London
Jo Verrent
The audience comment I most want to hear during next week's Unlimited Festival is: this show has transformed my perception of disability. We got that over and over and over during the first Unlimited Festival, which ran as part of the Cultural Olympiad in 2012. And I want that again. It’s all about making people understand that disability isn’t a negative, awful experience, just a facet of life that can give you as much as it apparently appears to take away. In fact, it just gives you more.I’m senior producer for the Unlimited commissions programme, which has worked with nine disabled Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
The extraordinary beams of light shooting miles into the air from Victoria Tower Gardens may be the most viewed piece of conceptual art ever. Spectra, visible from high points miles away like Primrose Hill, is the extraordinary work of Paris-based artist and composer Ryoji Ikeda, and is produced by art facilitators Artangel. For 20 years or so, Artangel have been doing – what? Struggling to describe what they do in a few words the best I can say is that they are “purveyors of magic.” They create unusual, often poetic experiences that lift us from the mundane, from Rachel Whiteread’s Read more ...
Andy Plaice
My heart sank when Lorraine Pascale’s documentary on fostering began with her making cakes with Junior, a 10-year-old boy in care. I feared Bake Off meets Who Do You Think You Are?, but those worries quickly faded as Pascale told her extraordinary story.We know her as a television chef and best-selling cookery author, but her success is all the more remarkable when her circumstances are revealed. Born in Hackney, she was given up at birth and spent the first 18 months of her life with a foster family. Little was known about this period. One hazy photo remained. Possibly the foster mum was Read more ...
Naima Khan
If you've been rolling your eyes at the rash of articles hailing London's ever-increasing number of dry bars, allow writer-director Ché Walker to convince you of their amatory relevance. In his new musical drama, smooth-talker Klook and hard nut Vinette fall for one another over a long tall glass of carrot juice, with just the right kick of ginger. The Park Theatre's 90-seat studio space here gives us two sexy strangers who meet randomly in the grimy health club where Klook works, only to find that the two are craving a metaphorical detox. Walker, drawn once more into the American noir Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
Sprawling over the East End of London for the next thirteen days and boasting an illuminating line-up of new voices, retrospectives and debate in its 13th year, the East End Film Festival ensures no cinematic rock is left unturned with its bold programming choices.Monte Hellman’s controversial Cockfighter gets a rare outing at Red Gallery, a grand Masonic Temple is home to a weekend of macabre cinema and the opening night gala proves the festival’s dedication to championing filmmakers they believe in with the world premiere of Ross Clarke’s first feature, New Orleans-set drama, Dermaphoria. Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
Decidedly diverse in its musical offerings as ever, this year’s Field Day, which for the first time was spread over two days with the Pixies as a fitting finale, was gifted with glorious sunshine and a chipper ambience. Fresh ferocious voices breaking out and established names reaching back to their roots made for a harmonious mix of boldness and greatness.Thurston Moore’s exceptionally tight guitar skills and sparse melancholy lyrics gently weaved across the sunny afternoon breeze with the sublime sound similar to that of early Sonic Youth delivering a delightful wave of nostalgia. Meanwhile Read more ...
Aimee Cliff
Whatever “it” is, Alex Turner has it in his bones. From those first excitable live performances passed around online in the early 2000s, before Sheffield’s Arctic Monkeys rocketed to No. 1 success apparently overnight, to 2014’s triumphant Finsbury Park headlining residency, the frontman exudes charisma live. Where that once came from his disarming lyrical dexterity and comparable physical awkwardness, though, he’s now a different character entirely: one with smooth hair and smoother hips, who floats through an hour and a half set in front of a crowd of around 40,000 like a living, breathing Read more ...
Florence Hallett
John Deakin was lukewarm about his career as a photographer because his heart wasn’t in it. Really, he wanted to be a painter, and so it was in spite of himself that he became a staff photographer at Vogue in 1947, acquiring a reputation for innovative portraiture and fashion work. Vogue’s studio was dangerously close to Soho and Deakin was prey to its temptations, his alcoholism and dubious friendships with many of its most celebrated and notorious characters providing a constant distraction.The tension between Deakin’s life as a talented, salaried photographer, and his role at the heart of Read more ...
Mark Valencia
It’s safe to assume that mischievous Monsieur Poulenc would have been delighted by the juxtaposition of his joyous slice of Surrealism with Fauré’s serene masterpiece the Requiem. What his elder compatriot might have had to say is harder to imagine. Since Les Mamelles de Tirésias was conceived for the opera house and the Requiem for a place of worship they don’t even belong in the same building – and neither of them by rights in a concert hall – so to call them an odd match would be an understatement. The only obvious link between them is thematic rather than musical: the former Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
For some reason this year's telly-Baftas felt a bit flat and weary. Host Graham Norton seemed to labouring for laughs (when he wasn't moaning about his own show not winning anything), and anything resembling a surprise was thin on the ground. When Aaron Paul, Breaking Bad's Jesse Pinkman, stepped onstage to present the Comedy and Comedy Entertainment award (one of the ones Graham Norton didn't win, since it went to A League of Their Own), at least you knew B Bad was going to win something. This turned out to be the International award, which was by far the strongest category of the night Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The literal miracle in this earthily comic 1956 romance happens at the end. The deeper magic for producer-screenwriter Emeric Pressburger was the “small daily miracles” he found in its “extraordinary” Soho setting. He wrote the script in 1934, at the start of life in England as a Hungarian Jewish refugee, via France, from Germany’s newly Nazi film industry. In the two decades it took to make it, Pressburger wrote, produced and edited one of the greatest sequences in British cinema with director Michael Powell - A Matter of Life and Death, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, The Red Shoes, Read more ...
Aimee Cliff
Before Janelle Monáe even materialises at Brixton’s O2 Academy, her presence is already felt in the stagecraft. Lab-coated, bow-tied techies unsheath the instruments from their black covers, revealing a glimmering monochrome set-up in the centre of a giant white cube reminiscent of the "Q.U.E.E.N." video. Three - count ‘em, three - men see to the polishing of Monáe’s microphone. The build-up is every bit as meticulous as the stunning 90 minute set that’s to follow.When Monáe does appear, she’s wheeled onstage in a straightjacket. Across her early EPs and albums The ArchAndroid and The Read more ...