mon 13/01/2025

Israel

The Holy Rosenbergs, National Theatre

Home truths have a unique power to grab at your entrails and tear at your peace of mind. But so often, in so many families, the truth remains too painful to acknowledge, and togetherness is bought by means of keeping secrets. And, of course, in any...

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Douglas Gordon: K.364

'The journey seems agonisingly slow, interspersed as it is by desultory, Impressionistic fragments'

After writing about a recent survey of French artist Philippe Parreno at the Serpentine Gallery last year, I found myself wondering about his collaboration with the Scottish artist Douglas Gordon. In 2006 the two artists made the acclaimed film...

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Hawaii Five-O, Sky1/ The Promise, Channel 4

They've remade everything else, so what took them so long to get around to Hawaii Five-0? Maybe the exotic Hawaiian locations of JJ Abrams's Lost helped to trigger flashbacks of Steve McGarrett & co, which would explain why Abrams's...

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Miral

With a script co-written by the Palestinian journalist Rula Jebreal, based on her 2004 book of the same title, Miral follows the interconnected lives of four women caught up in the Arab-Israeli conflict. It’s a sprawling, epic affair, directed by...

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Leonard Cohen: Bird on a Wire, BBC Four

The renaissance enjoyed by Leonard Cohen over the past few years is not only thoroughly welcome and entirely justified, but also partly a testament to the strange and powerful alchemy that sometimes occurs when the defiantly high-brow is swallowed...

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Emanuel Gat Dance, Sadler's Wells/ Henri Oguike Dance, Touring

Emanuel Gat's 'Winter Variations': 'The movement is the problem'

How do young modern choreographers engage with their audience? With references from the street - motion that the audience knows and recognises? With musical expressiveness? With the development of a technical style that has a language of its own?...

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Hofesh Shechter's Political Mother, Sadler's Wells

In the middle of the pulverisingly loud and utterly thrilling experience that is Hofesh Shechter’s new production Political Mother, I wished suddenly that all dancers could come and see this piece, see what clarion theatre dance can be. If the...

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The Art of Touch/ Rainforest/ A Linha Curva, Rambert, Sadler's Wells

Pieter Symonds and Jonathan Goddard in 'Rainforest': 'stirring themselves amid the LSD landscape of silver floating pillows'

There are occasionally pieces of dance that you just want not to have to scribble notes about, just to watch and enjoy through your senses, not perming it all through the verbal brain. Siobhan Davies’s The Art of Touch is one of those, and when her...

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I Am a Warehouse, Newhaven Fort, Brighton Festival Fringe

Anna-Maria Nabirye taking on the role of the bombed Gaza warehouse

Just say "Gaza" and it's like throwing a bombshell marked "Darwin" in among the Creationists. Only in this case it's not always clear who the antagonists might be. Several seemingly liberal theatre venues in Israel, where this project originated as...

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the Artes Mundi Award goes to...

Yael Bartana accepting her award

Great excitement at the Artes Mundi Awards in Cardiff’s National Museum last night as the UK’s largest cash prize for the winner of any UK contemporary art competition - a staggering £40,000 - was presented to the Israeli artist Yael Bartana. Two...

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Iram: Shalom Aleichem's shtetl life comes to London

`Holy and not so holy; superstitious, avaricious, ambitious, loving and cruel': the vanished Jews of Iram

Tonight at the Barbican's Pit, kicking off a run of ten performances, a rather unusual piece of theatre opens. It's not a big play, it probably won't make great waves and it does involve reading surtitles. Called Iram, it's an Israeli adaptation, in...

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Lebanon

Monstrous apparition: an Israeli tank invades Lebanon

A field of sunflowers hang their heads, as though in shame or sorrow, to the deep thrum of a single chord in the film's opening shot, at once beautiful and threatening. But that is about the only breath of fresh air in the whole of the movie. Set...

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