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Ismene Brown
Port Talbot’s staging of The Passion with Michael Sheen won the highest accolade at the Theatre Management Association Awards yesterday, which honour the best of work touring Britain beyond London during the 2010-11 season.The adventurous Welsh community production, a National Theatre Wales/Wild Works collaboration put on over three days last Eastertide, won the Best Director gong for Sheen and co-director Bill Mitchell. Sheen told the awards lunch at Banqueting House, Whitehall: “This was the most meaningful and powerful experience of my life. I know this is the best thing that will ever Read more ...
Ismene Brown
As great changes happen in the British arts economy, what lies ahead for dance? What are the questions to ask about what we will watch in future, what we will create for others to see, what we will perform, what we will pay for?theartsdesk and the national dance lobby organisation Dance UK bring together seven leading arts figures for a unique and pioneering live debate on Friday, 4 November at 1.15pm at The Riflemaker Gallery in Soho. The event will be filmed and streamed on theartsdesk. UPDATE: Find the report and film of the debate here.The panel will address the crucial issues that Read more ...
judith.flanders
There’s a lot of Soviet art about at the moment – the excellent show that opens this Saturday at the Royal Academy has Constructivist and Suprematist paintings and drawings loaned by the George Costakis Collection in Thessaloniki. Now, at Annely Juda, a smaller, but no less excellent, show highlights one single Malevich painting, Black Square (main picture, above), a tiny gem of the early 20th century, also from the Costakis Collection, together with a series of Malevich’s working drawings.The painting is only 17 x 24cm, not much bigger than a couple of postcards, but what a punch it packs. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
New Order’s “Blue Monday” might be the bestselling 12” single ever. It might not be. Either way, Factory Records released it on the 12” format only and it was given dry runs by club DJs. Although Factory had an overriding visual aesthetic, it was a wilful label with little musical coherence and no set way of doing things. Dance music, though, was central to Factory, and the new compilation Fac.Dance celebrates that in a way that was impossible in the scattershot Eighties.Fac.Dance collects 24 tracks issued between 1980 and 1987. Most were originally heard on 12” singles and were either Read more ...
Mary Mazzilli
Beijing International Fringe Festival, virtually unheard of in the UK, closed last Sunday after three weeks’ showcasing the best talent in drama, musical theatre, dance and experimental theatre in China. It was conceived in 2008 as a small local festival using university performance spaces to give voice to young directors and young talent. Back then it comprised a mere 10 productions. This year there were 54 productions in 11 venues around Beijing. They ranged from drama and physical theatre to dance and opera; a few workshops and stage readings were also included in the programme. It Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Few comedy writers can claim to have extracted so much mirth from the slightly foxed fabric of British life as David Croft, who (with his writing partner Jimmy Perry) created It Ain't Half Hot Mum, Hi-de-Hi! and, above all, Dad's Army. Though the latter initially fell foul of BBC One's controller Paul Fox, who protested that "you cannot take the mickey out of Britain's finest hour", its ineffably absurd and eccentric portrait of the Home Guard in wartime Walmington-on-Sea proved irresistible to millions of viewers. The show originally ran from 1968-1977, but Captain Mainwaring, Private Pike, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
By 1977, disco was a cliché to be mocked. But a few years earlier, before its ubiquity, disco was a liberating music uniting minorities on the dance floor. Funk, too, became a cliché, little more than a reductive musical cypher. Two new reissues celebrate these genres when both were still vital, still able to surprise. Disco Gold: Scepter Records & The Birth of Disco is exactly what its title says it is, while Darondo’s Listen to My Song: The Music City Sessions collects A-grade funk that had languished in the vaults until now.Disco wasn’t just the place to dance, but the music, too: a Read more ...
mark.hudson
Hard on the heels of the death of Lucian Freud comes the departure of another British art great, an artist who was Freud’s exact contemporary but who seems to belong in a different aesthetic universe – Richard Hamilton. While he was the more influential of the two, by some distance, Hamilton was never a contender for that nonsensical soubriquet "Britain’s greatest living artist". His work was too challenging, too difficult to pin down and it never told Britain anything it wanted to hear about itself.Born into a working-class London family, Hamilton left school without qualifications, becoming Read more ...
joe.muggs
At the start of September, the fourth Outlook Festival takes place in a 19th-century fort on the Croatian coast. Already this festival has become a vital point in the calendar for those involved with dubstep, grime and other UK underground scenes – not only a jolly in the sun (“dubstep's Ibiza”), but the one time in the year when everyone involved takes a break from international touring and comes together in the same place, a time to compare notes and take stock of the progress. Its British organisers make even bigger claims for it, though: they see it as drawing together decades' worth of “ Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
With theartsdesk readers still reeling from the demise of Italianate sleuthing series Zen, now comes news of the axing of glossy MI5 drama Spooks. The BBC has announced that the show's 10th series, starting next month, will be its last, though it seems the decision to pull the plug was taken by production company Kudos rather than by the Corporation."We didn't want to get to the point where the BBC said we really don't want another one," said executive producer Jane Featherstone. "We wanted to kill it off in its prime."
Spooks was originally launched in the wake of the 9/11 attacks in New Read more ...
alice.vincent
The round and the curtain are two of theatre’s oldest pieces of stagecraft. Yet architect and design legend Ron Arad has reinvented both in celebration of the Camden Roundhouse’s fifth birthday. The north London venue, which was transformed from a redundant 19th-century railway turntable shed into a famed music venue in the Sixties, was revamped in 2006 and has since become a hub of creative support for young and disadvantaged people in the area. Echoing these sentiments, Arad’s Curtain Call has been created with accessibility and opportunity at its core to try and bring art to the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
We are still acknowledging our 21st-century debts to the energy, curiosity, determination and passion for discovery of a host of Victorian polymaths, and here is another. Sir Charles Eastlake (1793-1865) was a painter, scholar, author, collector and translator – fluent in German, French, Italian – and the first director of the National Gallery, rising above disputes with trustees and the government to set the scene for the role it plays today.A small exhibition in Room 1 shows us Sir Charles’s travel diaries and notes, his annotated guidebook to the art collections of Venice and a half-dozen Read more ...