Features
Florence Hallett
With a raft of high-quality digital effects available, real stunts might seem a little old-fashioned. In truth, the art of the stunt is alive and well: according to veteran performer Tracy Caudle, not only is it often cheaper to film the real thing, but “a computerised fall never looks quite right.” She has filmed scenes for TV and film, and with credits including Skyfall, Shaun of the Dead, Midsomer Murders and Doctor Who, chances are you’ve seen her fall to her death, crash a car or come to grisly grief one way or another, many times over.Read the full article about Tracy Caudle on the site Read more ...
Richard Bratby
The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra's appointment of the Lithuanian conductor Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla as its new Music Director won’t have surprised many concertgoers in Birmingham – or indeed regular readers of theartsdesk. The post has been vacant since Andris Nelsons’ premature departure in summer 2015, and the last few months in Birmingham have seen a string of concerts clearly intended as thinly-disguised auditions for conductors of various ages and nationalities.But the buzz that developed after Gražinytė-Tyla’s short-notice CBSO debut last July was hard to ignore in Birmingham, and Read more ...
Matthew Romain
Za’atari set a precedent. Our performance in the Syrian refugee camp in Jordan became a template for how to perform Hamlet in every nation in the world – in a world that rendered travel to Syria, Yemen, Libya and Central African Republic out of the question. And it paved the way for our most ad hoc and unconventional performance yet.The terrible fighting in Central African Republic (C.A.R.) meant that even towns along Cameroon’s eastern border were too volatile for us to visit. But in the small Cameroonian village of Mandjou, a couple of hours’ drive from C.A.R., a large portion of Central Read more ...
Kelly Grovier
The back cover of my book makes a big claim. “This book dares”, it says, “to predict the 100 most significant works of art made since the 1990s.” Although the tagline is an entirely accurate description of what I attempt to accomplish in my study of contemporary art, the phrase “dares to predict” has always made me a little anxious. It seems to suggest that the act of forecasting or foreseeing is deliberately provocative, defiant, or even risky.The truth is, ours is The Age of Prediction. Every time we grab for our smartphones to tap out a text message to a friend, and everytime we click onto Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The nature of Europe, its administration, institutions and its porousness are hot topics. Sectors of Britain’s media and political class hyperventilate over trumped-up concerns while real issues which are just about impossible to address remain unresolved. In this climate, the European Border Breakers Awards are ripe for misinterpretation. Instead of being for those devising the shrewdest ways to slip in and out of countries, they are an annual European Union-sponsored award presented to pop musicians achieving success beyond their own borders.There are rules in this contest, one which no one Read more ...
Hugh Pearman
“He lives in Woolwich and Warsaw”. From which author note you might conclude that Owen Hatherley, author of The Ministry of Nostalgia, is not your ordinary kind of UK critic, comfortably ensconced (usually) in North or fashionable East London. Fashion has always passed Woolwich, if not Warsaw, by, though Hatherley himself is quietly stylish, somewhat in the manner of his hero Jarvis Cocker. Can one extrapolate a whiff of left-puritanism from this alliterative choice of abode? Perhaps, but also a romanticism. Hatherley is of Communist stock, and knows that his previous published laments for Read more ...
theartsdesk
When sorrows come they come not in single spies. It is a bad week to be 69. Hard on the heels of David Bowie's death from cancer comes Alan Rickman's. He was an actor who radiated a sinful allure that first gave theatregoers the hot flushes back in 1985 when he played the Vicomte de Valmont in Christopher Hampton's Les Liaisons Dangereues. His co-star was Lindsay Duncan with whom he went on to share other highlights on stage: Private Lives in the West End and on Broadway, John Gabriel Borkman at the Abbey in Dublin.He had a late start as a star. His Hamlet came at the age of 47, followed by Read more ...
theartsdesk
David Nice writes: 2016 began by ringing in the new with concerts by the ever-astonishing National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, and continued by ringing out the old-new with funeral bells on the news of Pierre Boulez’s death at the age of 90. Tributes began pouring in from all quarters, including a very pithy one from an old university friend, whom I remember in the early 1980s playing a very young Simon Rattle’s 1977 recording of The Rite of Spring with the NYO and regaling us with stories of how Boulez turned that interpretation on its head within weeks.Other memorials revealed that Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In 1994 the art magazine Modern Painters invited fresh blood onto its editorial board. The new intake included a novelist, William Boyd, and a rock star, David Bowie. "That’s how I got to know him," says Boyd. "We’d sit at the table with all these art critics and art experts feeling like new boys slightly having to prove ourselves. He interviewed Balthus, he interviewed Tracey Emin. He wrote for the magazine effectively."But there was another contribution made by Bowie (who was privately a painter, collector and autodidactic connoisseur), and as a story it was still running four years ago. In Read more ...
theartsdesk
If each man's death diminishes us, we're all about a foot shorter today. When Elvis Presley died, his manager Colonel Tom Parker said "this won't change anything!", and he promptly set about ensuring his client's immortality by turning him into a production line of merchandise and memorabilia. This won't happen to David Bowie, because he had already seized control of his own myth. It will continue to be felt indefinitely in his influence on music, video, art and the the nature of stardom itself.Anyone who thought Bowie had made his last big artistic statement will have been confounded by the Read more ...
Joe Muggs
He knew.18 months of dealing with cancer, and rather than withdraw and rest – as he'd done before – David Bowie knuckled down made a record as intense and disturbing as anything he's done before. The Next Day was a worthy return to the fray but Blackstar... Even before we heard the terrible news, just taken on its own merits, Blackstar was something else. And now, knowing that he knew, it's absolutely fearsome in its confrontation with death.I know something is very wrongThe pulse returns the prodigal sonsThe blackout hearts, the flowered newsWith skull designs upon my shoes(“Can't Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
So the feasibility study for the new concert hall – The Centre for Music – has finally surfaced, a little later than planned. It’s being greeted, generally speaking, as if it’s to be the next London Olympics. “A global beacon,” declares the Evening Standard... Nicholas Hytner (he who said that building the Southbank Centre extension would spoil the view from his National Theatre) compares it to Tate Modern, which he says enlarged audiences for other visual arts rather than taking them away. This should, he says, be “a Tate Modern for music”.Having written more times than I can count that it’s Read more ...