piece of work, acted in a delightfully old fashioned, exclamatory, actorly style which works much better that the naturalistic mumbly style which ruined the National’s go at the Man of Mode. CW is a filthy, wonderful play and they do it justice, albeit going for a revolving doors French farce kind of vibe which buries some of the darker and more cynical elements of the play. And it is really really funny. Acting is superb all round except for the poor dear playing the Country Wife who could not hold her awful Yorkshire accent together, often drifting over to Ireland via a number of European countries.

At the LONDON JEWISH CULTURAL CENTRE I caught the famous 1937 film of DER DYBBUK. Yiddish expressionism anyone? It really surprised me in the imagination of the camera work and the intensity of the on screen world. A silly girl behind kept sniggering at the manneristic acting (lots of hand over eyes and trembling going on), but this was part of its charm.

Finally I caught a band I have loved for a long time now, German electronic tunesmiths LAUB. It was a real thrill to hear the songs played live, and their absurdly talented enigmatic singer, AGF, seemed to really enjoy herself on stage. The gig was put on by THE WIRE, celebrating 25 years of pompous and often incomprehensible, but always essential reading. The main act were MATMOS, who I didn’t enjoy as much as their gig on the South Bank; not as much variety and little sign of the percussive and contemporary classical strains that made that gig so good.

And then there was my second visit to THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH. It was great fun, but I am still not convinced that it is quite as spectacular or rich as Faust, but it was a great night out. I managed to get into some of the secret rooms - a band and paper puppet show of an obscure Poe story, and an improvised invention of a lost Poe poem in the library. I narrowly missed out on one-on-ones about 4 times, each time the actor or actress selecting someone else. My theory that I would be more likely to be chosen if I was in black tie proved fatally flawed! Then on to RED DEATH LATES, the weekend only after show party during which masked maidens regularly poured strong liquor down my throat from a big old brown bottles, a fortune reader told me I was starting out on a new path as a writer, and to be wary of gossip ( I think they area great band) and a make-up artist painted two bleeding pustular boils on my forehead and announced that indeed I had caught the plague. I was well hammered by the end I can tell you.

Pictures of all this madness will follow… in time

Late October Catch-up - Part One

2007-10-30T14:55:00.000Z

Well what a couple of weeks it’s been – seen and done so much. No time for the usual in depth psycho-cultural analysis!

It all began with CONTROL, Anton Corbijn’s film of the life and death of Ian Curtis. I wasn’t at all a Joy Division fan, nor did I have high hopes for the movie, but it was really good, crucially avoiding making Curtis out to be a tortured genius/martyr/saint. At times hypnotic, and moving, and a film which has stayed with me.

I spent a lot of time at the BRITISH MUSEUM. THE FIRST EMPEROR exhibition is an amazing thing to see, although not quite living up to the politically motivated hype (and how the fuck can they sell Chairman Mao pin badges in the shop?). It told the Emperor’s story well – how he created unified systems of money, language, weights and measures etc to keep his empire together - and despite the lack of numbers of terracotta figures, you got a sense of the scale of the folly of his tomb complex. But the queues and excruciatingly slow snake of people working their way around the exhibition were painful. But much better was my return to the CRAFTING BEAUTY IN MODERN JAPAN exhibition – the pieces seemed even more extraordinary second time around, and they had some lovely new kimonos on display. I also went to a free lecture given by one of the potters on his life and aesthetics. Still at the BM they had a great little room with a display of KOREAN MOON JARS – huge pots of white china made in two separate halves then joined together before firing – only about 1 in 10 pots survive, but those that do have the most extraordinary undulations and bulges around the join.

TUNNG are on the road again promoting their excellent new album, Good Arrows, and played at the 229 Club. They just keep getting better, having developed a richer and more interesting sound since I last saw them You feel they just need to shake their booty a tad more to really fire up the crowd. They finished with a superb cover of Dancing Naked In the Rain.

At the BARBICAN, I went to SEDUCED, ART AND SEX FROM ANTIQUITY TO NOW. The most damning thing I can say is that, by half way round this overtly serious exhibition of explicit sexual material, I was well and truly bored. The highlight was the last room and had nothing really to do with the exhibition, it was the soundtrack to a Nan Goldin slide show, and was the piece that John Tavener wrote for Bjork and the Brodsky Quartet, a simply stunning piece of modern re-imagined choral music.

Still at the Barbican I saw the SHEN WEI DANCE ARTS COMPANY and a work called Connect Transfer. Some of the dancing was a bit twee for me, a bit birdy hopping like, but most was mesmerising and meditative. Their thing is that the stage was made of canvass, and the dancers dipped their hands or feet in paint, painting the stage as the work progressed. Afterwards the canvas is cut up and sold to the audience. I bought a bit on the basis of the woman on the desk saying that Shen Wei has been commissioned to choreograph the opening of the Beijing Olympics, so the “painting” will hopefully increase in value. Standing around at the end whilst members of the company signed the work, I felt more like a groupie that an art collector.

The Masque of the Red Death: some further thoughts.

2007-10-10T18:40:00.000+01:00

As Kylie would say, I can’t get it out of my head.

On my way up to Waitrose, I found myself ruminating on some of the criticisms and negative comments about the show. Here’s what they are and what I think…

That it is irredeemably middle class, to wit the preponderance of public schoolboys:

I have no problem with reviewing the audience, I do it all the time! My justification is that I am reporting on my experience, and the audience can heighten or dampen my enjoyment, And I suppose if you are a class warrior, the make-up (as opposed to behaviour or glamour or otherwise) of the audience could lead you to have a bad time. But I would observe that last night, there were more black faces in the audience (underneath the white masks of course) than I have seen at any of the theatre I have been to in recent years. And as I have discovered from my exploration of classical music, sometimes the perception of certain kinds of art as elitist turns out to be completely false. The biggest barrier to art is cost, and the tickets are pricy (last night was £30) but in keeping with most major London venues. And even if on the whole it is attracting a middle class audience so what – we who shop at Waitrose are entitled to get excited about stuff!

That it is all sensation, it has no emotional content:

This is partly to do with plot and characterisation (see below), but in the room where the man was beating up his wife, I can tell you I had plenty of emotion, just as I did in the abortion scene in the forest in Faust. Largely it is a sensational sensory experience – that doesn’t diminish it. It also provokes profound mental stimulation. These are enough in my view to mask any emotional deficit.

That it is a themepark experience:

What is it that is pejorative about the term themepark? That it is a plastic experience, corporate, Disneyfied, synthetic, commercialised? Certainly none of that applies here – the depth of the experience, of the detail, is breathtaking. Yes you wander through the space, but you do that in an art gallery.

That there is no narrative:

There is a narrative, but it is one that is received, by each audience member individually, rather than given. It is the journey of the audience through the space. It is the accumulation of experiences. It is not a linear narrative, nor a full one. It is fragmented and frustrating. As such it reflects contemporary life much more closely than the traditional linear narrative. In particular it draws on three strands of (post-post-)modernity

1. The structuralist/post-structuralist/post-modern movement’s explosion of the stability of the building blocks of text, art, and even consciousness.

2. It reflects contemporary experience, such as computer games, the flash zapping of multi-channel TV, t’internet, you tube etc. The lives we lead are increasingly made up of accumulating chunks of information technology, and it is right that art should find itself reflecting this.

3. Art whether consciously or unconsciously is a product of the society and culture in which it is made; a broken and fragmentary art suits our time.

Regular readers will note a recurring theme here, so I wont blather on any more about fragmentation – see A Disappearing Number below, somewhere.

That the actors are slaves:

A weird one this, but yes, they do work bloody hard, and being surrounded by the audience, especially those who go right into personal space, or for whom this experience is a substitute for a visit to a lap-dancing club, must be a challenge, but then many are repeat performers - most were in Faust, and almost all have worked for Punchdrunk before. Working for the most exciting company on the planet in really challenging environment must be a reward in itself.

That it is all hype:

Absolutely not, Faust was a huge word of mouth success, and many of those who fell in love with the show signed up to the mailing list and bought tickets for Masque on spec. Almost all tickets were sold before any reviews, and maybe they were for the most part favourable because that it was the reviewers actually thought, rather than them succumbing to some PR voodoo. In fact there has been very little publicity – none was needed!

Why Punchdrunk when there have been so many great site specific promenade performances before:

I can’t really comment on other companies, but I will say that I will now check out any of the other artists working in this form in the future, so I think everyone will benefit. After reading Cees Noteboom’s excellent novel “Lost Paradise” I really wish I’d caught Deborah Warner’s Angel Project (featured in the book). As to why Punchdrunk, all I can say is because Faust was amazing, it was a perfect storm. It was more than just site-specific or promenade, it was an art installation, it was dance, it was full on sensory experience, it was emotional, it was filmic, it was multi-dimensional, the building afforded a perfect opportunity. And Masque is forming itself in my mind along similar hyperbolic lines.

Punchdrunk - The Masque of the Red Death

2007-10-10T12:11:00.001+01:00

My first of four (count ‘em) scheduled visits to the Battersea Arts Centre (and you know how nervous I get going south of the river).

It might seem an odd thing to say about a Punchdrunk performance, but this was a remarkably subtle production, by which I mean that its genius crept up on me slowly; only after a bad night’s sleep and by gathering my thoughts for the blog did I come to realise quite what a thing this thing was.

It is not as immediate as Faust, as visceral and thrilling. I didn’t mean to compare it to Faust, but when you enter a Punchdrunk world, you lose any control over your mind and senses (any one who says the experience of Punchdrunk theatre is democratic, that the individual audience member “chooses” what to see, gets it so wrong - one can no-more choose than one can stop one own’s heart from beating or lungs from breathing - all you can do is go with the flow, accept that you have lost control over your own body, brain, senses and all).

So for a lot of the show I was in compare and contrast mode. The show made be do this, by too often not being different enough from Faust – the smell of mothballs, the rumpled beds, the dances in confined spaces, the feather-light whispered dialogue, the shouty dialogue, the meaningful slapping and posturing of rugged bearded men, the imperilled beautiful women, the big set pieces – but without ever managing to be quite as thrilling as Faust – there was nothing here (that I saw) to match the scenes in the Diner, in the end Bar, in the Pine Forest, and in the Basement at Wapping. It also lacked the demonic energy of Faust, and I missed the changes in tempo offered by the mid-show Hop and Mephistopheles' conjuring tricks. There seemed to be a lot of similar scenes – for example at least three man/woman physical theatre/dance erotic/violent routines in tiny bedrooms, a saminess of atmosphere through the piece.

Where The Masque of the Red Death excelled was with scenes which felt completely fresh – the woman playing the piano becoming tormented by a ghostly echo, and the fabulous Palais Royale Music Hall, especially walking through the changing rooms to view the acts from the wings – not just a play within a play but a sense (an illusion) that the play within the play was more real than the play, watching the person manning the curtains flying up into the air to use their weight to pull the rope down, watching the actress pacing nervously and muttering to herself before going on stage, acting not being an actor in other words, a symbol of the swirling realities and psychological inversions to come if you spend too long in here…

Let’s being again at the beginning. I don my mask and think how happy I am to be back in the world of Punchdrunk. It’s like a drug of course, altered states, addictive. I quickly find the outfitter and don my cape. A large man with Victorian moustache whispers in my ear, do I ever wonder why nothing happens when you die? In a small room with framed butterflies on the walls I find a weeping woman – “all is lost" she wails. She is dipping her hand in a bowl of water, her wet hand holds mine and leads me down to a parade of the character up the main staircase. I am alone in a room with a man and wife, petting and stroking alternates with horrific abuse, she is slapped around, made to drink from a bowl like a cat, then hung up from the roof, hanging like a limp rag doll. Thereafter things get blurry. Different rooms, different scenes, a constant sense of imminent sex and violence. Mr Usher seems to be everywhere. Women in peril slink behind doorways. Screaming and anguished cries coming from somewhere unidentifiable.

No stories as such emerge from these fragmented shards, little pieces of Poe, sampled and remixed into something different. Yet something, a theme rather than a narrative, congeals, a consistency of deadly sins, lust and avarice, drinking and gambling and debauchery. The saminess starts to feel less like a weakness and more like something musical, the way classical music uses repeating refrains and sonic motifs, variations, resonances.

And all these doors and rooms and curtained tunnels, following an actress under and through a fireplace into a small curtained area where, for some time, we are all compressed, too close, but not close enough. Something, an idea, starts to niggle away at me. At first I think the whole experience is (metaphorically) sexual, squeezing yourself through these red corridors and into tiny spaces, the whole production reeks of sex. But overnight another idea comes, it stems from that extraordinary experience of being backstage at the Palais Royale, what it reminds me of, what it feels like, is not so much parallel universes, but rather like being able to travel down portals into different people’s minds – it makes me think of the troposphere in Scarlett Thomas’ “The End of Mr Y” or the portals into John Malkovich’s mind in “Being John Malcovich”. This is an experience about consciousness, about what it feels like to be in someone else’s mind, and of course, what flows from that, is that the overreaching theme is madness. Many of the
Poe stories on which the piece is based depict madness of some sort, but “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether" becomes central. We see it in one of the big set pieces, about a dozen cast members around a dinner table, things becoming increasingly strange and out of control. In the Poe story, a narrator visits a lunatic asylum and dines with the doctors. As the story progresses, we learn that they are not the doctors, but the patients, who have revolted and taken over the asylum, the sane made mad and the mad made sane. And this becomes the central metaphor for my experience. It is an insane experience. In everything you see and do, the delicate membrane between sane and insane seems to have torn. Including your own grasp on reality. In the mask, in this atmosphere, your own sense of self dissolves. How else to explain why, in the bar at the Palais Royal, I order a shot of tequila. I never ever drink shots. I might have a tot of whisky at home, but I haven’t had tequila for at least 10 years. As I said at the beginning, any sense of choice is an illusion. You go mad, you are possessed. This is insane.

I go back in a couple of weeks.

Happy Mondays - Brixton Academy - 6/10/07

2007-10-07T14:48:00.000+01:00

It is difficult to know what to say about this gig. After all, the Mondays themselves, or what is left of them, which in essence means Shaun and Bez, are riddled with contradiction, enigma and puzzle.

Take Bez. On the credits for Pills Thrills and Bellyaches, after the usual vocals, guitars keyboards etc, is listed “Bez – Bez”. So the Bez that now appears before us, working up the crowd, jigging laterally from one side of the stage to the other like a demented Space Invader, or doing his trademark bent over shuffle, is it the real Bez that was, or is he now just playing Bez, or was he always just playing Bez?

Bez

And Shaun, demented genius. We demand of him that he is permanently fucked. Anything other than a Shaun who is smacked off his skull and incapable of standing, let alone “singing” (or what approximates for it in the Ryder universe) for more than ten minutes, as in the legendary debacles at the height of Madchester, leaves us feeling bereft of the real thing. We want to pay £30 to see a band that are too fucked to play. That they manage to play for close on an hour and a quarter is wrong. That the audience politely observe the no smoking ban is wrong, let alone the almost total absence of the sweet grating smoke of a forest fire of weed.

the ghost of the memory of Shaun Ryder

Yet it doesn’t feel like simulation either, nor pantomime. The band are loud, and get pretty close to the demented concoctions of the classic works. Rowetta is dynamite; her voice has grown more powerful, richer and deeper over the years. Without her the show would descend into farce, she covers for Shaun, she belts her lungs out, and it sounds, for the most, part tuneful, soulful even.

Shaun remains barely there, a black hole in the centre of the stage, dressed in black, with a black hat at a jaunty angle, black shades. Often we only know he’s there because of the shadow he casts over the back lit stage.

Bez plays the Bez as only Bez can, a crazed Figure from the Commedia dell'arte, the Mancunian Marcel Marceu.

Bez as Pierrot

The crowd are full of southerners pretending to be Mancs, civil servants and librarians pretending that they are on E, everyone fancies themselves as some dodgy geezer.

I write a review pretending to be Paul Morley, arch observer of Mancuian inflected pop culture.

What can never be denied or forgotten is that out of all this came something incredible, an album, Pills, Thrill and Bellyaches, of such wonder, of such extraordinary beauty. And ultimately this is a celebration – of how amazing those tunes were, of how amazing it is that Shaun is still alive and now solvent and maybe straight, that Bez won Celebrity Big Brother, that Tony Wilson was actually right about something, namely Shaun’s genius. Shaun's most celebrated line, from Kinky Afro, opens the show, everyone in the crowd singing along: “son, I was thirty, I only went with your mother cos she’s dirty”. Thereafter people don’t know and can’t hear, but it doesn’t matter.

Another thing about the Mondays, despite all the obvious associations, with Manchester, with Factory, with flirting with physical, mental, and financial disaster, is that they never played the tortured artist, never blamed anyone, never asked for sympathy, They just accepted what life threw at them and lit another spliff. And another. Maybe it is this attitude, so in contrast to the angular jutting attitude of a Gallagher or a Brown or the manic jerkiness of a Curtis, is why people love them so, why we want them survive, why we celebrate their survival.

Syndromes and a Century

2007-10-04T20:29:00.000+01:00

Back to the NFT for Apichatpong 'Joe' Weerasethaku’s latest film, Syndromes and a Century. Like Tropical Malady, this is a film in two parts, but the parts to this film are more closely aligned, in a strange way making it much harder to relate the parts than the more distinct halves of Tropical Malady.

Both parts of Syndromes are set in hospitals, with largely the same cast playing the same characters (or at least characters with the same names).

The first half focusses on Dr Toey, her hopeless suitor and her unreciprocated love for an orchid collector who in turn loves another from afar. We first see her interviewing a Dr Nohng for a job. There is a subplot featuring a singing dentist infatuated with a monk who wants to be a DJ. The tone is lighthearted and gentle.

The second half begins in a different hospital, possibly a different time, certainly a different place, maybe a different world. It begins with the same job interview, but thereafter we focus on Dr Nohng and discover his relationship with girlfriend Joy is doomed. The tone is much darker, with Lynchian flourishes and menacing moments of camerawork and offscreen sound.

The NFT notes kindly summarises some of the dualities between the halves: female/male, country/city, natural light/electric light, but this hardly begins to make order of the ambivalent and ambiguous relationship between the halves. They are not versions of the same story, and to talk of parallel or alternative realities doesn’t seem to fit either. It is much more complex and elusive than that. There is talk in the first half of past lives, and in the second of future lives, yet the second half seemed to me to suggest not another life but another plane of existence, maybe a spirit world, or something akin to limbo or hell, especially the scenes in the basement of amputees, and grotesque women staring out the camera, and a fantastic swirling thick smoke slowly moving towards an extraction pipe so wonderfully filmed that I thought that I cold smell the acrid smoke.

Which made me wonder whether Buddhists believe in hell, or maybe the film was setting up another duality – eastern vs western. But a quick google seems to show there are Buddhist ideas of heaven and hell, and even (a quote that seems to fit Joe’s worlds very nicely) “the Buddha's Teaching shows us that there are heavens and hells not only beyond this world, but in this very world itself”.

The film ends back in full colour and outdoors with a group aerobic session – I got from this a sense of souls reborn and the joy of living.

Another reading of the film is that in the first half the relationships are ones of delicious(ly) unrequited love; the bridge between the sections has the monk asking the singing dentist to follow him, suggesting a relationship is about to begin, but the monk disappears and we see the dentist alone in his surgery; in the second section the key relationship between Nohng and his girlfriend disintegrates, and there is hint that Dr Toey and her nebbishe suitor are going out for lunch, and a shot of her looking forlornly and desperately at her desk – so perhaps there is a comparison of the exquisiteness, the hopefulness, of love not yet declared vs the hell of dying or loveless relationships. Or maybe it is just a case that Dr Toey in the first half is an optimist and Dr Nohn in the second a pessimist.

These are all ifs and maybes. The wonder of the film (along with some incredibly powerful visual moments) is that its meanings remain outside and beyond the viewer, as though being channelled directly into the viewer’s unconscious, challenging the brain to see patterns but always remaining elusive. As Browning put it “Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?”

Tropical Malady / Drawing Restraint 9

2007-09-30T21:06:00.001+01:00

Over the next month I will be turning some attention to film, what with the London Film Festival opening and all, and there being some interesting stuff about.

When I was a lad, the term Indie or Art House cinema really seemed to mean something, artists producing work far from mainstream Hollywood fare. Now Indie cinema is too often just a brand for something maybe low budget but which in many ways does the same kind of stuff as big budget films, reinforcing the myth of consensus reality as Rudy Rucker put it in the Transrealist Manifesto (see my review of a Disappearing Number). Here though are two films way way away from the kind of stuff we are normally fed.

First up, Tropical Malady by Thai director Apichatpong 'Joe' Weerasethaku. It passed me by when it came out a few years ago, but he has been getting rave press about this film and his latest, Syndromes and a Century (which I am seeing this week). Both films come in two parts, two separate stories which may or may not be variations or possibilities of the same story; maybe male and female, or yin and yang versions.

The first half of Tropical Malady is a gentle gay love story, between a soldier and a country boy. They hang out, hold hands a bit. Everyone is very tolerant. Whilst the soldier is looking at pictures of his boyfriend, another film bleeds into this one, with a folk tale of a shaman with the ability to change into the shape of animals. The edges between the folk tale and the second half of the film are blurry. In the second half, a soldier in the forest is hunting and being hunted by a ghost/man possessed by a tiger spirit/tiger possessed by a man spirit. Each hunts the other but also yearns to be consumed by the other. The film becomes dark, hypnotic and mysterious, its meaning(s) elusive. It finishes with soldier and tiger locked in a stare.

There was that wonderful sense at the end that the audience were united in a collective state, of glorious bewilderment, of so much unsaid and unsayable, of possibilities. So subtle and elusive, I left in an altered, hypnotised state. Outside the NFT, on the beach underneath the festival pier, someone had set up a rave: vintage reggae blasting out over the river, people feeding a bonfire with pallets. I wondered if Joe had put me in a trance.

On one level the film is contrasting the etiquette of polite courtship with the animalistic nature of sexuality, but to try and put a unified meaning on it does not do it justice.

I woke up still thinking about the film, remembering details which resonated between the two halves, like the odd scene towards the end of the first part where the lovers lick each other’s hands. At the start of the film, a group of soldiers find a body, which we don’t see – was this the soldier of the second part? Shortly after we see a naked man running across the forest – the ghost/spirit? The body is wrapped up, a character comments on the body shifting as the spirit is released. The resonances between the two halves continued to haunt me, until blasted away by…

Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint 9 is an even more difficult piece to describe. I’m not even sure it is a film, although it is much too expansive to be called video art. Barney talks about “narrative sculpture” but whilst there are actions and things happening, it has no plot as such. Perhaps its best considered as a manifestation in video form of Barney’s ongoing Drawing Restraint series (see Richard Dorment’s comments, again in A Disappearing Number.) In the course of the piece, various things are made, cut up or dissolved, remade, often in the form of whales. There is much use of petroleum jelly (to remind myself of Dorment’s interpretation – “for [Barney], what is valuable in art is not so much the finished product as the tension between the desire to create and the discipline required to funnel that desire into the making of art. This is why petroleum jelly is such an important symbolic material for Barney. Being formless, it can be heated or cooled, shaped and transformed, restrained in a mould or allowed to flow free like molten lava.”

The ‘film’ is set on board a Japanese whaling ship. Onto the ship come two “Occidental Guests”, Barney and (his real time partner) Bjork. After undergoing grooming, dressing and tea rituals fusing Japanese tradition with something marine and sea-salty, they embrace and proceed to cut each other up and are remade into whales.

Knowing what (little) I do about Barney, there is much more going on than this, but I suspect it will take me some time and further research to get to the bottom of it.

For a long film, with many slow moving scenes which defy immediate understanding, it was surprisingly watchable. Although many of the actions involved were not immediately yielding of meaning, nonetheless it had a conviction and a kind of forward propulsion which kept me going.

Of course the soundtrack by Bjork was wonderful, but I already knew that having bought it a few years ago when it first came out.

Before DR9, I caught the trailor for Atonement. There was a time when the trailers were the best bit, but this trailer left me feeling utterly contemptuous. The fast cutting and constant manipulative sweeping and soaring (and clichéd) strings of the soundtrack repulsed me for their blatant, unashamed manipulation of emotion. It’s as corny and fake as Yentob’s nodding to interviewees that he has never met, doctored Reuters photos, phone ins that you can never win etc etc, - abusive manipulative spin. More and more I feel that we live in a time when our emotions are being blatantly exploited, in advertising/retail, in language, in politics, in print, on tv and in the cinema. I keep going back to that Rucker quote about reinforcing the myth of consensus reality. We must stand up for ourselves, people! The revolution will not be televised!

Art has the power to move us, to transport us, as LSO/Kissin did to me, as Tropical Malady did to me, to a place that is not defined, that is elusive, difficult, contradictory, stimulating, confusing. This is for me becoming the standard by which I judge the things I do, see and create.

The KAOS Dream (A Midsummer Night's Dream) - Arts Depot - Finchley

2007-09-29T14:22:00.000+01:00

Heading up the road to the Arts Depot see this “adaptation” of A Midsummer Night’s Dream by KAOS Theatre, renamed The Kaos Dream, set in an “urban underworld of strip-clubs, pimps and pole-dancing”, I reckoned that it was either going to be very good or very bad. Or as the heroine of Angela Carter’s Shakespeare-infused masterpiece “Wise Children” puts it, “hope for the best, expect the worst.”

Well, not only did I thoroughly enjoy this production, but I thought it was touched with genius.

The “adaption” took the form of heavily editing the text rather than re-writing it, and although in principle I am not a great fan of cutting down the great man’s work, at the same time I was relieved not to have to face three hours of Bottom’s tedious rehearsals for the grand finale etc etc.

If you are going to set a play, especially Shakespeare, in a time or place other than its natural one, then there has to be some reason, it has to illuminate some aspect of the work, not merely be a gimmick to get the punters though the door or to try and make a play more “relevant”. And perhaps against expectation, this really worked. There is a dark side to many of Shakespeare’s comedies – bad things often happen. If not exactly killing, the gods certainly put the characters through the mill for their sport. They are comedies in the sense that the resolutions at the end are happy, rather than tragic. The seedy East End strip pub setting brought out a sinister edge to the play (but without falling into the clichéd tropes of Eastenders and Brit Gangsta flicks) at the same time as fitting in nicely with the bawdy aspects of the play. It was in parts gloriously and shambolically filthy. Another touch of genius was to make the fairy queen, yes, a dragged-up fairy queen. And it did that rarest of things with a Shakespeare comedy, it made it funny.

Of course there were flaws, some of the acting a bit too camp, the stage set a bit wobbly in places, the grotesque rectum of the arse (rather than ass) placed on Bottom’s head, but I think that what this showed is that if you do something with real gusto, if the decisions made as to how the stage a play are backed up by its contents, if you entertain an audience, they will forgive the rough edges.

I couldn’t help feeling that what I was watching was in many ways a more authentic experience of Shakespeare than the prim and proper stagings of the RSC or at the Globe. Contrast for example the ultimately disappointing Indian version of a Midsummer Night’s Dream earlier this year at the Roundhouse (http://robingrebsonsguidefortheperplexed.blogspot.com/2007/03/sore-bottom-funny-bottom.html) where the production values seemed to be grafted on rather than shed light onto the play.

Looking again at that earlier review, I see that the production was also trounced by something at the Arts Depot. Which only makes me more angry about the disgraceful state of play at the AD. The audience for The KAOS Dream was woefully thin (and I’m not talking about waist size). I am on their mailing and emailing list but got no flyers about the play. In fact, I haven’t had any literature from them for ages. And if it’s a 90 minute production, why start at 7.30, a difficult time for anyone working in town or who needs to sort out babysitters, when they could easily have started at 8? And the play having finished at 9, we wanted to stay and have a drink there, but the bar was shutting 15 minutes after the end of the show. And as we discovered, this part of Finchley is hardy overflowing with sophisticated wineries of the type where the members of the Latte Days’ salon can sit in the comfort they/we require at their/my age and discuss important issues of the day without the fear of being knifed by some feral dope-smoking adidas wearing ASBOnik. Shame on you, Arts Depot.

London Symphony Orchestra – Barbican - 27 September 2007

2007-09-28T13:57:00.000+01:00

My current explorations into the world of classical music were partly inspired by my trip to the Barbican some time ago to see the Icelandic production of Peer Gynt when I was taken by the excitement of the audience heading into the Barbican Hall to see a solo piano rectital by Evgeny Kissin (see http://robingrebsonsguidefortheperplexed.blogspot.com/2007/06/maurizio-pollini-barbican.html). I researched Kissin and was rather taken by his extravagant bouffant, and clear signs of crazed genius. At two he was playing by ear, by 12 he was performing Chopin’s Piano Concertos in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory with the Moscow State Philharmonic. Oh and did I mention his hair?

Kissin wasn’t lined up for any more solo recitals, so I booked this concert instead.

It was a game of two halves.

The first half featured Kissin with the LSO (conducted by Sir Colin Davis) performing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No 3. I have to say, I was blown away. It did something to me, the way only music can – my brain seemed to expand beyond the confines of my skull. The music took me somewhere physically and mentally. I felt very trippy. It was achingly, almost unbearably, wonderful.

In the second half, piano, Kissin and hair were gone, and we had the LSO performing Beethoven’s Symphony No 3 (‘Eroica’). I didn’t really enjoy it. I missed the contrast of the piano with the strings, and the lack of a soloist gave me nothing to focus on. I was missin’ Kissin. Whereas in the first half there seemed to be an abundance of tunes (for the first time I started to see how pop music has sampled and expanded so many melodies from the classical canon), in the second half there seemed to be no tunes, just stabbing phrases. I couldn’t find a hook to hang my concentration on. And the symphony was very long. The last movement had some drama, but overall I was hanging in a bit there. Sir Colin shook his big grey hair about as best he could, but it didn’t have the follicle excitement of Kissin’s coiffure.

The audience didn’t seem quite as funky as on at that Peer Gynt night: lots of buffers in musty pin stripes; some dressy women, including a few designer-clad Russians, but generally a bit older and uninteresting.

As Meatloaf put it, you took the words right out of my mouth; must have been when I was Kissin you.

Complicite - A Disappearing Number - Barbican

2007-09-26T12:51:00.000+01:00

First and Second: two warnings.

1. This review contains plot spoilers. But nothing is quite as spoilt as the plot of this show.

2. Maths. Not a lot of people know that I got an A in my Pure Mathematics with Statistics A level, back in the days when A levels meant something. At school they wanted me to do a maths degree. In a funny kind of way I wish I had. I have been thinking a lot about maths of late. When I was a kid, I got into a book called The Joy of Numbers by an Indian maths genius called Shakuntali Devi. I’ve been re-reading it of late, working on developing a character who has an intimate relationship with numbers. It works into a lot of ideas I’ve become curious about, like symmetry, chance and coincidence, the appearance of mathematical sequences in nature, string theory and quantum physics, which as things stand lead to the extraordinary conclusions that matter can be in two different places at the same time, the existence of parallel universes, and that time, rather than being linear as we take it to be, with distinct past present and future, is, as Doctor Who put it, “wibbly wobbly”, that everything is taking place at the same time, all the time.

Or as TS Eliot put it in Burnt Norton:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.

I am not the only one following this path. The new age fraternity have leapt on this area and fused it into their own belief systems: for example saying that this wibbly wobbly concept of time is in effect the same as that of Native Americans and Aborigines, although this is disputed by those who have studied those cultures.

All of which is a round about way of saying that I came to this play with a certain amount of knowledge which would not be shared by most of the audience. And despite what I thought was lukewarm applause, all those around me were saying how fantastic they thought the play was. I didn’t. I thought it was fundamentally, artistically, flawed. And I found this deeply worrying. Because in many ways the flaws were failures to find solutions to the problem of making art out of this stuff, problems I am wrestling with as well. I was hoping for inspiration, but came away troubled.

The key issue for plays (or any art) like this is how to make ideas led art, rather than narrative or character driven art. The starting point for Complicite was the “real life” relationship prior to WWI between Cambridge mathematician GH Hardy and a self-taught maths genius in Madras called Srinivasa Ramanujan. But the majority of the play was based around a fictitious modern day relationship between (guess what) a maths lecturer and her soon to be husband (of course of Indian extraction) who did something in the futures market, oh and there was a string theory chap who the husband meets on a plane to India – characters entirely concocted to solve the problem of how you explain the maths to the audience. So we had maths lectures from the wife, and the string theorist explaining how some of Ramanujan’s theories turned out to support or be supported by string theory. This might have worked, were it not so obvious that the characters were foils for their speeches, having no credibility as characters in their own rights. So as bad things happen to the wife, a miscarriage, and ultimately an early death, you do not feel that they have grown organically from the plot, you feel emotionless. It is too blatant that the play is gratuitous in manipulating your emotions.

This is especially annoying as in the relationship between Hardy and Ramanujan offers great material. Hardy considered his collaboration with Ramanujan as the “one romantic incident” of his life (quoting the programme) but whether platonic, sexual, intellectual or whatever, this does not come across in the play.

The narrative weaves shards of the Hardy/Ramanujan and husband/wife string theorist narratives together, neither following chronological order – the point being to demonstrate within the fabric of the piece the idea of time present time past time future. This was more like the sort of approach I am advocating for art after quantum physics, but I was underwhelmed by the execution. For example the sequence where the deaths of Ramanujan, Hardy and the wife follow one after another seemed contrived. Too often the shards of narrative failed to coalesce or resonate with each other. It felt as though the company was searching for a key to unlock the material and give it shape, but that the key remained elusive.

And it didn’t help that the depiction of India and the Indian diaspora was so clichéd. The gratuitous arms in the air dance sequence. The tabla player on the side of the stage, when the rest of the music is recorded. And did they really do that conversation? The one where an Anglo Indian woman is asked where she comes from and she says London and he says no before that and she says Ealing?

It is no co-incidence that this fractured narrative technique is one which all significant narrative art is struggling with at the moment – it is the necessary consequence of the conversion of (a) the modernist (and all the stuff that came after it) dismantling of the “realist” art form, and (b) the fundamentally altered conception we now have of “life the universe and everything” post quantum physics (and my doesn’t that Eliot quotation seem prophetic!) So we have the multiple strands of films like The Fountain, and Pan’s Labyrinth, or the extraordinary INLAND EMPIRE which is designed out of David Lynch’s Maharishi / Transcendental Meditation philosophy that everything is connected because it comes from the oneness of (un?)consciousness. In theatre we have Faust, the (coming soon) Masque of the Red Death, the Wonderful World of Dissocia, all riffing on fragmentation, multiple colliding parallel narratives, the uncertainty of consciousness and psychology and (and this should in some ways have been a (c) above) the fragmentation of society. And although the linear structure is abandoned, they work in a way which still produces a sense of pattern. Which this show should have done, given one of the key quotes from Hardy: “Mathematicians are only makers of patterns, like poets or painters.”

This is maybe the fundamental flaw in the production, the failure to find a satisfactory pattern to its structure, one that feels organic, and natural, as maths is, rather than contrived.

Which is not to say that there weren’t great ideas lurking here. The fact that the husband works in “futures” is never explored, save for a great line that he believes that if he says something it is much more likely to come true (cf Auster – Oracle Nights and the Music of Chance). The “numbers are all around us” stuff is good too, the digital clock, the computer code projections, although there is quite a lot made about ‘phone numbers which gets a bit tiresome.

Back to reality. You will have noticed I only got as far as films and plays 3 paragraphs ago. Well at the start of the play something terrible happens. The string theorist tells us that nothing we see on stage is real. They are only actors. The set is just a set. Only the maths is real. And the tablas. So far so modernist, although in my view the play never recovers, or more to the point I never recovered my suspension of disbelief; I just didn’t believe the characters. Why you might be thinking am I carrying on so? Because I believe that this issue (reality) is fundamental to what is going on at the moment in all narrative artforms (fiction, film and theatre), fundamental to the book I am trying to write, fundamental to the explosive arguments which are inevitable coming to a Latte Days Book Group near you sometime soon. The realist form is dormant, very possible dead. Because realism doesn’t reflect reality, or should that be realities. The genre of literary fiction has played itself out. It doesn’t work anymore.

That’s why literary fiction has become more about writerly style – eg John Banville’s Booker Prize winning “The Sea” , a book which takes the “show not tell” obsession of the objective correlative to an ultimate position. The phrase objective correlative was, ironically, perhaps, coined by TS Eliot. He said that the only way of “expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding…a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion.” In The Sea what happens is that every inanimate object, every piece of clothing, every blade of grass, every grain of sand on that damned beach the narrator is obsessed with, is animated with meaning, to express the interior psychological condition of the narrator. All the inanimate objects are animated, but the problem is that the characters themselves are totally inanimate. Of course I may be doing Banville a disservice, in that I can conceive of a counter argument that the tension between the animated inanimate and the inanimate characters is deliberate, creating an internal critique of the characters and the objective correlative and the genre of literary fiction. But my gut instinct is not.

Another technique that literary fiction has adopted is to try to head off the reality problem by writing about stuff which is really important, like Darfur (I am thinking of Dave Eggers “What is the What”). They make a pre-emptive strike against the argument that they are redundant as fiction because of the worthiness of the subject matter. I admit I am straying into dangerous territory here, in that I don’t read this type of work, a priori because I have already dismissed it, so I can’t give specific evidence other than the fact that I have no interest in it. My gut feeling though is that it is reportage, journalism or fact dressed up as fiction. I have read some Eggers and he is a terrific writer, but for me books like this inhabits the same territory as docu-dramas; I cannot conceive that it can get away from the fundamental problem that whatever the factual background is it has to be shoe-horned into the realist genre, by artificial plot devices and neat narrative tricks.

And don’t get me started on all those books about three generations of lesbian sisters growing up in a remote treehouse on an island somewhere foreign”

Compare and contrast the energy and excitement of the postmodern none-literary scene. The explosion of graphic novels where words and pictures combine, contradict, resonate, vibrate. Or that very hard to label thing that is a kind of fusion of magic realism and postmodernism – Murdoch, Carter, Auster, and Murakami to name but four, but much much more is coming – Steven Hall’s “The Raw Shark Texts” or Scarlett Thomas’ “The End of Mister Y”, wherein narratives are constantly remixed, and genres mashed-up. Weird Fiction some people have called it. Toby Litt tried to coin the phrase “Slipstream”. But Scarlett Thomas prefers “transrealism” and pointed me and other attendess at her book launch to Rudy Rucker’s superb “A Transrealist Manifesto” (get it at http://www.cs.sjsu.edu/faculty/rucker/transrealistmanifesto.pdf). Here are the first three paras (though it is worth reading the whole thing):

“In this piece I would like to advocate a style of SF-writing that I call Transrealism. Transrealism is not so much a type of SF as it is a type of avant-garde literature. I feel that Transrealism is the only valid approach to literature at this point in history.

The Transrealist writes about immediate perceptions in a fantastic way. Any literature which is not about actual reality is weak and enervated. But the genre of straight realism is all burnt out. Who needs more straight novels? The tools of fantasy and SF offer a means to thicken and intensify realistic fiction. By using fantastic devices it is actually possible to manipulate subtext. The familiar tools of SF — time travel, antigravity, alternate worlds, telepathy, etc. — are in fact symbolic of archetypal modes of perception. Time travel is memory, flight is enlightenment, alternate worlds symbolize the great variety of individual world-views, and telepathy stands for the ability to communicate fully. This is the “Trans” aspect. The “realism” aspect has to do with the fact that a valid work of art should deal with the world the way it actually is. Transrealism tries to treat not only immediate reality, but also the higher reality in which life is embedded.

The characters should be based on actual people. What makes standard genre fiction so insipid is that the characters are so obviously puppets of the author’s will. Actions become predictable, and in dialogue it is difficult to tell which character is supposed to be talking. In real life, the people you meet almost never say what you want or expect them to. From long and bruising contact, you carry simulations of your acquaintances around in your head. These simulations are imposed on you from without; they do not react to imagined situations as you might desire. By letting these simulations run your characters, you can avoid turning out mechanical wish-fulfillments. It is essential that the characters be in some sense out of control, as are real people — for what can anyone learn by reading about made-up people?”

And this is what he says about form:

“The Transrealist artist cannot predict the finished form of his or her work. The Transrealist novel grows organically, like life itself. The author can only choose characters and setting, introduce this or that particular fantastic element, and aim for certain key scenes. Ideally, a Transrealist novel is written in obscurity, and without an outline. If the author knows precisely how his or her book will develop, then the reader will divine this. A predictable book is of no interest. Nevertheless, the book must be coherent. Granted, life does not often make sense. But people will not read a book which has no plot. And a book with no readers is not a fully effective work of art. A successful novel of any sort should drag the reader through it. How is it possible to write such a book without an outline?”

And maybe this is the crux of the matter:

“Transrealism is a revolutionary art-form. A major tool in mass thought-control is the myth of consensus reality. Hand in hand with this myth goes the notion of a “normal person.”

There are no normal people — just look at your relatives, the people that you are in a position to know best. They’re all weird at some level below the surface. Yet conventional fiction very commonly shows us normal people in a normal world. As long as you labor under the feeling that you are the only weirdo, then you feel weak and apologetic. You’re eager to go along with the establishment, and a bit frightened to make waves — lest you be found out. Actual people are weird and unpredictable, this is why it is so important to use them as characters instead of the impossibly good and bad paperdolls of mass-culture”.

And lets face it, its not just people that are weird, the universe(s) is/ are. Rucker was writing in 1983 and we all know things have gotten a damn sight more weird since then. Look at quantum physics. Look at the internet and the way it has screwed up so many people’s ability to differentiate truth from fiction, although this phrase is of course loaded with prejudgement, for if we have learnt anything from the parlous state of the world today, it is that one person’s reality is very different from another person’s.

At the heart of A Disappearing Number lies a nexus of anxiety about how to mathematical weirdness and the weird nature of its universes, without losing the audience. It adopts a number of strategies. For example there is much use of projections and an ever fidgeting stage set to try and introduce an overreaching aesthetic to the play. But, spectacular and sometimes lovely though the visuals were, they again seemed to be a gratuitous layer that didn’t successfully integrate themselves into other aspects of the play. At one point I was thinking to myself how the visuals were full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, when there was a loud, unexplained, and deliberate bang. I could see no purpose to this other than to wake up any one who had nodded off what with all the maths stiff that was going on. If this was its purpose, it succeeded, judging by the number of people who jumped out of their seats.

And the irony of all this is that the maths was the best part of A Disappearing Number. I had no trouble following it (there were some deliberately obtuse equations for easy laughs). What I resented was the usual conduit of communication – ie mock lectures, and stilted conversations. In one section, the maths was acted, eg possible divisions of 4 represented by movement of an actresses two legs and two shoes, and this was so much effective.

Towards the end of the play we learnt that mathematicians have recently got excited that Ramanujan’s last scribblings may hold the key to unlocking the holy grail of physics, the grand universal theory of everything from the very smallest to the very largest. And I wonder whether there is a grand universal theory to this piece. I think there is, namely that narrative art is about communication, and that contemporary narrative art is suffering from acute anxiety as to how to achieve this, and art being a mirror held up to nature, we are riddled with anxiety about communication, about language, about ideas. Looking back at Eliot’s definition of the objective correlative, I still think that what he said holds true, and that the challenge of contemporary art is to wholeheartedly commit to his formula, not holding back, not dumbing down, trusting the audience or reader, not feeling the need to interrupt the art with its own explanation. Coming soon to London is an artist who does just that, Matthew Barney. He makes art entirely constructed from his own private system of symbols and meanings. No concession is made to explaining itself within the artwork. He picks up the mantel from Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and Joyce’s “Ulysses” and “Finnegans Wake” – imagine trying to read those without having access to the copious footnotes that accompany the texts, and you get somewhere close to it. His films and gallery installations make David Lynch’s work seem entirely limpid (dictionary definition: “1. characterized by transparent clearness; 2. easily intelligible; clear; 3 calm and untroubled; serene) by comparision. Luckily we have excellent interpreters like Richard Dormant (writing unfortunately in the Daily Telegraph). Here’s an extract (read the full article at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2007/09/18/babarney118.xml) :

“Working in the North gallery, the high ceilinged central space under the cupola, and wearing a harness around his waist and thighs, Barney first attached himself via a flexible elastic cord to two heavy oil drums filled with petroleum jelly (Vaseline) on the floor. He then climbed each of the four gallery walls, on each ascent making a drawing in the triangular spandrels in the corners under the ceiling.

Strapped together to increase their weight, the drums of Vaseline acted like an anchor, pulling him back towards the floor, forcing him to ever greater exertion because the higher he climbed, the more the resistance increased.

What is hard to convey in words is the sheer physical strength and mental focus required for each ascent. Not only are the cleats or footholds embedded in the walls for the climb very small, but once at the top he had to work with one hand, using a large piece of graphite in a long bamboo holder to reach the top of each spandrel.

As if that weren't difficult enough, the length of time he is able to work before becoming exhausted is limited. Throughout, I could hear him panting and grunting, winded with the effort required to stay at ceiling height long enough to complete a drawing while simultaneously struggling against the tremendous force pulling him backwards. In the rest periods between each ascent his body language was just like a top athlete's. He hunched his shoulders, shifted his weight from one foot to another, and paced back and forth, concentrating on what he had to do next.

Through the extreme physical exertion used in making these drawings, Barney is here making an analogy between the great artist at work and the biological phenomenon of hypertrophy whereby weightlifters and athletes make their muscles grow bigger by placing them against resistance. Just as a muscle is weak until it meets an external force, so too at its highest level art needs to encounter resistance or constraint if it is not to become facile.

This is why Picasso always fought against his own facility as a draughtsman and why other artists have endured extreme physical constraints to create some of the greatest works of art – just think of Michelangelo lying flat on his back for years to paint the Sistine Ceiling.

And so, at one level, the first part of Drawing Restraint 16 is a symbolic enactment of the process of artistic creation. For Barney, the making of form begins with what he calls "Situation", a state in which raw energy is unstructured and lacking in direction. This is symbolised by the petroleum jelly.

In the second stage of creation, which Barney names "Condition", the artist uses discipline and restraint to channel and give structure to that energy. This is the climb. Finally, in the "Production" stage of the creative process, form begins to emerge. This is the drawings in the spandrels.

For him, what is valuable in art is not so much the finished product as the tension between the desire to create and the discipline required to funnel that desire into the making of art. This is why petroleum jelly is such an important symbolic material for Barney. Being formless, it can be heated or cooled, shaped and transformed, restrained in a mould or allowed to flow free like molten lava. The elastic tether is an umbilical cord that ties the artist to the formless and often destructive chaos of pre-creation.”

What is going on here is classic post-modernism – art about making art, but the idea is fused totally with the art itself, rather than sitting apart from it, the adoption of a private mythological system used without compromise. The exhibition is on at The Serpentine Gallery very soon, with related cinema showings of Drawing Restraint 9, a 3 hour plus film of slow, total, visual symbolism. I will let you know whether I love or loathe.

You should know that Barney’s most famous work is a series of films called the Cremaster Cycle. They are named after the cremaster muscles which cover the testis, their function is to raise and lower the scrotum in order to regulate the temperature of the testis and promote spermatogenesis. No doubt his detractors deride his work as a load of old bollocks.

So there you have it. I thought that A Disappearing Number was a flawed piece of work. I am troubled, because what it tried to be was in some ways very close to my own work, and its flaws are those I am trying to and so far failing to overcome. So this is far from being a malicious review, I am just trying to work through what I think, develop my wn theory of what I want my work to be, to identify the pitfalls. Writing this was easy, what is hard is turning the ideas into functioning art, finding the formula in Eliot’s terms.

In summation: A Disappearing Number, a play about maths which failed to add up to more than the sum of its parts.

more Múm madness...mmm

2007-09-17T19:03:00.000+01:00

the BBC have some footage of that gig and a nice interview over at http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/collective/A26396283

i fear if you look closely enough you might be able to spot me, probably one of those holding up 'phone cameras!

Crafting Beauty In Modern Japan

2007-09-07T17:18:00.000+01:00

The Japanese say autumn is the 'cultural season' with many events and exhibitions
throughout the land. So what better way to get in the mood than popping down to the British Museum for this exhibition of exquisite modern craftwork. Covering ceramics, textiles, lacquer, metal, wood and bamboo, dolls, cut metal foil and glass, the BM have 100 pieces by members of the Japan Art Crafts Association (Nihon Kōgeikai), many of them designated ‘Living National Treasures’ in Japan, a title conferred by the Japanese government on exemplary individuals who carry on Japanese traditions.

As Grayson Perry says: “Uniquely in the developed world Japan has preserved the most authentic and least self-conscious continuing craft tradition...these beautiful works are masterpieces of the kind of art that is used and appreciated in many Japanese homes every day.”

It’s the attention to detail which really caught my eye, for example in the boxes sprinkled with gold or decorated with tiny mosaics made of mother of pearl or the delicate patterns of cross-woven bamboo in a lacquered bowl.

It costs a fiver and is on until 21st October. Who needs the Terracotta Army?

Boileroom - The Terrific Electric- The Barbican

2007-09-07T12:47:00.000+01:00

First and foremost, the lady sat next to me sported the most stupendous bob. Cut deep into the nape, sharp, straight and vertiginous to the cheekbones, fluffy density in the feathery sweeps around the neck. Perfection.

BOiLEROOM (as they call themselves) are a new theatre company who won the Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Award to develop this piece. From what I gather from Time Out, previous recipients of this award went on to produce work varying from the mediocre to the downright awful, so I was a bit worried, but this time much more support was given to the winning company, who were mentored by Mark Ravenhill and given much support by the Barbican. And the good news is that I really enjoyed it.

The piece was about the effect of electricity and technology in our lives, set amongst a weird Victorian / Edwardian household (I think) comprising an opera singer who has lost her voice, her nurse, a young adopted girl and a mysterious Doctor with a bag of tricks. Visually and sonically, it was very strong. The bare set was framed by scaffolding on which various weird things were hung, with other bits and bobs being wheeled into the middle from time to time. The piece incorporated projections and some sound art. On the negative side, there was a pre-recorded narrator, and the actors, rather than speaking, mumbled in a kind of Mr Bean kind of way which got really irritating, and the text of the narrative was a bit trite. Also the narrative petered out with none of its strands coming to any sort of denouement. None of this really affected my enjoyment though; it was more like a piece of mime or dance, and the “generous” ie a little slow pacing and visual and sonic styling gave it a ruminative, meditative effect. A company to watch.

Panic Attack! Art in the Punk Years - The Barbican

2007-09-07T11:30:00.000+01:00

Spinner.com: "You played in punk bands throughout your adolescence and are known for doing things your own way. Is that a by-product of the punk ethos?"

Bjork: "Well, I've never been into the establishment and the hidden rules that come with that; you're supposed to dress a certain way, sing a certain way, be a certain way, cook a certain way. I don't believe in that. We're all very different. I don't think anybody fits. It's not only me."

With time to spare in the Barbican, I found myself at their exhibition “Panic Attack! Art in the Punk Years”.

I wasn’t a punk in 1976. I was 8.

There is a certain kind of muso journo cum cultural commentator, the sort of chap (invariably) who finds himself on Newsnight Review scratching his face and gurning with the sheer effort of being so brilliant,for whom Punk represents some mythical altered state of being, some new Jerusalem, something which somehow defines their very being. To me they just remind me of the fat bald bloke at the party who just has to do the nutty boys dance when a Madness track comes on – creatures of a fake, false remembered childhood, revised, rewritten, a made up lost paradise.

What actually was/is Punk? The exhibition chooses (from necessity) to ignore this question, mentioning only in passing there is some dispute as to the interelationship between the UK version (Sex Pistols, the Clash) and the US (Ramones). It manages to stretch the Punk years (via reference to Post-Punk, an even more illusive concept) up to the mid 1980s.

It starts with Jamie Reid's cover of God Save the Queen, and the early rooms feature various cut-up / collage work, postcards to abandoned warehouses being the objects which are chopped and reconfigured.

Then there is a run of familiar territory - Cosi Fan Tutti's porn interventions, Jarman's early Super8s, Gilbert and George, then a run of famous American artists, Robert Maplethorpe, Cindy Sherman, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Hering - familiar territory in that they are all artists who somehow became household (if you live in the Finchley LovePalace) names. The terrific finale is a 1984 film by Cerith Wynn Evans featuring Leigh Bowery modelling his "Pakis From Outer Space" look.

Mick Hucknell was a punk. So was Adam Ant.

This was a curate’s egg of a show, or should that be a curator’s egg? Some of the work was very dated, some of it suprisingly contemporary, not in the sense of being ahead of its time, but in the sense of exposing how little some conceptual art has moved on since the 1970s.

The central argument, that somehow all the featured artists were Punk, functioned instead to show up how much internal contradiction there is, unless you reduce Punk to the simple notion of people just getting off their arses and doing stuff.

Who do you believe? Lydon or Mclaren’s narrative? The Sex Pistols as angry working-class boys kicking down the walls, or the product of a svengali media manipulator. Either way leads you to Reality TV.

Many of the artists could easily have been connected by other narratives than Punk. As the artists of the Thatcher/Reagan years (what could be more punk than Norman Tebbit’s call for the unemployed to get on their bikes?). Decentralisation, emphasis on the individual, a push towards small self-help communities rather than state support – the art of the 1980s unconsciously mirrored the socio-economic governmental philosophy it was fighting against. Or as artists of gender / sexuality revolution. Or perhaps as nothing particularly new, just a natural progression from the 1960s. Never mentioned, Warhol looms large over this exhibition – he was making art from junkies and trannies long before this lot. Working class revolutionaries kicking down the doors of the Establishment? Or had the doors already been kicked down by the 1968 riots, by That Was The Week That Was, by Altamont, by the Profumo Affair. Or go even further back, to the Surrealists, Situationists and Dadaists. Duchamp put the urinal in the gallery; the artists of the 1970s just had to add the piss, shit, spit and spunk.

'How do I know all this stuff?' Anonymous Gill would ask if she still read my blog. Yeah, that’s a good question. Because the prevailing culture keeps feeding me all this stuff, even the stuff which purports to be undermining or radicalising the prevailing system. Which makes me wonder? Maybe it was radical once, but it certainly doesn’t feel so any more. It’s been absorbed. What doesn’t kill the system makes it stronger.

Which might explain the absence in the exhibition of that which I most associate with Punk, namely a snarling menace, a sense of impending, random, horrible violence.

The quality of the art is mixed, the narrative flawed, but this has to go down as a must see for the stimulation. It finishes 9th September though.

Múm - Museum of Garden History 29/08/07

2007-08-30T19:24:00.000+01:00

So I was one of the lucky 125 who won the opportunity (through the Múm mailing list) to purchase tickets for this very special gig at the Museum of Garden History. The Museum itself is quite weird – dedicated to displays of garden shovels and hoes through the ages – being formerly the church of St Mary-at Lambeth. Sound was good but lacked a little clarity; sightlines were ok-ish (the stage was quite small).

But you don’t want to know about that. You want to know about the new Múm.

Regular readers (oh if only) will have followed the saga of Múm’s loss of figurehead and vocalist Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir (see http://robingrebsonsguidefortheperplexed.blogspot.com/2006/11/gig-review-kitchen-motors.html). In theory Múm are now left with the two “boys”, the perhaps somewhat anonymous (and underrated) founder members Gunnar Örn Tynes and Örvar Þóreyjarson Smárason, but they have always had a squad of friends and musicians for tours and recording, and they have dipped into the pool of remarkable Icelandic talent, particularly the aforereviewed Kitchen Motors Collective, to refresh themselves. So here they were 7 strong. Regulars drummer and token Finlander, Samuli Kosminen on drums, and Ólöf Arnalds on strings and vocals were supplemented by the glorious Sigurlaug Gísladóttir (who goes by the name of Mr Silla but I can tell you she aint no fella!) and the sublimely talented Hildur Ingveldardóttir Gudnadóttir (here on vocals, but her brilliant solo cello album under the name of Lost in Hildurness has been gathering rave reviews) and Eiríkur Orri Olafsson on trumpet and keyboards.

The gig was a one-off to launch their new single “They Made Frogs Smoke 'til They Exploded” out this week and the new album “Go Go Smear The Poison Ivy” out 24th September.

And it was, of course, fantastic. It was pretty much a run through of the whole of the new album plus a couple of oldies and a very odd and wonderfully shambolic honky tonk meets gospel cover (so right, and yet so wrong, in a church, oi!)

They sounded, well, like only Múm sound. There were some differences, post–Kristín. The boys seemed, well somehow friendlier, more relaxed, warmer. The sound was brighter, a bit meatier in the beats, less waves crashing on Lighthouse rocks and more wooden shack with roaring fire and toasted marshmallows and beer and Brenivin (Iceland’s own home brew style fire-water, not known as the Black Death for nothing). Less string, more woodwind. Generally the vocals were sung by the three girls and the boys all together. As they didn’t really do old songs we wait to see how they will deal with trademark Kristín tunes like “Green Grass of Tunnel”.

To be honest, after the Kitchen Motors gig I wasn’t too worried about Múm. I knew the new members were talented, and I always suspected there was more to those two boys than met the eye. I wonder if they are in some ways liberated after Kristín. We will miss her brooding fragile intensity and sonic touches, but there is no doubt that Múm are as wonderful as ever. They tour properly later in the year and I can’t wait for December, when they play the Scala.

Road Trip V - Belsay Hall, Northumberland - 30/07

2007-08-07T22:22:00.000+01:00

Belsay Hall is an English Heritage site near Morpeth in the heart of Northumberland. The Hall itself is Greek revival style villa built in the early 19th Century. Now empty, it is given over every year to assorted artists to do with as they will. When I heard that the ghostly cellars had been given over to a sound installation by Anthony (of the Johnsons) and the great New York contemporary classical / electronica composer William Basinski and when I saw the pictures of what Geraldine Pilgrim had done in the bedrooms, I knew I had to go!

I was so impressed, especially by the way that themes ran across the work of the various artists. Generally the artists traced the history of the Middleton family who lived at Belsay for seven centuries, and the work fell into two categories. Some examined the socio-political aspects, such as the life of scullery maids: I found this work a little too worthy. The other, more successful, approach was to turn the site into a phantasmagoria; haunted by the Middletons and their imagined lives.

Ghosts abound. You hear them in Anthony’s haunting spooky tones emanating from the cellars and drifting around the house. In Pilgrim’s rooms, ghost birds flutter behind open wardrobes, a spectre brushes her hair in the mirror, a single eye blinks in the wardrobe. It was like site specific promenade theatre (ok Faust!) all over again, except here the actors had departed into the shadows. What you are left with are traces, ghosts of ghosts.

In a room by Sandy Powell, a single spot light illuminates a key hole – you peep through it and watch Lady Middleton slowly undress – at the end she walks towards you, bends down, and winks. Who is the watcher here? The walls have eyes, as well as ears. In Mike Figgis’ room, wallpaper is torn to reveal a face staring back at you; a reflection of the picture in the related room by Boudicca next door.

In Francesca Steele’s room, you sit and watch the wallpaper morph. Part of the wall is a projection, perfectly matching the real botanical style paper, until it starts to move, and grow or shrink or tear; other images burn through, of plants and macro-biology.

In a film by the Quay Brothers, projected inside a coffin, the traces of the ghosts have all but vanished, just a creaking door or a footstep is left. Traces of ghosts of ghosts.

In works by United Visual Artists and Golan Levin (the latter in the 14th Century castle) it is the viewer who is made into ghost, the gaze turned back again on the visitor. In the former, wispy images of oneself are projected onto a screen; in the latter you are turned into a skeletal hieroglyphic, pacing around the room and waving your arms to find yourself amongst the other ghosts.

Between the Hall and the Castle lie wonderful gardens, formal at first, then you drop into the cool air of a former quarry where huge ferns and weird plants dominate, like something out of Jurassic Park.

Another wonderful, enchanted and enchanting place.

Road Trip IV - Northumberland - 29/07

2007-08-07T21:14:00.000+01:00

Northumberland

Who knew? Certainly not me. Mile after mile of the most beautiful, unspoilt scenery.

Rolling hills, massive skies, wonderful huge fluffy clouds, meadows and vales and forests, sunsets to live for.

Then there’s the coast, designated an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, with a 35 mile road running along side. Dune grass and castles, a perfect sea, seabirds everywhere. Our first stop was Craster famed for its kippers, although the town’s famed smokehouse restaurant was closed on a Sunday, so I settled for the burger van by the tourist information booth. Kippers from a van? Ah but they were so good – marinaded in spices, then cooked in tinfoil on the hotplate, and served in a bun. Delicious! They were holding an artists open house event in Craster that day – one artist had a piece (not for sale) about the perils of a road trip – talk about synchronicity.

After buying some prints, we stopped again after Seahouses to explore the dunes, then made our way to Bamburgh Castle.

What a Castle – huge, perched on the side of the sea, impeccably restored.

Everything seemed to conspire to give us picture postcard views - a games of cricket on the green in front of the castle; a kite flying over the dunes. If you are lucky, I'll show you the full set of photos some day.

We stopped at some great pubs. The Gun Inn near Bellingham sported amazing views for miles around and friendly locals. Great fish was had at the Cross Keys in Thropton. I just wanted to record that in case, sorry make that for when, I go back.

Road Trip III - The Angel of the North - 28/07

2007-08-07T19:36:00.000+01:00

No road trip from Yorkshire to Northumberland would be complete without a stop off at the Angel of the North, although in a funny kind of way TAOTN is at its most angelic whilst driving along the M1 – it crops up on the left, disappears, then appears on the right, then its on the left again, now straight in front of you.

At the site itself, what strikes you is the sheer size of the thing, and the engineering – deep grooves run along the outside, an external skeleton.

It seems to me that Gormley shares a lot of attributes with Goldsworthy – both are treated with suspicion by the art establishment, I suspect because of their popularity – they make public art and they make work that the public wants to see. And they demonstrate a scale and ambition lacking in many of the “art scene” artists.

TAOTN is the most popular piece of art in Britain. The Geordies of course love it; as we were to discover, they are very proud and passionate about and in this part of the world, and they have a piece of work worthy of their pride.

Road Trip IIA - Goldsworthy pictures

2007-08-07T19:10:00.000+01:00

Wood Room (courtsey YSP site)

Stone Room (courtesy Daily Telegraph)

Clay Room (courtesy Daily Telegraph)

Leaf Stalk Room (courtesy Daily Telegraph)

Road Trip II - Andy Goldsworthy at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park

2007-08-07T13:52:00.000+01:00

The YSP is dedicating its 4 galleries and various outdoor locations to a major exhibition of work by Andy Goldsworthy. The London-centric art scene are rather snotty about Goldsworthy – I think they consider him twee, a country bumpkin, and worse of all, he is very,very popular, and with real people, not ICA clones with silly facial hair. I believe that his books are the bestselling art books in the market. The establishment snottiness is odd given that a lot of his work is conceptual, rather than aesthetic, and he predated the YBAs love of materials like piss, shit and blood and subjects like death and decay.

Very Damian Hirst you might think, save that Goldsworthy’s canvass is nature, particularly rural and agricultural, where such material is everyday and you cannot afford to be squeamish about it. Much of his work is temporary, designed to decay or vanish, melting snowballs, corroding damns, etc, leaving you with just the ghost, the photograph of the work in action, which make up those oh so popular books. He describes his art in terms of “actions” or “interventions”.

Some of this work leaves me cold – I saw one of his melting snowballs in a gallery a few years ago – a pile of watery mud, but at it’s best, which it is here, his work is breathtaking. The underground gallery at the YSP hosts a series of rooms each more astonishing than the last.

It begins with Stacked Oak - a perfect mound of chopped trees, beautifully, naturally curved. In the Stone Room are eleven stone domes, like an ancient village in miniature, or a futuristic settlement on the moon, or some weird agricultural practice us townies can only guess at. The top of each dome supports a wafer thin hole, the effect to make the deep dark black of the hole seem more like a felt covering.

The Clay Room is just that; the walls caked in thick mud which has cracked as it dried. The mud undulates and warps away from the wall. Rather like a Rothko, the more you look, the more you notice, luring you into a trance like state – different shades, patterning and rhythms in the cracks, your eyes start to dance.

The first thing you notice on entering the Wood Room is the deep almost astringent smell. 760 logs of coppiced chestnut curl around in a self-supporting dome, like the lair of a Tolkeinesque warlord.

The final room is simply beyond any man made artefact I have ever seen. In the Leaf Stalk Room , Goldsworthy has made a 12 metre wide “curtain” from leaf stalks held together only with blackthorns. I say curtain but it is only a filigree lattice, so fragile, and yet giving the effect of solidity. So still, yet containing within so much energy. So peaceful, yet the effort of it not falling induces anxiety, a kind of horizontal vertigo. At the centre of the curtain is a void, a hole, anti-matter, absence made whole. The piece took him two hours everyday for three months, and there was a full scale collapse midway through.

Sadly we weren't allowed to take photos, so here's a shot of the outside of the gallery, with some Goldsworthy arches - if i find any photos of these rooms I will post later.

The other galleries on this part of the site showed pictures of previous works – I was especially taken by a set of four photographs of a curved damn, each photo taken with a higher water level, so that in the third just the top of the damn walls peeks over, and in the fourth it has gone, but its line is shadowed in the different patterns the water makes either side of it.

Outside, a series called Hanging Trees featured three walled enclosures into which trees have been incorporated.

We never got to the far gallery, which hosted paintings made by sheep (with Goldsworthy’s help) and other stuff with blood and dung, nor to a couple of the more difficult to reach outdoor pieces. But the exhibition runs until January, so that’s not to say that I wont!

Road Trip I - Yorkshire Sculpture Park – 27/28 July

2007-08-07T12:22:00.000+01:00

What an enchanted, magical and mellow place this is. The park covers a huge area (500 acres) of fields, agricultural land, meadows, woodland, streams and rivers, as well as four separate gallery spaces and a plush modern visitor’s centre.

Outdoors, selections from the Park’s collection are dotted all around.

Because the sculptures are often changed, there isn’t a guide as such, just some suggested walks, and many of the sculptures don’t have anything to tell you who they are by. This could be annoying, but somehow isn’t, as it allows you to wander freely and make your own discoveries and judgements. So some magnificent humanoid forms sit in the middle of a field of sheep, whilst a row of clucking birds lead us to a wonderful Henry Moore figure...

As we get lost in the forest, nothing seemed to make sense any more. Some of the artists play with the question of what sculpture is, incorporating elements of the rural surroundings. We stumble on an arch of arranged twigs – considered work, or a children’s project? A treehouse rests on a large tree into which a poem has been carved; from a distance it looks random, like graffiti or vandalism, only close up does it reveal itself. That sheep pen over there – is it for the sheep or is it an installation? – it looks like it is a working pen save for a sign pointing to the public entrance. In an old deer shelter James Turrell has made one of his skyspaces – a square hole in the ceiling – you sit and look at a square of sky – the drama of cloud sun and sky focussed and quickened by being framed.

Cibelle – Luminaire – 26th July

2007-08-07T11:26:00.000+01:00

I can’t think of a more appropriate siren to sing me away on my road trip than the honey- toned Cibelle (pronounced so as to rhyme with ‘lov-er-ly’). I’ve previously posted her own (non) definition of her music without boundaries: “Even better, is to sculpt out of a big mass of collected particles of sound, sweat, glue, lick, purple, silver, air, wood, wind, anything thats been stuck together by living life and all these and other things accumulating inside of me just like breathing and the only things remaining being the ones that match me at that moment, then letting them out, all merged inside me by osmosis, letting it all come out, all that, is that mass, that will be sculpted until it gives me goose bumps and butterflies. then i know it's ready”.

On stage this amounts to an assortment of electronic gadgets and children’s toys and percussive instruments, backed up by fiery drummer and guitarist, and brought together by Cibelle’s angelic voice – she sounds like hot maple syrup dripping over cold ice cream melting over hot home-made waffles. Mmmm.

This was part of a new night called dsh blp which featured djs from my old pals Tunng, and excellent support from SonVer (chamber rock meets shoegazer electronica) and Robert Logan (bedroom moog-freakery) – it was kind of like the Arctic Circle used to be only better, and I will definitely check out any future events they hold.

But the night belonged to Cibelle.

Ghetto Warriors - Minority Boxers in Britain - The Jewish Museum

2007-07-24T11:36:00.000+01:00

A small but perfectly formed exhibition about “minority” boxers at the small but perfectly formed Jewish Museum in Camden. To my shame, I hadn’t been there before, and they had some great stuff in their permanent exhibition, including a Pesach moustache cup – a cup with an internal strip of ceramic I guess intended to keep one’s ‘tache dry. But I was there for the boxing.

The exhibition began with some of the great Jewish pugilists of the 18th Century like Daniel Mendoza (who wrote the first boxing manual) and “Dutch Sam” who invented the upper cut, and featured some amazing prints and souvenirs from this period.

The second period covered was pre WWII where many Jewish boxers from the East End came to prominence - I particularly enjoyed the display of cigarette cards from these times, and Elliot [of Yabbok – see March 07] Tucker’s film featuring various cigar chomping old timers (did you know Mickey Duff’s grandfather was the Belzer Rabbi?).

Finally the exhibition covered the rise of Black and Asian boxers after the war, including a great picture of Chris Eubank in all his pomp.

A must see.

The museum is normally only open in the day, but I went at night as part of a talk given by Professor Sander Gilman on “Imagining Jewish Bodies”, a disconcerting rollercoaster ride through 2000 years plus of anti-Semitic stereotyping, deconstructing the physical characteristics associated with “the jew” through the ages. For example, “the jew” was often portrayed as having flat feet, signifying his unsuitability for military service, thus his inability to serve his [adopted] country, hence highlighting his innate disloyalty. I will be raising this issue with my podiatrist when I next see him about my collapsed arches. Prof Gilman was as stimulating a speaker as I’ve had the pleasure to come across in recent years.

Carlos Acosta - The Lowry, Manchester

2007-07-16T17:27:00.001+01:00

And so to Manchester, to the Lowry indeed, for Carlos Acosta and friends as part of the Manchester International Festival. I was taking Mama Grebson as a birthday treat and boy did she enjoy it.

Carlos Acosta is by repute the world’s best male ballet dancer. What never occurred to me before hand is that, for thinking ladies of a certain age and disposition, he is their equivalent of a night at the Chippendales. There were so many hysterical screaming women, it was like Barry White all over again.

The first half featured two Acosta-less pieces from Danza Contemporanea de Cuba , and a brief but powerful appearance from the main man dancing the pas de deux from Le Corsaire (that really does sound like a euphemism for something unspeakable). He was accompanied by Yiensgay Valdes, Prima Ballerina of the Ballet Nacional de Cuba.

The second half was edited extracts of a piece by Acosta called Tocororo: A Cuban Tale, to a live Cuban band. It was supposedly his life story but in reality more of a Fame-style dance off between geeky classical boy (Acosta) and a Huggy Bear style cigar smoking pimp-rollin’ cat (dunno who played him). Acosta won of course, and the two traded hand shakes rather than fists as the girls on stage and off watched on adoringly.

It was all great fun. Ballet really isn’t my sort of thing, but I could appreciate Acosta’s physical and athletic approach that made most European dancers look a bit feeble and listless in comparison. Anyway who cares what I thought, this was very much ladies night.

rainy day, dream away

2007-07-03T11:38:00.000+01:00

I received this greeting from my friends at japanesepottery.com:

"Greetings from Mishima, As mid-summer greets us, we'd like to extend a traditional Japanese shochu mimai greetings to all (a summer greeting inquiring about how one's getting along in the summer heat) and hope some coolness in harmony with nature---cold barley tea!--will find its way to you."

Oh if only they knew. Won’t it ever stop raining?

Cornelius - RFH - 1/7/07

2007-07-02T11:59:00.001+01:00

I was slightly unprepared for the sonic onslaught of Cornelius, or the Cornelius Group as they were styled, and their Synchronsied Sensuous Show. Known to some as the Japanese Beck, and to me as a DJ, remixer / producer, this show was alchemy of a different kind to Matmos’, a thick and heavy fusion at high temperature of many prefixes to the word rock – surf, punk, angular, funk, noise and post being just a few.

The four piece band, dressed in grey shirts with white collar and tight black jeans, were effortlessly cool, as were the lightshow and visuals. And it was all ever so tight. The synchronisation with the visuals was quite amazing, particularly given the speed of some of the playing. In the best number for this, a magical stop-animation scene set in a kitchen matched every pulse of the band, every vocal click coordinating with a sugar lump defying gravity and rolling across a table.

I preferred the more mellow numbers, although this was all relative, as even the slow tunes were heavy and the quiet ones loud. But for a finale, the band swapped position, the lady drummer who had been bashing nine bells of hell pout of her kit all evening took centre stage with a flute, and they lullabied us into the night with a lovely rendition of the old Dean Martin croon, Sleep Warm.

Which I did.

Matmos - RFH - 1/7/07

2007-07-02T11:40:00.000+01:00

A gig this disparate can really only be reviewed in two parts…

First up were sonic alchemists Matmos.

When I saw them a few years ago, they were generating sound from the most unlikely sources, notably the spanking of a bare bottom and the pouring of beer onto a metal sheet.

For this gig they were augmented by an extra guitarist (though this being Matmos guitars aren’t played as such, they are bowed, or played directly into the hardware to be processed and manipulated) and by a member of New York’s So Percussion ensemble, here playing timpani, marimba, tubular bells, plant pots and bird whistles).

They’ve expanded their musical palette too: less driving beats, an infusion of latin rhythms, touches of contemporary classical, and generally more mellow. They were just back from Verona where they had been commissioned to produce an electronic version of Aida, and treated us to a couple of tracks.

For the finale we had a brilliant reading of a story from the libretto to Robert Ashley’s Perfect Lives opera (from googling him today, I learn that Ashley is an avant garde American electronic / contemporary classical composer).

All in all this was a wonderful set, with moments of real imagination, touching on the sublime.

Candi Staton / Al Green – The Royal Albert Hall

2007-06-29T15:31:00.000+01:00

I might as well get this over with from the start. The sound was terrible. Like a church hall, all boom and echo and fuzz. It completely ruined Candi Staton’s set and all but did the same to Al Green’s. Queuing up at the end to complain, I got talking to someone doing the same who told me he had had the same problem at Simply Red (I pass no comment) last year. It would take a phenomenal legend to get me back to the RAH for anything other than classical music, which I presume is what the acoustics are designed for.

But what a performer the Very Reverend Mr Al Green is, like the bastard love child of Barry White and James Brown (imagine the grunting at the conception!). You couldn’t take your eyes offa him, whether distributing roses for the ladies, jigging about one foot, dropping down on one knee, yelping and moaning. Legend! And a shit hot band.

The weirdest thing here was the crowd. Remarkably warm and friendly (people talked to each other, like strangers and all, imagine that!) but, how can I put it, elephantine? I have never seen so many clinically obese people in one place. I don’t mean overweight, I mean the sort of people you see in a Channel 5 documentary. The sort of people who need to invest in serious pot-holing equipment if they are to even contemplate sexual intercourse. I don’t know how the tubes back to Essex coped! And if you couldn’t get a black cab on Thursday night, this was why, all the cabbies were here (well those that haven’t already disappeared to the Costa del Cab). And gawd help anyone in the City who was trying to get their secretary to do overtime that night, cos they were all here as well. There were even (I heard people saying) several “stars” “out of” (pronounced eht awf) East Enders.

There is something worrying about seeing so many whiteys joining in gospel inflected call and response sessions (can I get a witness!) but in its own way, also something quite lovely (do you believe?!). But boy oh boy, the white man cannot clap to save his sorry little ass.

After I had booked my £50 ticket, I found out that Ms S and Mr G were also appearing at Hammersmith Apollo. It was too late to do anything about it, but I’m sure it would have been a much better venue. Still, legend!

Art Marathon Part 5 - Rites - Royal Festival Hall

2007-06-29T15:23:00.000+01:00

The art marathon reached its final destination at the RFH for a performance by the London Philharmonic Orchestra (and others).

The programme began with Philip Glass’ Prelude from Akhnaten. As you would expect from Glass, this was a piece of interlocking repeating phrases with variations. “You’d have loved it” I heard someone saying on his mobile after, “it was like house music” , but the interesting thing for me was the subtle differences between this and electronic music. The way the phases were mixed in never quite followed the beat, there was arrhythmia, syncopation, sometimes it would come in on the one as James Brown might have said. The syncopation was what most interested me, the way notes came in a touch early or a touch late – was this in the score, or was this interpretation by the orchestra?

The second piece was Arcana by Edgard Varèse, but before it began, the conductor, Marin Alsop, gave us a talk about the piece. She was wonderfully sardonic. Varèse, she told us, only wrote 12 pieces, and once we had heard this we would know why. She got the orchestra playing snippets and themes to help us understand the construction of the piece. Varèse, she told us, was the 13 year old Frank Zappa’s favourite composer. I don’t know how unusual it was to give such a talk, but what a great idea, especially for an event like this which was designed (as you will see) to get all sorts of punters in. It took a few moments for my ears to adjust to the piece, but once they did, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I could see why Zappa liked it, it kind of rocked. A vast number of percussionists played all sorts of instruments, clappers, bongos, gongs, those Latin American things you scrape a stick across.

For the second half we donned our 3D glasses (oh yes) and settled down for The Rite of Spring. In the corner, a lone dancer, the lovely Julia Mach, performed in a grey box (another box!!). The images were treated live by digital artist Klaus Obermaier with technology from the Ars Electronica Futurelab and projected in 3D on a giant screen above our heads.

The 3D effects were astonishing. As Julia Mach waved her hand in the air, invisible slipstreams were rendered in thick red marks on the screen, and began to rotate around her onscreen avatar, faster and faster, sweeping over our heads, until they started to unravel and dissolve. Her avatar elongated and crawled towards us through the air, or was tossed on the choppy waters of a virtual sea. As the piece reached its climax, the vibrating molecules of the avatar’s flesh loosened their gravitational hold on each other and pixellated and exploded into galaxies of stars (a counterpiece to Gormley’s exploded Matrices).

Unlike much vj type video work (see earlier reviews of Optronica and Turning), the images were quite subtle – there was no bombardment or overload of visual stimulation. Some of it was even quite spare.

There are some buts mind you. I thought it was great on its own terms, but equally I would have been more than happy just to watch the remarkably sexy Julia Mach on her own.

The visuals were not really an attempt to recreate the narrative of the piece, but rather existed as their own improvisation from the music.

And it must be said, the orchestra were brilliant!

It’s been fun watching the newspapers struggle to know how to review the work. The Telegraph sent along their music critic, the Guardian their dance critic, neither seemed to have quite the range to be able to review the event properly. They lacked a Grebson, a polyglot polymouth prepared to spend a very long afternoon sucking it all in and spitting it out for you, my lucky one and a half readers.

Art Marathon Part 4 - Lynette Wallworth - Hold:Vessel 2, 2007 - BFI

2007-06-29T14:45:00.000+01:00

Still in the BFI, I wandered into an installation by Lynette Wallworth called Hold:Vessel 2, 2007.

Me and Ms Wallworth, I think we share the same punctuation culture.

I loved this.

At the entrance you pick up a large white glass bowl (the bowls sit in a golden glow on a black pedestal, beautifully lit from above) and wander gropingly into a thickly black room (echoing in negative the experience of Gormley’s negative Blind Light box).

Four showers of light fall from the ceiling, like the early stages of transportation in Star Trek. The idea is that you catch the images in your bowl. The images are microscopic, organismic, liquidy. A heavy ambient soundtrack fills the room.

As a method of presentation of images, how much more interesting this is than the image wall. And as a method of projecting video art, how much more imaginative than Mathew Buckingham.

Art Marathon Part 3 - Hitsville UK

2007-06-29T13:04:00.000+01:00

With some time to kill, I decided to check out the DVD shop at the BFI. In the foyer was an exhibition about Punk, basically a flow chart with lots of album covers.

You see a lot of this sort of presentation of information about these days. I think it started with the Lomographic camera cult – this was a Russian camera built with Soviet era military optical technology, which was meant to produce pictures saturated with colour. I bought one but could never get it to do anything for me. The lomographers often present their images in walls of pictures. The outside of the Royal Festival Hall had a lomography wall for a while last year.

Although the camera was film, not digital, the method of presentation connected with the digigeist (I just made that word up, but isn’t it good!) and image walls are cropping up everywhere.

To me, the image wall represents the triumph of data over knowledge and appreciation. Presented like this, you really can’t focus on any one image. It is all flat, every image reduced to the same as its neighbour, no scope for selecting good from bad.

It is particularly sad to see the wall used to present record covers. The art of the record sleeve was all but killed by the advent of CDs; it still exists with 12 inch vinyl but the digital onslaught is mopping up the survivors. All that’s left is nostalgia. At least The Wire devotes a page each month to the depictiction and analysis of classic sleeves.

Art Marathon Part 2 - Antony Gormley - Blind Light - The Hayward

2007-06-29T12:48:00.000+01:00

To the Hayward for the Antony Gormley exhibition...

The first room is dominated by Space Station, a huge structure. It looks like a weird space city, but like almost everything in the exhibition, it was modelled on his body, then processed, in this case into perforated metal blocks. It explores the relationship between man, the space occupied by a body and the environment in which the body lives, and this lies at the heart of the exhibition and the related sculptures, which line the skyline around the Hayward for miles around.

Blind Light is the cloud within a box. The feeling as you enter the glass box is like walking into a pitch black room, where the darkness is so heavy as to be physically oppressive, visceral, material, only in negative, for here it is “pitch whiteness” that envelopes you. It is not just a mist, it is a solid. You can’t even see your feet.

self portrait inside Blind Light

In the oppressive whiteness, I became acutely aware of how much debris floats on the surface of my eyes, little spots and wisps like tiny cotton fragments. The air is saturated with moisture; you are encased in a clinging cool wetness. You don’t want to be in here for too long.

Upstairs is a room of Matrices and Expansions which I really liked. They look at first like delicate exploded fragments, filigree structures of delicate rods. As you look more closely, some of the rods are darker and, when viewed from different angles, body form emerge, often hanging upside down, suspended within the structures. They make me think of computer modelling, DNA, space age pods, string theory, and exploded consciousness.

Lining the walls are a series of Quads, collections of four photographs, which share or comment on the others in the batch. In one set, a lone Gormley statue on a beach is echoed by three farmers standing in a field, the horizon of the field echoed in a landscape devoid of people or statues. In another, a v shaped valley shares perspective with a square tunnel, and the V of a building crane.

I cue for ages to get into Hatch, a perforated box. Only two are allowed in at any time. Hollow rectangular rods of different lengths puncture the room seemingly randomly; tiny squares of light hover at the end of the rods. Viewed up close, the effect is kaleidoscopic. The catalgue talks of endoscopy

Throughout the gallery, Gormley body forms lie, hang, and squeeze themselves into corners.

From the terraces, you get a great view of the Gormleys staring at you from the surrounding rooftops.

Art Marathon Part 1 – Camden Arts Centre

2007-06-29T12:07:00.001+01:00

It had never meant to be an art marathon. It just turned out that way!

I started at the Camden Arts Centre who were showing two artists.

Mathew Buckingham’s work comprised three pieces of video art based on biographies of people who had lived in three different centuries. It was unforgivably dull. A handful of serious-looking and pretty (always a dangerous combination) girls were sat on the floor staring intently at the screens.

It was David Thorpe’s work that I had come to see but I was disappointed. In a large room a screen of wood and dark coloured glass had been erected. Inside the room within the room were three science fiction-y stars, with five or so botanical drawings hung on the screen. I have a thing for botanical drawings, and those of Thorpe’s that I had come across before looked impressive, but somehow in this setting they looked diminished and uninteresting. I suppose the thing here was the interaction between the organic and the artificial, particularly the star shaped objects (part space satellite, part deep underwater creature) and the more alien looking of the plant drawings, but overall it seemed to me to lack any real depth.

Then on to the most important part of the trip, the coffee shop, which Time Out reckons is the “best coffee in London”. I enjoyed my coffee, but it was a bit odd – perhaps another interaction between the organic and the artificial - it managed to taste both good and strong and bitter, and to be a little bit watery, all at the same time. My coffee cheesecake (another odd combination) worked really well, probably the best juxtaposition of the day. No doubt the Latte Days will visit one day soon and give us the official verdict.

I really liked the CAC – from the outside it looks like one of those mansion blocks that litter this part of Finchley Road, but inside the vibe is great, classic gallery stuff, light and airy, clean white walls, parquet flooring, with a steel and glass extension housing the coffee shop and leading to a nice little garden area which I hope to enjoy later in the summer once the rains subside. Lets hope they find some art worthy of the environment.

Lost Ladies of Folk - QEH

2007-06-24T14:30:00.000+01:00

I was in two minds whether or not to go to this event, but in the end took a gamble based on the provenance of the people behind it. Part of Jarvis Cocker’s Meltdown Festival (or Jarvis Downer’s Cockmelt as I prefer to call it), the gig was put together by Andy Votel, one of the movers behind last year’s terrific Jean Claude Vannier / Serge Gainsbourg gig, and a man who through his labels B Music and Finders Keepers has proved himself to be a remarkable picker upper of unconsidered weird rarities of the 60s and 70s, and the music was arranged by Sean O’Hagan, who arranged the music for the equally terrific Tropicalia gig last year, and appeared here with his band The High Llamas, supplemented by strings and sitar.

The Lost Ladies were Susan Christie, Wendy Flower, and Bonnie Dobson, and the gig began with three young British folk singers (bearded ladies as B Music likes to call them), Emma Trikka, Cate Le Bon and Jane Weaver. All 6 singers had remarkable pure clear honey-toned voices, which worked wonderfully with the warm and bouncy sounds of the High Llamas. Generally the feel and spirit was 1969, mostly folk pop Americana, with occasional moments of funk, psychedelica and country. Not quite my sort of thing, but really very pleasurable, and free from of the self satisfied matronly whimsy of other folkies of that era (eg Vashti Bunyan).

Wild Cursive – Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan

2007-06-22T15:54:00.000+01:00

If the British Library left me in need of some textual healing, luckily I did not have long to wait, for I was straight down to Saddlers Wells for the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan.

Wild Cursive is the last of a trilogy of works inspired by Chinese calligraphy and in particular the focused energy of the brushstrokes and the way that the calligraphers “dance” during writing. The programme tells how the dancers were asked to improvise by facing blown-up images of calligraphy, and how they absorbed the energy, or Chi, of the writer, and imitated the linear “route” of ink, full of lyrical flows and strong punctuations, with rich variations in energy.

For Wild Cursive, choreographic ideas were taken from Kuang Chao, “wild calligraphy,” considered the pinnacle in Chinese cursive aesthetics and which frees characters from any set form and exposes the spiritual state of the writer in its expressive abstraction.

Even writing this now, I am struck immediately with how much more interesting an approach this is to calligraphy and the act of writing and the spiritual value of text than anything in Sacred, which barely touched on these aspects.

On stage, large banners of rice paper drop down from above. The paper is richly textured. Ink is dripped onto the paper from hidden pipes above, and during the performance, the ink meanders down the paper. The lighting design plays with the effects; for example when back lit patterns embossed on the paper emerge which were otherwise hidden. Sometimes the lighting gives a golden mystical glow to the paper and the ink.

But it is the dancing that is the start of the show. What originally attracted me was the fact that much of the movement is derived from Tai Chi Tao Yin and Chi Kung. As I am now in my 6th month of Tai Chi practice, I was able to appreciate just how incredibly difficult the movements were, and how unbelievably graceful and fluid the dancing was. Generally the scenes comprised between one and three dancers performing a series of linked but subtly different movements. The articulation was astonishing – some dancers seemed able to move separately each toe and finger at the same time. A cartwheel was performed with such grace that the dancer appeared to float above the stage.

The sound design was also fantastic: as well as the deep breaths and occasional yelps from the dancers, the theatre was filled with ambient sounds - the hum of cicadas, gusts of wind, waves breaking on a pebbled beach, dripping water, rainfall, foghorns and temple bells. And the Japanese chap behind me sniffing profusely.

For the finale, the full company of about 20 crept onstage in a tightly packed seething mass, slowly separating out to fill the stage. The cumulative effect of their movements made my brain feel like it was being stretched, like rubber, gentle gaps opening up, solid melting into liquid, splitting and folding on itself.

As the dancers magically disintegrated, a powerful flow of ink down one of the rice paper banners generated three thick feathery fronds whilst a pool of black ink formed on the stage.

The curtain descended with a solitary dancer sinking lower and lower to the floor until finally defeated by the curtain.

Mesmerising, meditative, and utterly brilliant.

Sacred - The British Library

2007-06-22T14:12:00.001+01:00

One of the most extraordinary exhibitions that I ever went to was “The Writer in the Garden” at the British Library a couple of years ago. Although roughly chronological, it did not really have an overarching narrative or theme, but instead allowed ideas to ping around the room. It started with depictions of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, and managed to take in, amongst many other things, the Song of Songs, the Pearl and Chaucer, landscaping in Jane Austen (where a character’s opinion on gardening was used as a window into their soul), the Romantics (Keats’ garden obviously, and Wordsworth, but also an original manuscript of Kubla Khan), recordings of Alfred Lord Tennyson and various Bloomsbury types, Philip Larkin’s lawnmower, automata, field recordings of gardens, midnight/secret gardens, Derek Jarman’s garden at Dungeness etc etc. It was so exciting and stimulating. I was there for hours, and in the end had to be forcibly ejaculated by the security guard.

Digging out my notes on that exhibition (which finished “that exhibition was FUCKING AWESOME – it felt like it was curated by my sub-conscious"), I see that afterwards I went to the BL’s semi-permanent exhibition of religious artefacts, and still in an excited state, noted that they had 10th century Torah scrolls, various Jewish artefacts from the 14th to 16th centuries, and a touchscreen display of the so-called Golden Hagadah of Barcelona circa 1320.

Those religious artefacts and others from Christianity and Islam have now been collated into a new exhibition at the BL, titled “Sacred.” And what a disappointing exhibition it is. It is everything that The Writer in the Garden was not: bland, flat, dull. The clue is in the tagline “discover what we share.” There’s that dreadful flat tone of voice again. This from the exhibition guide: “Religion is one of the main aspects of life by which we define ourselves, and from which we derive our sense of community. In the 2001 UK Census, 76.8% of people said that they had a religious faith”. I’ve commented on this voice before – patronizing, simplistic flat. Any excitement, any vibrancy, any passion, any violence, is brushed under the carpet and trodden down. Note that terrible word “community”. Note that meaningless statistic, and bear in mind that the 2001 census was the one where there was a huge underground campaign for people to declare their religion as “Jedi”.

There was much talk in the exhibition of “diversity” but, of course, none of difference or conflict. In the spirit of diversity, I largely focussed on the Jewish objects and took little interest in the Christian and Muslim objects. The highlight for any reader of this blog would have been a 13th Century copy of Moses Maimonides’ Guide For The Perplexed.

I would also have liked to learn more about micrography but the exhibition gave almost no consideration to the aesthetics or practice of calligraphy,

This was a stuffy, uncomfortable exhibition – the essence of three religions reduced to just a lot of book at low level behind glass, with explanatory notes even lower down.

God was barely mentioned.

Despite the BL’s best attempts to gloss over the nastier aspects of eg Christian anti-semitism, or violent factionism in Islam, little hints crept through – a Christian object depicted the Jew as blindfolded because of his refusal to accept Christ; a section on the Sunni/Shia split notes the almost immediate murder of Shia figures by Sunnis.

It is odd, because (for all that it ignores the class of civilisations) in some ways this exhibition perfectly captures life in Britain at the end of the Blair government – what Sukhdev Sandhu, in his review of the (hype surrounding the) Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer film calls a culture of “coercive banality”. The language of government speak. The closed-eyed attempt to ignore the reality of religious conflict. The flattening of all experiences, so that they are all equal and all bland and all meaningless – just stuff behind glass cases in a museum. He is so right about that notion of “coercive”. At the end of the exhibition is a screen on which you are asked to give your thoughts, which (once vetted of course!) flash up around you. Time after time, messages appear along the lines of “wouldn’t the world be a better place if everyone realised how much they had in common”. This exhibition is an exercise in brainwashing. You come along, are battered into submission by banality, and then prove what good little boys and girls you are by parroting dull sentiments back into the system, where they will be used to brainwash other people.

This, for the record, was my entry, which I doubt you will be seeing up on the screen:

“Although people keep trying to persuade me of the powers of the British Library, nonetheless I have increasingly difficulty in believing that such a body actually exists.”

CocoRosie at the Bloomsbury Ballroom

2007-06-18T16:11:00.001+01:00

Lying in bed after the gig, I was in a dilemma. I was in such a good place, so happy and buzzy, that I didn’t want to go to sleep. On the other hand, I knew that to sleep would be to dream and in dreams I would find myself back in CocoRosieLand.

What a tremendous show this was – a perfect marriage of artist, crowd and venue. In reverse order, the Bloomsbury Ballroom is a recently restored and very plush Art Deco Ballroom in the heart of Bloomsbury, and it just had a great vibe from the moment you went in (albeit that the heavy handed bouncers did their best to spoil it). The crowd were, to a woman, beloved fans, so there were none of the strafes one tends to find at bigger venues, the ones who don’t seem to know why they are there, get horribly drunk and heckle and talk and generally spoil it for everyone else. As with the legendary Scala gig a few years back, there was a lot a love of love in the room, and the volume of noise was quite something.

As for the sisters, they have benefited from almost constant touring since I saw them a few months ago, and the smaller stage suited them. Some of the weaker numbers from the new album have been dropped since earlier in the year.

Both sported tears and rubies drawn onto their faces, and Bianca had drawn on her tradition Victorian-style moustache.

Sierra wore men’s long john’s and rubber wellies with the feet ripped off.

Bianca wore a hat and veil, with very very low rise jeans over big pants.

I was to be found very near the front, gazing up lovingly.

Despite this being the 4th time I have seen them live, they remain as elusive, enigmatic and contradictory as ever. Their act is playful but they maintain an air of seriousness. They come across best in smaller and more intimate venues, but engage little with the audience, yet they invite people up onto the stage until the bouncers intervene, and they are visibly moved by the warmth of the feeling in the room. And what a Bitches Brew they stir up: crotch-grabbing hip hop macho posturing is lesbianically appropriated; toy instruments, eurthymy, opera, harp, piano, imaginary trumpet and beatboxing all go into the pot, but it is not gratuitous, it works. And unlike many artists hovering around what is sometimes referred to as the freak folk scene, they have always avoided whimsy and exude cool

You can start to see CocoRosie as a knowing art project, but then they sing songs about their bastard father breaking up the marriage to their mother, and about the death of their brother. They often wear masks but you feel the songs come from the heart, the disguises allowing them to be more honest.

They seem to be channelling some shamanic, ancient and deep wisdom, but at the same time play with any patronising misconceptions that might lead one to connect this with their part Native American lineage. They are sexy and sexualised but sexually ambiguous. Woe betide anyone who tries to put them into any preconceived box.

After the show Bianca is standing opposite me as I buy my t shirt. She is covered in a film of sweat and with the intensity of the performance. There is nothing I can find to say to her, nothing worth saying. Perhaps I have might have if it had been Sierra, she seems warmer and more open, Bianca is sterner and (I imagine) more pricklish. But that’s the things. Who knows? It is inconceivable to imagine them not being CocoRosie. The documentaries and interviews on the web give the impression that they wake, inspect their hair to see if the fairies have been cutting off their locks in the night again, paint on the tears, pick up some instruments, summon a ghost or two, and start singing, and that they stay like that until bedtime. And I would hate to think that it might not be so.

Ticket trouble

2007-06-14T11:10:00.000+01:00

There is a specific frustration caused by organisational inefficiency. Its just part of the basket of psychological ailments perched wobblingly on the end of the bicycle that is modern life, deflated tyres and all.

Tickets don’t arrive in the post. Have they been nicked again by a quickfingered postie at the sorting office? Or not sent? Wrongly addressed? Computer error? Not printed yet? Sitting on someone’s desk?

So I ring the ticket office but a soft voiced girl shows complete indifference. She says that tickets are not normally sent out until a week before the event. I know this to be untrue, having just checked my collection of tickets for this venue, which covers the next 18 months, all tickets having been received by me within days of making the booking. She says that she cannot check if the tickets have been posted. She tells me to ring customer services, that they can tell me. But customer services turns out to be a recorded message telling me to ring the ticket office for tickets enquiries, or if I am ringing about access, to contact the security officer at the stage door. I shall leave the security officer until nearer the time.

There is of course nothing remarkable about such encounters. They just swim up to the shore and beach themselves in front of you, sapping your time and energy.

I reply to the sender of the e mail which confirmed my booking, but that bounces, as I knew it would. The website only offers me someone called “webeditor” so I e mail him or her, in the hope that at least I can make them waste some of their time, if only in forwarding my e mail to someone else within the organisation, someone who will probably also be the wrong person, or who will forget about it, or will try and steal my identity, or will be so inundated with all sorts of e mails that they will not realise that mine is sitting there waiting for their attention.

So I shall visit the ticket office in person, and affecting frailty, shall beg and wheeze until I achieve some resolution.

In such situations I find it best to adopt the persona of Alan Bennett: a sense of being out of one’s time and permanently baffled and befuddled normally does the trick.

Maurizio Pollini - Barbican

2007-06-13T10:25:00.000+01:00

Time to dust off that kimono again…

As I saunter down to the Barbican for the first in a series of piano recitals I shall be attending over the coming months…

It started the night I went there for the Icelandic Peer Gynt production and was struck by the excitement in the audience waiting to go and see a recital by Evgeny Kissin. I want some of that excitement.

So last night was Maurizio Pollini playing Chopin and Liszt. The Chopin half was a little flat and dull to be honest, listless you might say, but things picked up with the Liszt, especially the last tune, a sonata in B minor. There then followed a series of encores but of course I can’t tell you what they actually were, although I overheard someone mentioning Debussy. Anyway this was definitely a concert that got better as it went on, partly because the numbers were more melodic, and partly for me at any rate because mental tiredness brought with it a certain relaxation and mellowness which allowed the music to wash over me .

But what really struck me was the audience. Albeit less excited than for Kissin, two things stood out:

First was the sense of joy people emitted as they left the Hall. These were smiley happy people and they hadn’t need pills to get like that. “Oh it was wonderful” gushed strangely attractive girls all around me. This contrasted with the dowdy smelly too cool to actually enjoy themselves crowds at the gigs I normally go to.

And second was diversity. I read recently about how the English Lit school syllabus is now geared towards “equal opportunities to such an extent that there is not one English or Welsh poet in a prescribed list of poetry" so pupils are studying Carol Ann Duffy (whoever the hell she is) rather than Milton. The myth is that somehow this represents diversity and inclusiveness. But looking around the Barbican, at an event which one might have expected to represent the pinnacle of elitist conservative western high culture, gave lie to the myth. On every level – age, sex, gender, ethnicity, nationality, eccentricity of nasal discharge, this was a more varied and diverse audience than at any other event I have been to. And a happier one too.

One only hopes that one day this crowd might rise up and sweep away all the bullshit and nannyism that infects this sceptred isle.

Funny that

2007-06-11T10:35:00.000+01:00

So the Sunday Telegraph felt unable to print an article in the travel section by Stephen Berkoff about a visit to Tel Aviv without initiating a discussion about whether or not one should be boycotting Israel. It asked for contributions to its website.

So I submitted my comment, namely that it was a stupid question and wasn’t it odd that they didn’t feel it necessary to initiate that sort of discussion when writing about Russia, China etc etc. Funny that, I said.

They didn’t post my comment.

Funny that.

Murcof - Luminaire

2007-06-11T10:04:00.000+01:00

Murcof sits in front of a black curtain, staring at a black laptop. He wears black, and has black hair and a thick black goatee. This leaves only the rest of his face to look at during his performance, and it is a face that remains passive, barely moving. He might as well be made of wax.

He builds a fiercely static set, tonally very pure. What beats there are, when they come, have punch and bite, but the rhythms are languid. For the finale, a note builds like the largest church organ conceivable, a nothing, but an overpowering nothing, the audience struggling not to bow down before the new pagan gods of the sine wave.

His set lasts only 45 minutes, but it has eternity within its grasp.

Batik Dance Company – Sadler’s Wells

2007-06-10T13:42:00.000+01:00

“So if I understand this correctly, my choice for this Saturday night is between a “Jewish Facebook party” in Hampstead, and 7 Japanese lovelies dancing in their skimpies in a work about masturbation and saphic love?”

Sadler’s Wells it was then, for the Batik Dance Company’s performance of “Shoku” led by dancer and choreographer Ikuyo Kuroda. It proved to be a very physical piece, pushing the dancer’s bodies to the very limits. It seemed to be drawing connection between the physical exertions of dance and of sex, arms flailing, bodies crashing to the floor time and time again. Shoes and torches were big themes, carrying and lighting the dancers, but also doubling as sex toys, constantly disappearing and reappearing in the dancers big frilly pants. On occasion, Ikuyo Kuroda dribbled spittle onto the floor or herself. Red hooded capes became bondage strappings or face masks.

Powerful and elusive, violently sexual and possibly sexually violent, it was, all in all, a great way to spend a hot muggy evening in sub-tropical London. Maybe the Facebook party was like that too?

2007-06-08T18:35:00.001+01:00

logo / no logo

2007-06-07T20:45:00.001+01:00

A little while back, I failed to go in time to an exhibition of the designs created by Otl Aicher for the 1972 Munich Olympics. Now recognised as design classics, Aicher’s work achieved two remarkable goals.

First, in view of the historical resonances of holding the games in Munich, he ensured that the athletes portrayed were free from any identifiable nationalistic characteristics – ie they were free of ego, jingoism, and in some ways time.

Secondly he created a simple design system based on the minimal graphic detail necessary to convey meaning. He invented those little stick people you see everywhere, from toilets to pedestrian crossings to biscuits. .

Get that. He invented them. That’s what I call a legacy.

Contrast of course the disastrous 2012 logo unveiled this week. Normally when the press get all uppity about a piece of art it is a sure sign that the plebeian populist masses are flaunting their ignorance, but not this time. The contrast with Aicher’s work couldn’t be more dramatic. The 2012 logo is cluttered, messy, full of ego. Like a bad dancing dad at a bar mitzvah disco, it tries to be cool and hip and misses by an embarrassing margin. Graffiti art my arse. Somebody said in the paper (but I wish I had thought of it) that it was a broken and fragmented symbol for a broken and fragmented city.

Looking at the 2012 website just now, I was drawn to a section headed “watch a film and find out about the new brand.” (note the Toby Litt style plain English). The film starts with a fat greasy woman walking into a garden shed with an old cardboard box of rubbish. Really, I kid you not. Then she says, in that kind of plain speaking voice that actors in government infomercials use to indicate that they are real and honest people: “I don’t think I’m proud of anything in particular”. Fuck off then I shouted at my monitor as I turned the film off.

Yeah well the way its going, 2012 is going to be something else not to be proud of. Remind me to get out of the city before then.

Equus

2007-06-07T20:17:00.000+01:00

So I toddled off to see Equus. I hovered reluctantly outside as the muggy sky cleared to sunshine, feeling achy from the gym and just generally not in the mood. I feared this was one theatre trip too many, and had bad memories of reading the play in my youth. Should I try to flog my ticket?

I am therefore happy to report that it was a triumph: gripping, well acted and staged and stimulating. Perhaps the psychology underpinning the play has dated: after the unlocking of the DNA code the psychometer has swung very much from nurture to nature; but the themes of the play seemed very much contemporary: pain, religion, parenting, passion, what it means to be sane, what it means to be alive.

As I was leaving the theatre, there was a party of German girls, I’d guess early twenties, chatting away loudly in German (as is their wont) and the only comprehensible word I could make out was “sexy”. Yeah, it was, in a funny kind of way. I think because it was so intense. Richard Griffiths of course was magnificent, a real presence, maybe a tad hammy, but generally low key yet powerful. Daniel Radcliffe was fine too, but you don’t want to know about his acting do you! Well hold your horses for a sec.

Its funny how certain ideas or themes gett into the ether; here are just some of the resonances between this play and others I have reported to you on recently:

1. Mental illness as a device for exploring social issues – although Equus was written in the early 1970s, it had many thematic similarities with the more recent The Wonderful World of Dissocia, particularly the notion of what sort of a cure it is that removes the passion and energy from the patient.

2. Nudity – you’ve got to say, Daniel Radcliffe has balls, remarkably big ones I can tell you. If you ask me, he needs to take a trip round the corner from the theatre into the hinterland of Soho and get himself porned up and release some of the tension – I remember on a group trip to Israel somebody ending up having to go to hospital with ball bag pain cause of the MSB – it had come to a head, so to speak, when he went in the Dead Sea and something in the salty water triggered the pain. Talking of which, I’ve got a new porn queen heroine – she’s called Naomi, is Israeli, proud to be Jewish, the daughter of a rabbi, and very, very, very and I mean very very, filthy. Anyway enough of Harry Potter’s goblets, back to nudity sui generis. Faust, Platinov, Panthesillyarse, Michael Clark last year, everyone is getting their kit off (and I have high hopes for the piece of dance theatre I’m going to this weekend). No wonder Mademoiselle La Latte Days goes to the theatre so much. But what does it tell us. A desire for the theatre to strip away all external matter to expose the raw psychology of the characters? A desperate measure to get the punters in (£50 a ticket Equus cost me)? A restatement of western liberal ideals in the face of attack from fundamentalist religion?

3. Wild horses. Coriolanus went for pantomime style horses ie two men under a rug, but incredibly realistic so that I actually thought for a moment they were real. Equus (as in the original 1970s production I’m told) went for dancer-type actors wearing cage like horse-head masks and mini-stilts with horse shoes underneath. In the climax of the first half, little Harry Potter rides on one and the stage revolves faster and faster, with powerful kinetic force, a brilliant abstract impression of speed and power.

So that’s it for the theatre for the moment. Nowt much on that appeals until September, but don’t worry, there will be plenty of other things to tell you about.

misc

2007-05-30T11:13:00.000+01:00

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

2007-05-18T12:48:00.000+01:00

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

2007-05-09T12:39:00.000+01:00

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

2007-05-07T22:07:00.000+01:00

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

2007-05-04T17:35:00.000+01:00

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

2007-05-04T17:32:00.000+01:00

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

2007-05-02T11:05:00.000+01:00

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

2007-05-02T10:43:00.000+01:00

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.