Features
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 ...
Tim Cumming
Come the end of June in Essaouira on Morocco’s Atlantic coast, up to half a million festival-goers team the narrow, traffic-free streets of the medina, its two huge open squares, and numerous courtyards and riyads around town, for what must be the world’s biggest free festival. It is dedicated to Gnawa, the trance and healing music of African Moroccans who had been inveigled into slavery in centuries past – there was a slave market in Essaouria until the early part of the 20th century – and whose music, until the festival kicked off in 1998, was regarded with suspicion and disdain by Read more ...
hilary.whitney
Ten years after Justin Fashanu - not only the first openly gay footballer, but the first black player to command a £1 million transfer fee - committed suicide in a lock-up garage in the East End, his former agent, Eric Hall, breezily informed the BBC that football was “not a world that attracts gay people". Has anyone told Elton John, Watford FC’s most famous fan? Yet however implausible Hall’s comment may seem, the evidence is stacked solidly in his favour: no other professional footballer apart from Fashanu has ever come out. “The simple reason is that homophobia is still Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Get your tent and ice-box and plan your summer's entertainment with theartsdesk's definitive clickable festival guide - listings and links for all the UK festivals this summer, from heavy rock by Scottish lochs to Morris-dancing in the south west, and taking on opera, classical and major international arts festivals for good measure. If you know of a festival we've missed, please email info@theartsdesk.com with brief details of venue, booked artists and the website and we'll put it in for the world to see. ScotlandRock Ness, 11-13 JuneDores, Inverness-shire, ScotlandFatboy Slim, Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The apartment is shared with a Burmese cat named Hermione and two no less exquisite and venerable harpsichords. In the "library", lavishly bound scores attest to Rousset's archival spirit with his latest pride and joy laid out on the table - the original full score and continuo parts for Louis XIV's favourite opera: Lully's Bellérophon which Rousset and his group will present in the first performances in modern times later this year - including one in the newly restored L'Opéra Royal at Versailles. Rousset's latest CD release is of rarely heard harpsichord suites by Louis Couperin, uncle of Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Two leading ballerinas retired this week on either side of the Atlantic, Darci Kistler of New York City Ballet and Miyako Yoshida of the Royal Ballet. Both are in their mid-forties (not old for a ballerina) and each is an exemplar of certain best qualities of their companies, yet each seems to have outstayed their welcome in some way. Each farewell lights the touchpaper of argument as to whether those best qualities are institutional or personal - and therefore whether they can be preserved and transmitted - or whether the image that ballet neurotically clings to, of being ever-modernising, Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
The interior world of Morocco seems a magical place where music and words have more power than in the disenchanted, cold light of the North. On the plane on my first trip to Fes I met a businessman, in import-export, wearing a Burton suit. The strangeness of Morocco revealed itself when he started telling me of his current problem, that his daughter has been put under a spell by a djinn (he translated the word as “devil”) residing in a frog. His mother was a member of the Hamdashas, sects who are known to cut themselves, and his grandmother, he said, drank boiling water when under trance. Read more ...
sarvenaz.sheybany
The Los Angeles Film Festival would seem to have everything going for it. There's the perfect Californian weather, the vast number of stars who live and work in the city, and this year there’s been a glamorous new venue in downtown Los Angeles. The 16th festival has also brought in an ambitious new artistic director, former Newsweek film critic David Ansen, who hopes to unite high and low, screening both crowd-pleasers with major Hollywood talent and small, finely crafted foreign films. And yet something has been amiss.The new broom brought new disorganisation. At the festival village ticket Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Alan Plater's final drama for television, Joe Maddison's War, is due to be screened on ITV this autumn. Fittingly, it gave the Jarrow-born Plater the opportunity to revisit his background in the north-east. The story is set on Tyneside during World War Two, and reflects the impact of the war on a closely knit group of working-class families. The cast looks a little like Plater's own extended family, since it includes Geordieland stalwarts Robson Green, Kevin Whately and Trevor Fox (of the latter, the writer commented that "he was sent on this earth to do my stuff").I interviewed Plater a few Read more ...
Jasper Rees
They don't make television writers like Alan Plater any more. He entered the profession when there was still an audience that could be relied upon to sit down in their millions and watch challenging drama from strands such as Armchair Theatre and The Wednesday Play. He made his name in that great academy of small-screen writing, Z Cars. Other than Dennis Potter, it's difficult to think of a writer who, though he also produced half a dozen novels and many stage plays including the memorable Peggy for You about the legendary theatrical agent Peggy Ramsay, dedicated the greatest moments of a Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Edward Gardner is no longer English National Opera's best kept secret. The former choral scholar and repetiteur goes from strength to strength helming ENO through productive and interesting times. The world's stages are now beckoning. During a break in final rehearsals for Mozart's great opera seria Idomeneo in a new production from multi-media queen Katie Mitchell he talks informally about what being music director of a company like this entails.The long conversations with directors (what kind of things is Terry Gilliam asking him ahead of his operatic debut next season?), the relationship Read more ...
rebecca.ritzel
To get a feel for whether an arts festival has truly penetrated a city’s psyche, it helps to strike up a conversation with local Starbucks baristas. That’s why I was grateful to be asked one recent evening in Toronto, “So what exactly is Luminato?”As the green-aproned server handed me a post-show cup of tea, I thought, good question: what is Luminato? Four years after the festival’s founding, it seems many Toronto residents remain unsure. I explained that it’s an arts festival with many different events, including performances at nearby theatres. As it happens, I had just come from a Read more ...