Africa
Peter Culshaw
Another of Peter Culshaw’s peripatetic global radio shows. Star of this month's show is the Trinidadian Calypso Queen Calypso Rose, whose new album Far From Home, to be released in July, is given a sneak preview here. Then there is the usual wild, eclectic mix ranging from the latest cool jazz releases to cosmic sounds from Cape Verde, rediscovered Prog from Brazil, country blues and deep new African grooves. And Peter Sellers. Enjoy. LISTEN TO THE SHOW BY CLICKING HERE Tracklist:Leave Me Alone - Calypso RoseHareton Salvanini - Eu Hoje Acordei Com A Luz Do Read more ...
Charlene James
I knew that if I was going to write a play about female genital mutilation, I would have to try and understand why any mother or grandmother would make their child undergo such a brutal procedure. In my research, I read many articles and accounts of young women who were living with the emotional and physical consequences of FGM. I’d watched disturbing and devastating footage of young girls being cut, so it was difficult to comprehend how anyone could allow this act to happen, let alone celebrate it.But what I learned was that many of these mothers weren’t the villains I wrongly cast them as. Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
What larks! The first run of Zoo Quest – itself the first of the wildlife programmes – started 62 years ago, in 1954. It was thought it had all been filmed in black and white, on small 16mm cameras, but in fact a condition imposed by the BBC was to shoot in colour to produce a sharper image in black and white. Discovered in the archives a few months ago were perfectly preserved canisters of colour film, six hours' worth in all. This was all a decade before colour came regularly to television.So, perfectly timed for Attenbourgh's 90th birthday, the story of Zoo Quest was retold in this Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Terracotta warriors, Bactrian two-humped camels, Heavenly Horses, Buddhist caves, sand dunes, the world’s first printed book, a silk factory and temples galore including one that was the great mosque in Xi’an, were but some of the ingredients in a breathless first hour in a trilogy of programmes about the world’s oldest trading routes. They were opened up by the explorer and trader Zhang Qian of the Western Han dynasty, about 2,300 years ago.The Han were experts in mobile warfare and were searching for Heavenly Horses, to use instead of their sturdy but small ponies, the better to subdue the Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Hearing that both Javier de Frutos and rabbit heads appear in the new BalletBoyz bill might give you pause. A choreographer so unafraid of graphic content that he started his career with naked one-man shows, and later made a piece about the Pope so sexually explicit and offensive that he got death threats – do the rabbit heads mean we're in for some kind of furvert orgy?Well, the rabbit heads turn out to be in the double bill's other half, Rabbit by Swedish choreographer Pontus Lidberg, and it's not exactly Like Rabbits. The piece opens and closes with a longing pas de deux, the first Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Colonel Powell (Helen Mirren) has a problem: she suspects that a British woman who converted to Islam and tops the international terrorism hit list is holed up in a house in a suburb of Nairob controlled by Al-Shabaab. Can her local agent (Barkhad Abdi) fly his tiny spy drone inside the house and confirm the terrorist’s identity? And are the local military ready to capture the terrorist if she leaves? Powell is orchestrating the operation from an army hangar in Sussex thousands of miles away, with all the stern precision of a Jane Tennison in camo uniform. Director Gavin Hood has Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Lorraine Hansberry’s career as a playwright proved tragically short. A Raisin in the Sun is by some distance her best-known work, a key piece about the African American post-war experience. But she thought Les Blancs (The Whites) was potentially her most important play, although it remained unfinished at her death in 1965, aged only 34; it was assembled from drafts by her ex-husband and executor Robert Nemiroff, finally reaching Broadway in 1970. Les Blancs expands Hansberry’s dramatic range enormously, taking us from the direct American realism of Raisin to an unspecified African 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 ...
joe.muggs
Questions of what is authentic and what is retro get more complicated the more the information economy matures. Music from decades past that only tens or hundreds of people heard at the time it was made becomes readily available, gets sampled by new musicians, and passes into the current vernacular. Modern musicians play archaic styles day in day out until it becomes so worn into their musculature that it reflects their natural way of being. Tiny snippets of time that were once meaningless become memes that are shared and snared into the post-post-modern digital tangle.And in the thick of all Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
I’m still pondering the title of Chris Urch’s new play. On the surface it’s clear enough: The Rolling Stone is a weekly newspaper in Uganda that has been notorious for pursuing that country’s anti-gay agenda. In particular, at the beginning of the decade, it started a campaign of publishing the photographs and addresses of those it believed to be homosexual.That precipitated a witch-hunt, forcing those accused to flee their families and homes. They suffered violence: so great was the sense of public anger inspired by made-up equations of homosexuality with paedophilia that a number of people Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
That purveyor of everything from crazy cosmic jive and plastic soul to epic disco and elegant Berlin ambient gloom made a hell of an exit last week. His last release, his “parting gift” Blackstar, was a dazzling curtain bow unlike any other. He was a brilliant magpie, smuggling all kinds of ideas from Kabuki and Nietzsche to avant-jazz and cut-ups into impeccable, usually subversive, pop. Whether you saw him as a “major liberator” (Jon Savage) or were put off by the “smorgasbord of lachrymosity" (Julie Burchill), in the past week it became clear how many different types of people's lives Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The first face seen in The Gunman belongs to Sky News presenter Dermot Murnaghan. In a seemingly real broadcast, he says “the Democratic Republic of Congo is the scene of the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. The conflict is fuelled by the country’s vast mineral wealth, with all sides suspected of deliberately prolonging the violence to plunder natural resources.” Genuine footage of conflict, starving people and the mines in question accompany this commentary.According to The Gunman, the 1990s civil war was sparked by the assassination of the country’s minister responsible for mining. Read more ...