Japan
Nick Hasted
The Western image of manga comes from the thick volumes of knicker-flashing schoolgirls and lurid s.f. teenage boys pore over, and the anime (cartoon films) which adapt them. Singaporean director Eric Khoo’s animated adaptation of five stories by Yoshihiro Tatsumi, framed by details from his graphic autobiography A Drifting Life, reveals a radically different medium. As a young man proud of an art form which was being attacked for corrupting postwar Japanese youth, the now 76-year-old Tatsumi coined a new term for adult comics, gekiga (dramatic pictures), in 1957. It took until the 1970s for Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Scotland’s Bill Wells is hard to pin down. Although ostensibly a jazz pianist, boundaries don’t concern him. He’s played with Aidan Moffat and Isobel Campbell. In 2009 he made the GOK album with Japan’s Tori Kudo (who records as Maher Shalal Hash Baz). Lemondale was made in Japan with a raft of collaborators that include Jim O’Rourke, Kudo and members of Tenniscoats.It’s a lovely album. Coherent, too. Especially considering that it was recorded in one day. Overall, Lemondale is filmic, edging towards Michel Legrand’s jazzier moments and even Francis Lai soundtracks. Equally, it’d be at home Read more ...
joe.muggs
It's understandable that people get put off leftfield dance music, given how much micro-genre delineation and dog-in-a-manger protectionism there can be in underground scenes. It can seem a shame sometimes, but then again, these are part and parcel of the fertile creativity and passion that exists around the music, so it's swings and roundabouts. However, there are some areas you're guaranteed not to find frowning chin-strokers, and one of those is inhabited by Brighton label Tru Thoughts, which consistently produces music that's friendly, welcoming and veritably insists you forget nitpicky Read more ...
David Nice
Is this the year that G&S became definitively chic again? The slow-burn effect of ENO's "Miller Mikado" and Mike Leigh's Topsy-Turvy now results in numerous fringe benefits. Sasha Regan's all-male Union Theatre regime has delivered its best yet - Iolanthe at Wilton's Music Hall, the most touching and funny show I've seen over the last 11 months - and now Charles Court Opera gives us more witty operetta-in-close-up with a cast of nine backed up by two pianos. It's not quite on the level of Regan's imaginative refit, but it does place the singing and playing at the forefront, while the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
There’s no doubt that In the Realm of the Senses shocked and still shocks, but after watching this first-ever uncut UK release, it’s hard to figure out what shocks most: the sex, the equation of sex, obsession and death, that all this takes place in a sealed environment ruled by ritual, or whether it’s the revelation that Japanese society could produce a film so opposite to its perceived or received persona. It could also be the fact that it's based on a true story.Neither 1976's In the Realm of the Senses or Ôshima’s follow up, 1978’s Empire of Passion (although based on a Namura novel, Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The star ballerina Sylvie Guillem was rehearsing in London when she heard about the cataclysmic Japanese earthquake last spring, and the devastating tsunami in its aftermath. It was an apocalyptic blow that she felt personally. Since her first visit there as a teenager, the internationally renowned dancer has been drawn back to Japan year after year, winning legions of friends and supporters, the culture’s aesthetic clarity and spareness influencing her taste, and complementing her own evolution from classical ballerina assoluta into contemporary dancer stupenda.Her current show, 6000 Miles Read more ...
stephen.walsh
There are several types of garden opera, and there are also, happily, several types of cinema opera. You can rustle your Werthers through a relay from the Met and endure the touchy-feely interviews with panting mega-sopranos just out of Verdi’s “Sempre libera”; or you can pick up a small touring company like Mid Wales Opera at the Pontardawe Arts Centre or the Aberdare Coliseum, and watch real opera sung by human beings in unhelpful surroundings. I know which I prefer; but then I have a weakness for adaptability. And this MWO Madam Butterfly, which I caught up with at the Roses Theatre in Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Edit, edit. Inside TeZukA there’s a charming, elliptical, hugely stylish piece begging to be sliced and trimmed into focus - just as the manga master Osamu Tezuka must have daily occupied himself with as he prepared his graphic cartoons. The visuals in Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s piece are spectacular video animations of Tezuka’s fastidiously drawn scenes, the kerpows and the Zen landscapes, Black Jack, the transfigured rabbit. If it does nothing else, this show should whet your appetite for manga.Whether it whets the appetite for what dance can do is a more moot point. At two and a quarter hours Read more ...
Ismene Brown
A new production opens tonight at Sadler's Wells based on the graphic novels of Osamu Tezuka, Japan's master of manga art. Choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and composer Nitin Sawhney shared a love of comics as a boy that turned into the more sophisticated admiration for the narrative subtlety and precise visions that the best of comics led to. And to Cherkaoui it seemed a compelling world for theatrical treatment.Tezuka (1928-1989) was the most influential cartoonist in Japanese manga, credited with having invented the “big eye” cartooning characteristic in Japan, itself a deliberate take Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
As well as recounting the stories of two of the women who would become figureheads for the revolutionary movements that grew out of the social unrest of 1968 - Germany’s Ulrike Meinhof and Japan’s Fusako Shigenobu - Shane O’Sullivan’s documentary Children of the Revolution intriguingly juggles the political and the personal. Their public stories are presented through the personal prisms of their surviving daughters, who recount, with some coolness and with very different perspectives, how their own lives were affected by the revolutionary choices that their mothers made.Children may open with Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Chris Marker has made over 60 films in his long career (he's now 90). But his reputation has rested on just two. Sans soleil (1983), a meditative film essay on Japan, and La jetée (1962), a 20-minute sci-fi film in the ciné-roman photomontage style, are widely considered the finest examples of their respective genres. On top of that, La jetée was named one of the Top 10 sci-fi films of all time by Time magazine. Optimum Classics are re-releasing both this week on one DVD.With its eccentric eye, its exotic locations, its peripatetic ways, zipping between the economic miracle of Japan and Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Sylvie Guillem is back, chicken-skinny, middle-aged, dressed like a dowd. Did I just write that? And let’s add: as swift as mercury, as exact as a feather, as light as the sun, and as eternal in intelligent beauty as Nefertiti. In contemporary dance, as I was saying at the weekend, it should be permissible to sit in the dark wondering at the inexplicable and the unbelievable. This great ballerina of our era is both inexplicable and unbelievable, in physique and in temperament. Not least incredible is that a Parisienne of 46 would allow herself to appear in two outfits that compete Read more ...