Russia
Peter Culshaw
The Moscow girl punk band Pussy Riot say their impromptu performance inside Russia’s major cathedral of their song “Holy Shit” was a prayer. They were replying to the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia Kirill who called it “blasphemy”.Speaking at a liturgy in Moscow’s Deposition of the Robe Cathedral, the Patriarch condemned Pussy Riot’s actions at Christ the Saviour Cathedral as “blasphemous” saying that “the Devil has laughed at all of us.”“We have no future if we allow mocking in front of great shrines, and if some see such mocking as some sort of valour, as an expression of political Read more ...
geoff brown
Originally, this concert was to open with that mercurial wonder Martha Argerich playing an unspecified piano concerto. Then its first item became Martha Argerich not playing anything, for the good lady, almost as rare a visitor to Britain as the Man in the Moon, did what she’s famous for doing. She cancelled. Acting with award-winning panache, the Barbican then found a substitute artist who’s recently become even rarer, the violinist Maxim Vengerov. Known for his golden tone, charisma and fire, Vengerov last performed in Britain with his violin in 2007: the year of his serious shoulder Read more ...
Ismene Brown
No choreographer so divides American and British critics as Russia's only international dancemaker, Boris Eifman. He's "an amazing magician of the theatre", according to the late, great US critic Clive Barnes. He "flaunts all the worst clichés of psycho-sexo-bio-dance-drama with casual pride," according to the masterly New York Times critic Alastair Macaulay. Both views come from Englishmen working in America, hence a contradictory weathervane as to how his ballets will be received in Britain on this tour. Whichever side one comes down on (and one does, one does) what is undoubtedly Read more ...
geoff brown
For more than 10 years now I have been waiting in vain for the pianist Evgeny Kissin to shatter the stereotyped image built around him by music critics who haven’t always liked what they’ve heard. You know the kind of thing: Kissin the visitor from outer space, the strange performer who bows to the audience like a priest at a religious rite, displays plenty of peerless technique, but after decades cocooned and fêted on the virtuoso circuit appears too often emotionally remote, as if his feelings had been locked in his dressing-room fridge or maybe a strongbox in Siberia.I recognise much of Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
What could be more romantic than watching and listening to singers born on Valentine's Day rhapsodising about L.O.V.E.? We have love songs on video from Russia, Japan, Tunisia, America and the Czech Republic. Or if not love exactly, then how about saxist Maceo Parker (born 14 February 1943), best known for his work with James Brown, simply "needing somebody to make it funky with right now"? Take it away, Mr Parker... 14 February 1961: Pop music star Latifa Arfaoui was born in Manouba, in Tunisia. Her biography on her website states that she was "born into a small white house like all Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
American documentary directors David Redmon and Ashley Sabin have made a reputation with stories that study, as they describe it, “variations of truth and falseness”. Their latest, Girl Model, is just that, in spades. It tells the story of 13-year-old Russian teenage would-be model Nadya, plucked from the talent contests of Siberia to work in the potentially lucrative Japanese fashion market, where the premium is on youth.That strong clash of cultures is enhanced by a distinction between sheer naivety - in Nadya’s expectations of what she will be doing - and the reality of an industry in Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Sergei Polunin’s flight this week from the Royal Ballet just as he rises to the pinnacle made last night's Sadler's Wells show a very hot ticket for those who wanted to catch his guest appearance in it. But the evening was also a proclamation that this isn’t the first time that company has mislaid one of its finer talents. Ivan Putrov, who masterminded it, was also a splendid young principal who lost his compass inside Covent Garden, and last year sheared off to join the contemporary dance world.For Men in Motion he invited Polunin to join him and five others in a male-centred programme that Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“Who is Mr Putin?” That was the question being bandied about by journalists and Kremlin watchers in the months after Boris Yeltsin’s out-of-the-blue New Year’s Eve 1999 resignation. Vladimir Putin, ex-KGB operative in East Germany, was prominent in the St Petersburg city administration through the early 1990s; called to Moscow in 1996, he held various Kremlin jobs, before being appointed head of the FSB (the KGB’s successor) in July 1998, and in August 1999 Russia’s prime minister. His 2000 victory in presidential elections came as little surprise, and his assertive, populist tactics ensured Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It took a relatively little-noticed television documentary, Vlad’s Army, broadcast in Channel 4’s Unreported World strand to confirm that theartsdesk has a readership in Russia. Peter Oborne’s film (the presenter pictured below) caught the pro-Kremlin youth movement, the Nashi, with its defences down, and the result depicted, no holds barred, how politics works there today. Recent events hint, somewhat unexpectedly, that political change in the country is in the air; at the least what had seemed a depressingly predictable certainty before December’s elections now at least now looks up for Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Slava’s Snowshow is a Christmas package you don’t want to have unwrapped for you by someone else's description - it’s a fantastical, childlike, theatrical experience that for many is among the most profoundly delighting of their theatre-going experience, for others an empty whimsy. It's a show of mime, clowning and coups de théâtre, stunningly conceived on the twin themes of snow and the gruelling Russian winters outdoors, where street cleaners live out their lives, vagrants of an outcast kind of peculiarity and optimistic imagination, where brooms and bins are constants in their lives, where Read more ...
theartsdesk
Over the year we have reviewed many a new film and television drama in theartsdesk's Disc of the Day slot. As our series of DVD recommendations comes round to the movies, we have chosen to concentrate not on individual titles but box sets. For completists we suggest everything from Harry Potter to Ken Loach, The Avengers to Tarkovsky. If you want more Chaplin or Eisenstein in your life, here, too, is a good place to start. These collections and collations are a worthwhile investment for serious and playful fans of film and drama alike. The great thing about a box set - be it three discs of Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Cranes Are Flying begins with the literal rush of young love, as Boris and Veronica skip down a street, giddy with endorphins. They could be infatuated young Americans in the rock’n’roll year of its making, 1957. But this is Moscow in 1941, as a radio announces Russia is at war, and Boris (Alexei Batalov) volunteers for the front. The chaotic crush of women saying goodbye to men, in which Veronica (Tatiana Samoilova) can’t quite reach him, heartbreakingly brings home war’s human cost, as do later scenes of Moscow’s equivalent to VE Day – another visceral spectacle of overwhelming emotion. Read more ...