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theartsdesk
Matthew Bourne, creator of the famous male swans of his modern reinvention of Swan Lake, is to launch the nationwide screening of a spectacular new 3D film of his creation, along with a live Q&A - and we have free tickets to be won for this exclusive event. UPDATE: Competition now expired.Swan Lake will be given its premiere 3D screening on Monday 14 May, followed by the Q&A session with Bourne, the film's director Ross McGibbon and the producer Fiona Morris. The session, held at the Curzon Soho, 99 Shaftesbury Avenue, London W1D 5DY, will be chaired by theartsdesk's Ismene Brown.The Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Things didn’t go well for Eva Perons past and present at this morning’s announcement from New York of the nominations for Broadway’s 2012 Tony Awards, honouring the best of the 2011/12 theatre season, and Richard Bean will surely be wondering how it is that critics’ darling One Man, Two Guvnors failed to get a Best Play nod while nonetheless scooping up seven mentions in other categories – among the highest for a non-musical. But there will be general rejoicing in the onward Broadway march of both James Corden and his wild-eyed colleague Tom Edden, who have been nominated for virtually Read more ...
Ismene Brown
A new publicly funded UK web channel for performing arts opens tomorrow morning, preparing for a major launch this weekend streaming top international streetdancers to the web audience and publishing John Peel's notes on his record collection. The channel, called The Space, is funded by the Arts Council England in partnership with the BBC, and will run for six months over and through the Olympics period as an on-demand channel to put performance out via smartphones, tablets and computers.Described as an experimental digital arts channel and "communal playground", The Space clearly hopes to Read more ...
ash.smyth
There’s something in the water at the commissioning editors’ local, I think, resulting, of late, in a rash of rather good arts-n-culture biopics. This week, it was the turn of Roald Dahl, the Big Friendly Giant who made an absolute shit-load of cash telling really not-very-bedtime stories to young children.Our host for the evening – the channelling medium, more accurately – was David Walliams, comedian, campo supremo, and sometime quaffer of the Thames (oh, and he may have mentioned something about writing children’s books of his own). Walliams is not a world-beating comic talent, and Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The full programme is announced today for the London 2012 Festival, from 21 June-9 September, celebrating the London 2012 Olympics and Paralympics.Among more than 25,000 artists from all 204 participating nations, star names include theatre stars Cate Blanchett, Alan Ayckbourn, Mike Leigh and Julie Walters, musicians Damon Albarn, Daniel Barenboim, Gustavo Dudamel, Gilberto Gil, Zakir Hussain, Yoko Ono, Simon Rattle, Rihanna and Scissor Sisters, visual artists Ai Wei Wei, Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst and Anish Kapoor, and TV characters Stephen Fry, Wallace and Gromit and Dr Who.More than 10 Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Gravenhurst is Nick Talbot, a Bristolian multi-instrumentalist, producer and songwriter who recently completed his sixth album, The Ghost in Daylight. Ahead of its release on Warp Records next week theartsdesk premieres the unsettling film made for its lead single “The Prize”. Directed by Jenny Coan, Talbot says the video “suggests a journey towards an unknown destination”.The pairing of Gravenshurst with Coan makes sense. Both a film archive curator and filmmaker, the director has worked with Damien Hirst, Adam Curtis, Julian Temple and the Victoria & Albert Museum to make films Read more ...
theartsdesk
Southbank Centre’s current season has included weekends devoted to three contemporary giants: Pierre Boulez, Conlon Nancarrow and George Benjamin. But it closes with a festival devoted to not to one contemporary composer but 20. The New Music 20x12 weekend, initiated by the PRS for Music Foundation, is a Olympic celebration of the range and diversity of new British composition. Indeed, the only thing all 20 pieces will have in common is that – you’ve guessed it - they will last 12 minutes.Performances will take place all over the Southbank Centre, and 14 of them will be freeSome of Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Ballerina Tamara Rojo, director-designate of English National Ballet, is making waves even before she takes up her position in September. Next Monday she is a keynote speaker at a day of events at the Royal Society of Medicine launching the first-ever NHS treatment centre for injured dancers and rejecting the pressure for extreme thinness in performers.The all-day event will field a large number of speakers from both the performance and treatment sides. Rojo last week declared after the announcement of her appointment, "I have never been thin and I want for myself and for others to have long Read more ...
Jasper Rees
"Shakespeare’s Coming Home," boasts the strapline of a highly ambitious strand of London 2012’s Cultural Olympiad. Between now and 9 June, 37 productions of the complete canon by Shakespeare (with apologies to Two Noble Kinsmen fans) will be seen at Shakespeare’s Globe by 37 different theatre companies from all over the world. Hence the catchy title, Globe to Globe, which forms only a part of a World Shakespeare Festival continuing until September and taking place all over England and Wales, from Stratford-upon-Avon to the National Eisteddfod.But the whole thing is starting this weekend at Read more ...
ash.smyth
Next week sees the release of Shimon Peres, the second instalment in Spirit Level Film’s The Price of Kings series. A president of Israel who refers to leadership as “not a very happy engagement,” a Nobel Peace Prize-winner who says he has never slept easy, Peres is about as good a subject for a political doco as you’re likely to get. He’s the world’s oldest elected head of state (his political career having begun in the early Fifties!) and the only Israeli PM (two-and-a-half times) to have made it to the top step in their political pantheon. Most famously, though, he shares his Nobel laurels Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There'll be no avoiding Chariots of Fire this summer. The Olympics being shortly upon us, Hampstead Theatre are soon to launch a stage verison of the Oscar-winning 1981 film. The success of Hugh Hudson's epic account of the British athletes at the 1924 Olympiad in Paris famously prompted scriptwriter Colin Welland to yell from the Academy Award podium, "The British are coming!" As the British film industry went on to collapse in on itself throughout the 1980s, it turns out he was largely wrong about that. But 30 years on, Chariots is having its moment again.There is a general air of doom in Read more ...