wed 04/12/2024

China

The Blue Dragon, Barbican Theatre

Elegant eloquence: Tai Wei Foo dances up an emotional storm

Forked lightning glimpsed through an aeroplane window, a silken dancer spilling stars in a snow-filled sky, a dragon tattoo etched on a man’s back: we’ve grown to expect seductive alchemy of images from the work of Quebecois master of visual theatre...

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Nixon in China, Metropolitan Opera HD Live

Metcentric New Yorkers tend to think an opera hasn’t achieved classic status until it arrives at their vast inner sanctum. Whereas other cities worldwide know that the inimitable Peter Sellars production of grand opera’s last masterpiece (to date)...

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theartsdesk in Colombo: Where Music Matters as East Meets West

Eshanta Peiris: the multifaceted Sri Lankan musician

For hundreds of years now the island currently known as Sri Lanka has had a thriving musical culture (or cultures, not to politicise the issue). There’s been folk music for as long as there’ve been folks. The various strata of society have refined...

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Imagine: Ai Weiwei - Without Fear or Favour, BBC One

If you found yourself thinking that you were watching Mission: Impossible rather than Imagine, you could have been forgiven. Alan Yentob had clearly been banned from meeting Ai Weiwei in China, and so one of their interviews was conducted over a...

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Emanuel Gat Dance, Sadler's Wells/ Henri Oguike Dance, Touring

Emanuel Gat's 'Winter Variations': 'The movement is the problem'

How do young modern choreographers engage with their audience? With references from the street - motion that the audience knows and recognises? With musical expressiveness? With the development of a technical style that has a language of its own?...

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When will it end? Dust continues to spoil fun for visitors to Tate Modern

Ai Weiwei in his field of porcelain sunflower seeds. The seed, says the artist, symbolises the Chinese people

Three days after its closure, and just a few days after opening, Tate Modern is still to make an announcement over the future of Ai Weiwei's interactive Turbine Hall installation. Will the closure of the dust-emitting artwork be permanent? Or are...

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theartsdesk in Locarno: I'm Watchin' in the Rain

It had to happen. Until now, I've always resisted. But last Thursday, I had, finally, to tear open the plastic container to get to the protection inside. A nice man from Screen International gave me his before leaving - he'd have no use for it...

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The Printed Image in China, British Museum

The British Museum’s current exhibition of 15th-century works on paper, Fra Angelico to Leonardo: Italian Renaissance Drawings, explores the increasing importance of the preparatory sketch in the development of western art. Central to that...

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City of Life and Death

The rape of Nanking: Chinese women were forced to offer 'comfort' to the victors

From The Bridge on the River Kwai onwards, the Japanese haven’t tended to come up smelling of roses in war movies. Kind of unsurprisingly. In recent years it was Clint Eastwood who moved the story on. In Flags of Our Fathers he painted the...

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DVDs Round-Up 5

Two films with a East European flavour, Katalin Varga and Tales from the Golden Age, are among our March selection, which also includes the lovely, bittersweet Irish drama Kisses. Our US release (available worldwide, of course, by mail-order) is Wim...

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Turandot, English National Opera, London Coliseum

It’s a let-down when a new production of an opera that spends two acts feeling dazzlingly invigorating and clever collapses in a careless mess in the third. My guess is that a key scene for the concept of English National Opera’s Turandot is when...

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