Things to do in Chichester when your…

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

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

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

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

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

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."

even more haiku-esque

vaporizer
the balloon inflates
happy days

more haiku-esque

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

haiku-esque

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

Hay Ho

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

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

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

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

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

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

a classical week

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

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

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.