London
Sarah Kent
A glittering egg cracks open and, waving a magic wand, Andrew Logan emerges riding his sculpture of Pegasus, the winged horse. He flies across London to waiting friends and relatives and, with one touch of his miraculous wand, transforms them into sparkling glamour queens.The opening credits of The British Guide to Showing Off are a witty, Pythonesque riff on Logan’s extraordinary ability to inspire people. “He appeals to the child in everybody,” says fashion designer Zandra Rhodes. "He’s like your naughty aunty, putting a bit of gin in your tea,” observes artist Grayson Perry, best known for Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The 2012 Cultural Olympiad has been announced and events will take place throughout the UK from 21 June until the last day of the Paralympics, 9 September. Ruth Mackenzie, director of the Cultural Olympiad, said that many events would be free, and that “the festival will offer a once-in-a-lifetime chance to be inspired by the best in the world”. Events will range across the arts, from music, dance, theatre, opera and film to literature, the visual arts and fashion, and some will include a chance for arts fans to participate in the creation of an artwork.The highlight of the opening events, on Read more ...
Jasper Rees
British film-makers tend towards bipolarity. Where French cinema is broadly speaking about the middle classes, we tend to get films about one thing or the other. The national fixation with the past supplies stories about how the nabobs of yore lived (and, as importantly, dressed). But from Ken Loach onwards, British directors of another cadre have always had a real feel for the street, for that tranche of society which bumps along with nothing, where substance abuse is the rule rather than the exception. Such a film, more or less, is Junkhearts.Tinge Krishnan’s big-screen debut as a director Read more ...
judith.flanders
There’s a lot of Soviet art about at the moment – the excellent show that opens this Saturday at the Royal Academy has Constructivist and Suprematist paintings and drawings loaned by the George Costakis Collection in Thessaloniki. Now, at Annely Juda, a smaller, but no less excellent, show highlights one single Malevich painting, Black Square (main picture, above), a tiny gem of the early 20th century, also from the Costakis Collection, together with a series of Malevich’s working drawings.The painting is only 17 x 24cm, not much bigger than a couple of postcards, but what a punch it packs. Read more ...
theartsdesk
It may not have quite the glam tackiness of Cannes in May, nor the pizzazz of Venice in September, nor the chin-stroking seriousness of the Berlinale in February, but each October the BFI London Film Festival takes its own place on the European film festival circuit. theartsdesk has been attending the 55th festival in quadruplicate. On the closing day of a packed fortnight, our critics Nick Hasted, Emma Simmonds, Demetrios Matheou and, in quirkier mode, Matt Wolf bring you their highs and lows, their recommendations and their early warning signs.But first the winners of this year's awards. Read more ...
bruce.dessau
With the scheduled start time of last night's gig long gone and George Michael nowhere in sight, scurrilous jokes, gossip and unfounded rumours were floating around the Royal Albert Hall. We won't reprint them here but, needless to say, funny ciggies and Hampstead Heath were being mentioned. George's offstage antics might keep the red tops interested, but once he kicked the show off, backed by a 41-piece orchestra for the opening performance of the London run of his Symphonica tour, his glittering musical pedigree was absolutely centre stage.This was certainly an odd gig though. Often slow, Read more ...
alice.vincent
It’s a shame that Joseph Steele’s BIBLE didn’t come a week later. Halloween would have been a far better backdrop to the haphazard heathenism that the evening entailed.Presentation, exhibition – it is difficult to define the events which Steele arranged to showcase his latest work BIBLE. The premise is relatively simple: Steele re-wrote the entire 178,440 words of the New Testament, replacing every reference to Jesus or Jesus Christ with the words "Joseph Steele". This was the result of two years’ research attending Alpha courses, and a fortuitous contraction of tuberculosis, out of which a Read more ...
judith.flanders
It may be that there is no sunnier place than Ashton’s La fille mal gardée. Certainly there is no sunnier ballet. It speaks not of great drama, nor ecstasy, but instead of gentle happiness, of quiet content and loving kindness. Not, one might think, the stuff of great art. But one would be – one is – wrong, and Ashton is happy to set us straight.The standard tale of a girl whose mother wants her to marry a rich simpleton, and how she instead gets her way and marries a simple farmer, is not the point. Ashton takes this and embroiders it with magic – a dash of music hall, a splash of folk Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Whether or not we believe Wagner’s retrospective rebranding of the opera as a prototype music-drama, “a complete, unbroken web”, Der Fliegende Holländer reliably makes for a vivid evening’s entertainment. Which makes it all the more strange that this is only the work’s third outing at the Royal Opera in almost 20 years. Animated by the push-pull of contrary rhythms and the slapping, spitting bite of the brass, Wagner’s compact score is almost overburdened by its drama, something understood by Tim Albery’s quietly effective production which sees the work undergo something of a sea change. Read more ...
carole.woddis
Sometimes theatre people do mad things. Like stay up all night and the following day to “celebrate” the King James Bible and a theatre’s house-move to new premises. Its 400th year has been a good year for that collection of stories currently being advertised elsewhere as “the book that changed the world”. And for the Bush Theatre's outgoing artistic director Josie Rourke, having moved into John Passmore Edwards’s elegant Victorian Library round the corner from its old Shepherds Bush Green stamping ground this weekend, “There’s no finer act than to open a new theatre - it’s the single most Read more ...
fisun.guner
Whilst acknowledging the huge impact the Frieze Art Fair has made on the cultural landscape of the capital since its inception in 2003, the frenzied annual event definitely doesn’t float every art lover’s boat. With about 170 – mainly blue-chip – galleries occupying a sprawling 20,000 square metres, the posh Regent’s Park marquee can make the experience of looking at contemporary art feel like a trip to Westfield. And unlike the designer shopping mall, if you’re planning on seeing it all in a day it’ll cost you £27 just to window shop.There are a few satellite fairs hoping to catch Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“They should have trance nights here,” I heard a young man say to his girlfriend as we entered the domed, craggy splendour of Islington’s Union Chapel. Still a working church, this Victorian Gothic monster is an architectural Escher fantasy of arches and angles, its octagonal layout concealing as much as it reveals on first glance. Add a central stage where you might expect the altar, glowing red under the lights, to a programme of some of Monteverdi’s most erotic madrigals, and it didn’t take a degree in semiotics to realise what was going on. With sacred and secular rubbing up against one Read more ...