Africa
james.woodall
Theatre director Peter Brook is back in London. Brightly, eloquently, he's promoting his new show, in English (most of his work since the 1970s has been in French), currently running at the Barbican: entitled Eleven and Twelve, it's a dense chamber piece exploring a religious dispute in early 20th-century Mali. Quiet, sensitively investigative of an unknown strand of north African faith, it will enlighten some and bore others. Classic Brook?Well, certainly not redolent of the firebrand deconstructor of the 1960s, who imported an alarming thing called Theatre of Cruelty into mainstream British Read more ...
hilary.whitney
A new play by David Greig opens at the Hampstead Theatre for the Royal Shakespeare Company next week. A theatre director as well as playwright, Greig (b. 1969) is one of the most prolific and artistically ambitious playwrights of his generation and a key figure in the current burgeoning of Scottish theatre. In addition to an extraordinarily diverse range of plays such as Europe (Traverse Theatre, 1994), The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union (Tron Theatre, 1999) and Damascus (Edinburgh International Festival, 2009), his work includes Read more ...
mark.hudson
Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic is without doubt one of the year’s most enterprising and original exhibitions. Attempting to trace the impact on art of black cultures from around the Atlantic – in Africa, Europe and the Americas – from the early 20th century to today, it takes on a massive swathe of culture and experience. Or perhaps that should be several massive swathes. Beginning with the first earnest gropings towards a black modern style in inter-war Harlem and Brazil, the exhibition moves through Africa’s rediscovery of its own culture in the Negritude movement of the Read more ...
sue.steward
Dazzling and surprising, this Tate Britain retrospective by the 1998 Turner Prizewinner Chris Ofili should erase memories of the media sniping about him making money from using the so-called "gimmick" of incorporating elephant turds in his paintings. It will also confirm his status as one of the greatest contemporary British artists.A chronological journey through his relatively brief career charted from the early 1990s, the exhibition leads visitors along his painting time-line into three final rooms devoted to work produced since he moved to Trinidad in 2005. Astonishingly different and Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Marisa dos Reis Nunes (b. 1973) is an African-Portuguese singing superstar whose music has deep roots in fado, Portugal’s dark-blue, intensely poetic national music, but which over the course of five albums has gradually taken on inflections of jazz, blues and bossa nova. Born in Mozambique to an African mother and a Portuguese father, Mariza (like all good divas she has long since dispensed with meddlesome surname, converting along the way the soft S in her forename to a zippy Z) grew up in Lisbon, where she fell in love with fado (it translates as “fate”), the starkly melancholic strain of Read more ...
sheila.johnston
He thought he owned his property - he had the title deeds to it, after all - but suddenly the ground shifted under his feet and there came an aggressive bid to snatch his home away. His savings became worthless in the economic chaos; the social order was crumbling. The nightmare has become all too familiar over the last 18 months. But in Mike Campbell's case there was a further cruel turn of the screw: he lived in Zimbabwe. Recently named Best British Documentary of 2009 and shortlisted for an Oscar, this film tells the remarkable story of how Campbell singlehandedly took Robert Mugabe to an Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It always used to be said that boarding school prepares you for every hardship. Whether that includes prison in one of the most impenitent dictatorships in Africa is not a question that was put to Simon Mann in last night’s edition of Storyville. Mann, still incarcerated when the BBC caught up with him, was awaiting a pardon from President Teodoro Obiang, the very potentate he had attempted to topple five years earlier. Never mind that they like to keep a battery and electrodes handy for interrogations, Mann wasn’t about to slag off the great man’s excellent hospitality. Goodness, Eton really Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The stage of the Barbican is alive with black dudes in wheelchairs going bonkers. It's an extraordinary spectacle. To rocketing afro-funk, backed by a drum-kit of boxes and bells, Staff Benda Bilili's frontmen are rolling their chairs back and forth. Two of them face each other and perform loosely synchronized hand dances, another wearing an ecstatic grin clambers out of his wheelchair.Despite having legs shrivelled by polio to almost nothing, he scuttles round the stage, his arms agile, his movements a surreal breakdance. The audience claps wildly, pockets of dancing breaking out at the Read more ...
theartsdesk
An extensive selection is shown here of the work of Romuald Hazoumé, the Benin contemporary artist whose iconic masks made from petrol canisters dumped around his poverty-stricken homeland of Benin launched his international career. A major installation is owned by the British Museum, other pieces have been exhibited in the Saatchi and Hayward Galleries. Read the article on him by Sue Steward. Click on a picture to enter each section.Masks
(Photos Jonathan Greet. Images courtesy October Gallery, London)
Sénégauloise, 2009, Found objects, 33 x 22 x 25cm. .
La Meré Cotivet, 2001, Found Read more ...
ryan.gilbey
The raucous young lads swaggering down the streets of a charred, deserted town could be the Lost Boys in an African production of Peter Pan. Some are in their late teens, others are no older than 10 or 11, but most are decked out in fancy-dress garb and accoutrements which suggest a recent dip in the dressing-up box.One is sporting a Santa Claus hat, another a pair of wings; there is a crash helmet, beads, a neon-red wig. These are child soldiers in an unspecified modern African country, and they are wearing whatever they have managed to steal from their victims as they’ve rampaged from one Read more ...
sue.steward
Jillian Edelstein, the distinguished photographer, is joining theartsdesk. She grew up in Cape Town and in 1985 moved to London, where within a year she had won the Kodak UK Young Photographer of the Year award. It was to be the first of many such accolades. She has since established a reputation as one of the leading portrait photographers of the age, her work appearing widely in this country but also for American publications including The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue and Interview.Between 1996 and 2002 she documented the proceedings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
They played their first concert in 1969, and 40 years later the TP Orchestre Poly Rythmo de Cotonou, to give them their full name, had their UK debut last night at the Barbican as part of their first European tour. They are the latest expression of a growing cult of classic bands who hit their peak in 1970s Africa. The music of Nigeria’s Fela Kuti has never been more popular, strange jazz from 1970s Addis Ababa has been selling impressively on the Ethiopiques series of records, while Senegal’s Orchestre Baobab have reformed to great acclaim.Three cult albums, culled from a repertory of over Read more ...