site-specific
David Nice
Ten years on from 9/11 and the polyphony of reactions will not, and should not, be stilled. Creative artists have had to tread carefully in what they amass, and how they present it. Headlong theatre company’s fresh-thinking artistic director, Rupert Goold, decided to let a babel of playwrights and speechifiers have their say, with no one monopolising the truth (Simon Schama, whose lecture stands out as so obviously his own, the exception). Threading it together, deciding what to include and discard along the way, can’t have been easy, but a dedicated team of first-rate actors just about pulls Read more ...
caroline.boyle
A few days visiting the Edinburgh Art Festival and the city itself becomes the encircling gallery. Under great canvases of lowering grey cloud, plunging up and down the different levels of the Old Town and the New, things unfold against the intense hues of emerald-green spaces, the coppery contrast of the beeches, the cold hardness of the towering walls of stone and the eddying flow of the crowds. Within this frame is the opportunity to see a wide diversity of exhibitions and events in almost 50 museums, non-profit, commercial and artist-run spaces, plus specially commissioned site-specific Read more ...
fisun.guner
This warm-hearted production of E Nesbit’s most famous novel premiered to glowing reviews at its site-specific venue last summer. I didn‘t catch it last year, but I doubt this swift revival is any less captivating, nor the new cast any less sure-footed or engaging. Marcus Brigstocke has taken on the role of the gruff but loveable station master Mr Perks, whilst the three adult actors playing the children - Amy Noble as the sensible Bobby, Tim Lewis as the ever so mildly rebellious Peter and Grace Rowe as the charmingly ditzy Phyllis - bring just the right balance of earnestness and Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Bush watchers — a species of theatre buff with a particular interest in the rapid changes now happening to the Bush Theatre in West London — have been waiting for several weeks to see which of the various rumours are true about who will be the venue’s new artistic director when the present chief, Josie Rourke, leaves in December. Yesterday, it was announced that the new artistic director is Madani Younis, which is both a delight and, well, a bit of a surprise.The reason for both these emotions is that Younis — named by the Yorkshire Post as one of the county’s 100 Bright Things in 2009 — is Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Dickens wasn’t wrong – hard times they were. Around 1300 men, women and children worked at the Murrays’ Mills complex in the Ancoats area of Manchester in its mid-19th-century heyday (if you can call it that). Arrive a minute later than 7am and you were locked out, without pay. Now that actors are treading those same worn and oil-stained boards with an imaginative new version of Hard Times, you won’t get in after 7pm (and you’re the one paying, of course).In wide bays, where the machines (Dickens’s “mad elephants”) used to clatter and spew out cotton like confetti, on a mill floor 100 Read more ...
theartsdesk
The inaugural year of National Theatre Wales included an immensely ambitious body of work which tested to the limit the definition of what a national theatre can and should be. In new venues and old, found spaces and open spaces, it staged several freshly created plays, some retrieved ones, as well as adaptations, devised pieces and, in Aeschylus'sThe Persians, the oldest play of all. The year was capped at Easter by the widely hailed The Passion of Port Talbot starring Michael Sheen. Now NTW has announced its second season and it looks to be just as boundary-pushing as the first. Read more ...
bella.todd
Persecuted Burmese freedom fighter Aung San Suu Kyi may be this year’s guest director, provoking a loose theme of "freedom of expression, liberty, and the power of the individual voice" that’s all the more powerful for her enforced absence. But a week in to the 2011 Brighton Festival and Brighton Festival Fringe, I’d say it’s the stewards who are this year’s under-sung heroes and heroines. As the craze for interactive performance burgeons, the tricky task is falling to them of reassuring wary audiences without giving the creative game away. Would there be room for a rucksack in Small Space? Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bradford, once the worsted capital of the world, now employs fewer than 1,000 workers in the textile industry. Some of the disused mills have been transformed into tourist attractions – nearby Salts Mill has a huge collection of artwork by David Hockney and a posh bistro. Drummonds Mill has lain silent since closure, to be reopened temporarily for Freedom Studios’ production of The Mill – City of Dreams. Drummonds Mill is just north of the city centre. It’s a huge hulk of a building. You step carefully over the cobbles, and weeds, before being directed in through a back door by smiling Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Dave is a bomb, waiting to go off. He’s dangerous because he seems so ordinary. Late-twenties, he’s nothing much to look at. He wears a suit. Works as a civil servant in some absurdly obscure government department. No girlfriend. If truth be told, a bit of a piss-head really. But the thing that makes him dangerous is that - as the title of DC Moore’s 2010 play makes clear - he fancies himself as a truth-teller. He’s painfully honest, and, worse, he uses honesty as a weapon. So when you meet him in a pub, watch out.But first you have to find the pub (it's a site-specific show, after all). The Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Last weekend we posted a round-up of the vast array of site-specific work happening in the theatre over the summer. Most of them are shows which are so boldly experimental that they haven't much realistic hope of a commercial future. Plays for an audience of one are not the producer's friend. But it turns out that it's not just the mighty Punchdrunk who can shift tickets by the skipload.This week Punchdrunk's production of The Duchess of Malfi opened in an abandoned office block opposite London's City Airport the day after The Railway Children chuffed into the disused Eurostar terminal at Read more ...
theartsdesk
There is no consensus about what site-specific theatre actually constitutes. Does it grow organically out of the space in which the theatre piece is performed, and can therefore be staged nowhere else? Or is it no more than any theatre piece which happens away from the constricting formality of the thrust stage or the proscenium arch?Please feel free to debate that at leisure in the comments section below. It suffices to say that, whichever way you slice it, site-specific work has sprouted in the oddest places over the years. Audiences have found themselves summoned to caravans and sent into Read more ...
judith.flanders
Many people use that weaselly phrase about Antony Gormley, saying he “divides the critics”. For the most part this is not true: for the most part the critics loathe Gormley’s work. They suggest he is either a bad figurative sculptor masquerading as a conceptual artist, or a bad conceptual artist masquerading as a figurative sculptor. This is really just a whinge that he doesn’t fit in a box, but so what? Perhaps more useful is to think of him as the little girl with the little curl, because when he is good he is very, very good - the installation at Crosby Beach - and when he is bad he is Read more ...