Features
elaine.lipworth
B B King was the greatest blues guitarist of the age. Many contemporary rockers credit him as a formidable inspiration, from Mick Jagger to Eric Clapton to Bono. But when I met him in 2006, the then 83-year-old musician had a different perspective on his ability. "I don't think it's true," he says with a shrug. "A lot of kids tease me when they see me, they start to bow. I'm not trying to stop them. I think I'm a pretty good musician, I don't think I'm the best, that's all. I just do what I do my way."When I point out that he's often hailed as the second-most gifted guitarist of all time, Read more ...
graham.rickson
Composer Gavin Higgins and choreographer Mark Baldwin’s Dark Arteries is billed by Rambert as “the world’s first brass band dance work” and has its premiere this week at Sadler’s Wells. Higgins was born into a family of brass players in the Forest of Dean, later studying at Chetham’s School and the Royal Northern College. He spoke to theartsdesk in between rehearsals last week.GRAHAM RICKSON: How important was music-making when you were growing up?GAVIN HIGGINS: It was part of my life. Literally everyone in my family was in the local brass band. Of my two grandads, one conducted and the other Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The great Russian ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, renowned for her deathless Dying Swan and a performing career that lasted more than 60 years, died suddenly of a heart attack at home in Munich at the weekend, aged 89.To the West she epitomised the Bolshoi ballerina in style, fierily expressive, virtuosic, larger than life, but she was also an unclassifiable individualist who challenged Soviet norms.Her longevity was legendary. Dismissed from the Bolshoi aged 65, she simply carried on dancing on pointe, even longer than the tireless Margot Fonteyn and her Cuban counterpart, Alicia Alonso (who at Read more ...
theartsdesk
Basketball doesn’t often stray onto the arts pages. Cinema pays the occasional visit. White Men Can’t Jump starred Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson as a pair of slamdunking hustlers. Hoop Dreams followed two inner-city college kids in Chicago as they tried to turn pro. The hero of Almodovar’s Live Flesh was a wheelchair-bound basketball player embodied by Javier Bardem. But what about theatre?A bouncing ball is an unruly prop, so basketball (like other ball games) tends not to trespass onto the stage. A new play by spoken word artist Inua Ellams changes all that. The Spalding Suite explores Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Falling, released in cinemas this week, charts the events surrounding an epidemic of fainting among pupils of a girls' school in the late 1960s. The trigger appears to be the end of the friendship between the intense Lydia and the outgoing Abbie. Much in the dream-like film is unexplained. Abbie’s difficult home life is perhaps a contributing factor, as may be the institution’s disconnection from the liberal world evolving beyond the school’s gates.The first major fiction film by director Carol Morley – best known for her affecting, evocative documentary Dreams of a Life – features Read more ...
Jonathan Lewis
A Level Playing Field is the first play in my trilogy Education Education Education. The trilogy is my response to the black cloud of exams which has arrived in our household every spring for the last nine years – just as the sun was beginning to shine.It is my response to the maniacal devotion to testing and prescriptive teaching in our schools, in which exams are not just a diagnostic part of learning but the sine qua non of an education based on conformity and compliance.The first of the plays is an attempt to present the A-level experience from the students’ point of view. The second is Read more ...
David Nice
Sing, dance, breathe: those are the three imperatives for successful Bach performance, and three superlative interpretations at the Thuringia Bach Festival glorified them in excelsis. Frankly, I would have thrilled even to a merely good performance of the B minor Mass given its location in Eisenach’s Georgenkirche, which is to Bach lovers what Bethlehem is to Christians (not that many folk can't be both; and besides, can there really be blasphemy when it comes to the ultimate genius among composers, human as he undeniably was?).There, among the instrumentalists of Prague’s Collegium 1704, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Squarepusher, AKA Tom Jenkinson (b. 1975) is a groundbreaking electronic musician. Growing up in Essex, he first came to prominence in the mid-Nineties alongside Aphex Twin, with whom he worked extensively, amid a milieu of post-rave experimentalists exploring the wilder fringes of club-based sounds. Signing to Warp Records in 1995 he has maintained a position at the forefront of electronica, releasing 16 albums, the latest being Damogen Furies. His output has always been untrammelled by fads or trends and, while he’s often returned to a core jazz-funk flavour, his music has tapped into Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Dennis Marks, who has passed away at the young age of 66, was in every way larger than life. A talented and prolific music and arts documentary filmmaker, an inspired head of music for BBC Television, and artistic director of the ENO, he latterly reinvented himself as a consummately erudite and warm-voiced broadcaster who took his listeners on fascinating journeys down the Danube and along the Appian Way.Dennis was a true European, with a clarity of intellect honed in some of the best British educational institutions (Haberdashers and Cambridge), but with ears and eyes that avidly took Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
On a snowy day in early spring in New York, the On Kawara – Silence show at the Guggenheim is unlikely to warm you up. His date paintings, postcards, telegrams and other coldly ur-conceptual accountings spiral up those famous white Frank Lloyd Wright stairs, seemingly ad infinitum. But it’s a powerful, hypnotic experience, one that seeps into your subconscious and becomes a meditation on time and space.On Kawara, who died last year in New York at the age of 81, almost never gave interviews or let himself be photographed. You won’t find him on YouTube, though you will find footage of people Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Andrew Comben, CEO of the Brighton Festival, chooses ten locations that have resonance with the annual event. He talks about their past and future but, most particularly, what will be happening this May“Brighton Festival is all about the spaces and people of the city,” he explains, “Some of these spaces are especially evocative. They make artists think about doing things in different ways and make audiences respond accordingly. We have to strategise, sometimes taking over places that are used for other things most of the time. It’s always an adventure.”Comben, 40, became the Festival's Read more ...
fisun.guner
This is work that wears its heart on its sleeve. That’s what gets you in the end in this big retrospective of the work of Niki de Saint Phalle. The French-American artist, who died aged 71 in 2002, is probably best known for two very different bodies of work: her Shooting paintings, the series of collaborative performances in which she and others blasted paint-filled polythene pouches with a rifle, creating chance-based abstract paintings as the sacs burst over the white-plastered canvases they were attached to; and her exuberant Nanas, a nimble, tippy-toed troupe of gargantuan women, fat- Read more ...