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.

Pina Bausch – Café Müller / The Rite of Spring

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.