Mind Space

The Masque of the Red Death

I've just been to see The Masque of the Red Death at Battersea Arts Centre. The evening is based on the macabre short stories of Edgar Allan Poe. But rather than being presented on stage in front of the audience, the stories unfold through the rooms of the rambling old building, and the audience walks around. The two main foci are the grand central staircase and a theatre decked out as a Victorian music hall. But the stories weave and intersect through many other rooms as well; a wine cellar, a perfume boutique, an opium den, a cloak shop and an attic bedroom, as well as the suite of rooms comprising the house of Usher. Every room contains period props and furniture that you can pick up and examine; the audience is free to roam and explore the set. You can spend an evening in the music hall, watching the entertainments and plots as they swing through, or do as I did, and follow particular actors around the building to see their story.

This is storytelling without the linearised conventions of theatre; whenever you choose to stand and watch something, you miss something else that is taking place in another room. Each member of the audience comes away with a unique experience of the evening. It was the most exciting piece of theatre I've seen in a long time. For three hours I was immersed in a different world.

Performances on Friday and Saturday night conclude with a masque party that goes on into the early hours, with dancing, cabaret and sideshows.

The initial run of the production is completely sold out, but they have just extended the run to April. Tickets are selling fast!

Technorati tags: Technorati tags: The Masque of the Red Death, Edgar Allan Poe, Punchdrunk, Battersea Arts Centre, BAC

Maman 1999

This sculpture by Louise Bourgeois is currently sitting outside Tate Modern, part of their retrospective of her work.

Technorati tags: Louise Bourgeois, Maman 1999, Tate Modern

Dancing on the edge

On Friday night I dropped into Tate Modern to have a look at Doris Salcedo's Shibboleth, the new installation in the turbine hall. It's a crack in the floor, beginning at one end as a hairline fracture, and opening out into a deep fissure in the middle of the hall.

A Shibboleth is a word or cultural device that acts as a test of membership of a society (from Judges 12:1-6). The following quotes are from the exhibition leaflet;

‘The history of racism’, Salcedo writes, ‘runs parallel to the history of modernity, and is its untold dark side’. For hundreds of years, Western ideas of progress and prosperity have been underpinned by colonial exploitation and the withdrawal of basic rights from others. Our own time, Salcedo is keen to remind us, remains defined by the existence of a huge socially excluded underclass, in Western as well as post-colonial societies.
In breaking open the floor of the museum, Salcedo is exposing a fracture in modernity itself. Her work encourages us to confront uncomfortable truths about our history and about ourselves with absolute candidness, and without self-deception.

Perhaps Shibboleth will help us think about how racial divisions run through British society, where many people are blinded by the belief that we've grown beyond racism. Or maybe we'll just play around with the crack, and never look to closely at what it signifies.

Salcedo  has remained tight-lipped about how the crack was made, but it will leave a permanent scar on the building when it's filled in.

While I was there, the hall became remarkably full for an unusual piece of modern art. Then the crowd pulled out their ipods and headphones, and began dancing wildly. Someone in the middle of the hall coordinated the occasional cheer, but otherwise everyone danced to their own music. Other than the fast-rising smell of sweat, it was all harmless and friendly. It's coordinated from a website, www.mobile-clubbing.com.

Technorati tags: Technorati tags: London, Tate Modern, Salcedo, Shibboleth, Silent Disco, mobile clubbing

Event Horizon

Antony Gormley's latest large-scale sculpture work is Event Horizon, a series of life-size casts of his own body positioned on the buildings and walkways in and around the South Bank Centre.

At the end of last year I saw Gormley's installation of similar figures standing on the beach at Crosby, looking out to sea. There the figures were watchful and waiting; thoughts of the second coming bumbled vaguely around my mind. In the brutalist urban setting of the South Bank, the figures have a more alarming aspect. Soon after they were erected, an observer reported a potential suicide to the police, and someone has left a comment on one of my Flickr photos to the same effect. Maybe I'm paranoid, but they make me feel watched. Of course, there are enough surveillance cameras around the south bank to justify this feeling, but the stillness and prominent positioning of the figures suggests attentiveness.

I've started a Flickr set to collect these images together.

Technorati tags: London, sculpture, Gormley, southbank, eventhorizon

African Snow

This blog is in danger of a place where I rave about things I've done, and exhort readers to go and see them. I'll try to be a little less directive in future. But only after I've told you why you need to go and see this play...

African Snow by Murray Watts is the story of the meeting between Olaudah Equiano and John Newton. Equiano captured by slavers as a boy, and spent his life on ships, in Barbados and Britain before purchasing his freedom, writing a book of his experiences, and becoming a leading member of the abolitionist movement in Britain.

Newton was a sailor, had a Christian conversion, and then captained slave ships. In later life he became an Anglican priest and hymnwriter,  came to see the slave trade as a great evil.

The play tells the story of the lives of Equiano and Newton, pivoting around the meeting between between the two men arranged by William Wilberforce. It's written and directed with great energy and panache. Israel Oyelumade is superb as Equiano, and the piece throbs with African dance and music. No punches are pulled in depicting the lot of slaves, and Newton is a suitably angst-ridden old man.

The most admirable thing about the play is that it doesn't fudge the difficulty of forgiveness. Near the end of the play, Newton asks Equiano to forgive him for his part in the slave trade, and Equiano is unable meet the man's request. A reconciliation between the two men would have made for a happy ending, but Watts resists the temptation in favour  of showing how hard it can be to forgive a person. God forgave Newton, but for Newton this wasn't enough. His slave victims were too numerous, their sufferings too deep for Equiano to speak on their behalf. Forgiveness is difficult and costly.  God requires it of us, but who are we to judge those who cannot rise to the task?

African Snow is on at the Trafalgar Studios in London until  May 5, then on national tour, returning to London between May 29 and June 2. Details here.

 

Technorati tags: Slavery, abolition, abolitionists, John Newton, Olaudah Equiano, Amazing Grace, theatre, Riding Lights, African Snow

New Religion

I had the chance recently to visit Damian Hirst's exhibition New Religion recently. It's being shown in the church of All Hallows on the Wall, which is now being used as an exhibition venue, wallspace, as well as a place of worship.

The exhibition brings medical imagery to bear on Christian themes. Hirst's Stations of the Cross are a series of screen prints of pills and medicines, as are a similar series depicting the apostles. On an altar is a silver cast of a heart, pierced with barbed wire, razor blades and hypodermic syringes. A cedar cross is encrusted not with gemstones but with pills. Next to it is a familiar memento mori, a skull, but Hirst's interpretation is the silver cast of a child's skull, with adult teeth poised to push out the milk teeth in the lower jaw. A set of beautiful, provocative objects.

For all the religious imagery, this exhibition didn't seem to be much about Christianity. I heard several people wandering around saying that Hirst must have some kind of faith, but that is to miss the point of the show. It uses the language of religion to say that it is the modern cult of medicine in which we place our trust, derive our hope, and make our meaning. I don't think the show says very much about Christianity at all, except, indirectly, that it is the 'Old Religion', superceded by the New.

'New Religion' has been previously been shown in a 'white cube' style of gallery, but a church setting heightens the tension between new and old. Hirst's objects, parodying church furnishings, demand to be taken more seriously when placed in church. I suspect that Hirst was tickled by the invitation to mount his show in a place of worship. Some might view this as a 'home goal' by the Church; he's subverted our symbols, and we've legitimated what he's doing. But I'm heartened that the Christian tradition is resilient enough to be hospitable towards Hirst's New Religion, not threatened by it. A sign, in effect, that we are not ready to be written off as Old Religion just yet.

Another Place

At the end of last week I went with Alex to Crosby, just north of Liverpool. It's currently home to Antony Gormley's installation Another Place. Stretched along 3km of the foreshore, the installation consists of 100 life-sized iron castings of Gormley's body.

This stretch of the coastline is remote and industrial. The docks of Liverpool give way to various bits of heavy industry. To get to the beach from the car park, you first have to follow a path around a shallow lake and through some sand dunes. We visited at low tide, so were greeted by a long expanse of brown sands giving way to mud flats and tidal shallows. Three or four people walked their dogs, but the view was dominated by metal. The tall, spinning rotors of a wind farm dominate the skyline, but at a human scale, Gormley's statues suggest stillness, attention, focus. From the sand dunes they look identical; all still, all standing straight, and all looking out to sea.

Closer inspection reveals that even if they were originally identical, they aren't now. The ones further down the beach are covered in water, and become home to barnacles and weed, while the ones at the top of the beach are streaked with rust.  Crosby is the fourth home of the installation, and Gormley doesn't clean the pieces up between sites, allowing the crust of sea life to become part of the story of the work. And the work changes every day as the tide covers and reveals the figures. Gormley says,

“Each person is making it again… for some it might be about human evolution, for others it will be about death and where we go, where our bodies finally belong, do they belong to the earth and the elements? And I think that’s what’s amazing about in a way the work of now - contemporary art, it’s no longer representing the ideology of a dominant class it’s actually an open space that people can make their own.”

As I wandered around with Alex we mused on mortality and how we face death. The figures are well-separated from one another; as we contemplate the unknown, we do so alone. The temptation is to turn away, to busy ourselves with the mundane and avoid facing the sea.  Death is the final taboo for us. By paying attention, these figures are prepared for the coming of the sea. They stand firm. Though they may disappear from view, their presence is not erased by the high tide. They are revealed again as the waters ebb. A hint of resurrection?

But we are at the other end of the Christian story. Advent, the time of preparation for the birth of Christ, is a time of contemplating the unknown. Of watching, waiting, expecting. Of trusting that God will save us, and preparing for his coming.  For me, Another Place is a parabolic reminder of what I need to do in the coming days.

The re-enchantment of London

The Elephant goes walkabout
Originally uploaded by Ayres, no graces.

Something remarkable has been happening on the streets of London this weekend...

On Thursday, a large wooden capsule appeared on Waterloo place, apparently having fallen from the sky and embedded itself in the tarmac. On Friday, a giant little girl emerged, and walked to Horseguards Parade, where it met the  Elephant, a time-travel machine owned by a mysterious sultan, and operated by Jules Verne. The two became friends and toured The Mall together, before settling down for the night back in Horseguards.

In the night, the little girl boy got up to some mischief, stitching cars to the ground with her giant needle and thread, before joining the Sultan at a civic reception with the Deputy Mayor of London in Trafalgar Square. The mayor got a little political in her speech, making remarks about the greatness of the city that won the 2012 Olympics. Her French guests responded graciously, and it was left to the crowd to offer the odd 'boo' to her thoughtless remark. The Sultan responded in a dialect of gibberish with a speech that was short, to the point, and left us in no doubt of his meaning. I hope the Deputy Mayor was taking notes.

The whole event is a massive peice of street theatre staged by French comp[any Royal de Luxe. 'The Sultan's Elephant' was five years in the planning, and was originally staged in Paris to celebrate the Jules Verne Centenary.

In London, the 40ft puppets brought the city centre traffic to a standstill, and more importantly, brought the child out of the most cynical of people. Everywhere you looked, people were gasping with awe and wonder at the sheer dramatic spectacle as the elephant riders released a flock of mechanical birds into the air, or the elephant soaked the crowd with its trunk. Strangers exchanged views about what was going on, and helped one another track down the current whereabouts of the spectacle. Not everyone was won over, of course. One elderly woman said to her companion, "What's it selling? I bet it's selling something." But such views weren't too common; most were willing to coo and chuckle at the spectacle, and feel a little bit more connected to other Londoners as a result. A little bit of enchantment does us good.

We are promised a string of cultural events in the capital in the run up to the 2012 Olympics. It's hard to see how anyone could top this.

Alison Lapper Pregnant, by Marc Quinn

Alison Lapper Pregnant, by Marc Quinn
Originally uploaded by Ayres, no graces.

I had a good look at the latest commission occupying the plinth outside the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square yesterday. I picked a good day for it; the white marble took on subtle shades in the dying light of a clear October day.

But what of the composition? A naked statue of a woman born without arms and eight months pregnant was bound to stir controversy. I noted some passers by spotting the statue for the first time  and looking visibly discomforted. We may be able to train our rational minds to accept difference, but our gut instincts may still rebel.

In a square littered with bronze war heroes of empire (Nelson's victory had been commemorated here two days before; he, of course, lost an arm and an eye), the statue of Alison Lapper offers a refreshingly different slant on our national life. But I suspect we've still got a lot to learn about how to incorporate difference rather than declare war on it.