site-specific
Edinburgh Art Festival: A Festival woven together by the city itselfFriday, 26 August 2011
A few days visiting the Edinburgh Art Festival and the city itself becomes the encircling gallery. Under great canvases of lowering grey cloud, plunging up and down the different levels of the Old Town and the New, things unfold against the intense... Read more... |
theartsdesk MOT: The Railway Children, Waterloo StationMonday, 15 August 2011
This warm-hearted production of E Nesbit’s most famous novel premiered to glowing reviews at its site-specific venue last summer. I didn‘t catch it last year, but I doubt this swift revival is any less captivating, nor the new cast any less sure-... Read more... |
Bush Theatre: Yorkshire’s Madani Younis gets the top jobFriday, 08 July 2011
Bush watchers — a species of theatre buff with a particular interest in the rapid changes now happening to the Bush Theatre in West London — have been waiting for several weeks to see which of the various rumours are true about who will be the venue... Read more... |
Hard Times, Murrays' Mills, ManchesterThursday, 09 June 2011
Dickens wasn’t wrong – hard times they were. Around 1300 men, women and children worked at the Murrays’ Mills complex in the Ancoats area of Manchester in its mid-19th-century heyday (if you can call it that). Arrive a minute later than 7am and... Read more... |
National Theatre Wales announces its second seasonThursday, 26 May 2011
The inaugural year of National Theatre Wales included an immensely ambitious body of work which tested to the limit the definition of what a national theatre can and should be. In new venues and old, found spaces and open spaces, it staged several... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Brighton: At the Festival Where Anything GoesSunday, 15 May 2011
Persecuted Burmese freedom fighter Aung San Suu Kyi may be this year’s guest director, provoking a loose theme of "freedom of expression, liberty, and the power of the individual voice" that’s all the more powerful for her enforced absence. But a... Read more... |
The Mill - City of Dreams, Drummonds Mill, BradfordMonday, 04 April 2011
Bradford, once the worsted capital of the world, now employs fewer than 1,000 workers in the textile industry. Some of the disused mills have been transformed into tourist attractions – nearby Salts Mill has a huge collection of artwork by David... Read more... |
Honest, Queen’s Head Pub, LondonThursday, 03 March 2011
Dave is a bomb, waiting to go off. He’s dangerous because he seems so ordinary. Late-twenties, he’s nothing much to look at. He wears a suit. Works as a civil servant in some absurdly obscure government department. No girlfriend. If truth be told, a... Read more... |
Site-specific theatre goes commercialFriday, 16 July 2010Last weekend we posted a round-up of the vast array of site-specific work happening in the theatre over the summer. Most of them are shows which are so boldly experimental that they haven't much realistic hope of a commercial future. Plays for an... Read more... |
Site-Specific Theatre: theartsdesk round-upSaturday, 10 July 2010
There is no consensus about what site-specific theatre actually constitutes. Does it grow organically out of the space in which the theatre piece is performed, and can therefore be staged nowhere else? Or is it no more than any theatre piece which... Read more... |
Antony Gormley: Test Sites, White CubeFriday, 04 June 2010
Many people use that weaselly phrase about Antony Gormley, saying he “divides the critics”. For the most part this is not true: for the most part the critics loathe Gormley’s work. They suggest he is either a bad figurative sculptor masquerading as... Read more... |
Ditch, Old Vic TunnelsWednesday, 19 May 2010
Dystopia is a genre that works like a rhetorical device. Take a government policy — let’s say the war in Afghanistan — then list the bad effects that this has had on the British people, exaggerate by a factor of ten, or more, add some obscure but... Read more... |
