Features
theartsdesk
When sorrows come they come not in single spies. It is a bad week to be 69. Hard on the heels of David Bowie's death from cancer comes Alan Rickman's. He was an actor who radiated a sinful allure that first gave theatregoers the hot flushes back in 1985 when he played the Vicomte de Valmont in Christopher Hampton's Les Liaisons Dangereues. His co-star was Lindsay Duncan with whom he went on to share other highlights on stage: Private Lives in the West End and on Broadway, John Gabriel Borkman at the Abbey in Dublin.He had a late start as a star. His Hamlet came at the age of 47, followed by Read more ...
theartsdesk
David Nice writes: 2016 began by ringing in the new with concerts by the ever-astonishing National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, and continued by ringing out the old-new with funeral bells on the news of Pierre Boulez’s death at the age of 90. Tributes began pouring in from all quarters, including a very pithy one from an old university friend, whom I remember in the early 1980s playing a very young Simon Rattle’s 1977 recording of The Rite of Spring with the NYO and regaling us with stories of how Boulez turned that interpretation on its head within weeks.Other memorials revealed that Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In 1994 the art magazine Modern Painters invited fresh blood onto its editorial board. The new intake included a novelist, William Boyd, and a rock star, David Bowie. "That’s how I got to know him," says Boyd. "We’d sit at the table with all these art critics and art experts feeling like new boys slightly having to prove ourselves. He interviewed Balthus, he interviewed Tracey Emin. He wrote for the magazine effectively."But there was another contribution made by Bowie (who was privately a painter, collector and autodidactic connoisseur), and as a story it was still running four years ago. In Read more ...
theartsdesk
If each man's death diminishes us, we're all about a foot shorter today. When Elvis Presley died, his manager Colonel Tom Parker said "this won't change anything!", and he promptly set about ensuring his client's immortality by turning him into a production line of merchandise and memorabilia. This won't happen to David Bowie, because he had already seized control of his own myth. It will continue to be felt indefinitely in his influence on music, video, art and the the nature of stardom itself.Anyone who thought Bowie had made his last big artistic statement will have been confounded by the Read more ...
Joe Muggs
He knew.18 months of dealing with cancer, and rather than withdraw and rest – as he'd done before – David Bowie knuckled down made a record as intense and disturbing as anything he's done before. The Next Day was a worthy return to the fray but Blackstar... Even before we heard the terrible news, just taken on its own merits, Blackstar was something else. And now, knowing that he knew, it's absolutely fearsome in its confrontation with death.I know something is very wrongThe pulse returns the prodigal sonsThe blackout hearts, the flowered newsWith skull designs upon my shoes(“Can't Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
So the feasibility study for the new concert hall – The Centre for Music – has finally surfaced, a little later than planned. It’s being greeted, generally speaking, as if it’s to be the next London Olympics. “A global beacon,” declares the Evening Standard... Nicholas Hytner (he who said that building the Southbank Centre extension would spoil the view from his National Theatre) compares it to Tate Modern, which he says enlarged audiences for other visual arts rather than taking them away. This should, he says, be “a Tate Modern for music”.Having written more times than I can count that it’s Read more ...
theartsdesk
Can a portrait really be a portrait if we can’t see a person’s face? And what if the reason we can’t see their face is that it is covered with a lump of dough? Is it a joke? And if it is a joke, is it on us or them? Or perhaps it is a joke about art itself: doughy masks aside, Dahlgaard’s portraits are in every other way conventional, and dough is not so dissimilar to clay, a venerable material in the history of art.As ludicrous as the project undoubtedly is, Danish artist Søren Dahlgaard’s photographs are remarkably effective in their interrogation of portraiture, challenging our Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
It was business as usual in the British dance world in 2015. Looking back over the year, theartsdesk's dance critics see the industry's many talented, capable people continuing to do their jobs well, but we don't recall being shaken, stirred or surprised as often as in other years, or at least not by new works: our top moments of the year are concentrated in the farewells of great dancers Sylvie Guillem and Carlos Acosta, and in classic productions of classic ballets.What follows is our personal map of 2015's dance uplands. As usual with such lists, it doesn't tell the whole story. For Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Motörhead played loud rock ’n’ roll. Now, like The Ramones, they are gone. They burned with unbelievable vigour from the mid-Seventies until earlier this year, when the wheels started to fall off Lemmy’s wagon. His health suddenly gave way – as was clear at this year’s Glastonbury Festival – and now, as one of his greatest songs roared with rabid conviction and a cheeky wink, he has finally been killed by death.Whatever their line-up, from the mid-Seventies until his death on December 28 this year, Motörhead were Lemmy Kilmister’s conception. He was a confident, down-to-earth, post-hippy Read more ...
theartsdesk
So, the first day's done. We awake, bleary-eyed and emerge from our tents and survey the scene. No matter how bad it looks for our immediate future health, the clouds are sure to clear before the inaugural beer and opening bands. The quality continues as we run through the very best we've seen this year to create the best bespoke festival we can imagine given theartsdesk's collective gig-going this year. In short, ladies and gentlemen… welcome to Sunday's line up of theartsfest 2015.MAIN STAGEMadonna 10.00 - 11.30It was perhaps the most-anticipated live tour of the year, though in many Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Say what you will about London theatre during 2015, and by my reckoning it was a pretty fine year, there certainly was a lot of it. I can't recall a year that brought with it a comparable volume of openings, not least during September and December, this year's pre-Christmas slate of major press nights roughly double the same time period in 2014. And as proof that people were actually attending the stuff on offer, empirical evidence as ever was the best guide. One late-November Saturday on my way to an evening show, I counted six House Full signs while weaving through the West End, and for a Read more ...
theartsdesk
The festival market is one that has, like much of Britain, become oversaturated of late. Here at theartsdesk however, we feel that there’s room for one more as long as it’s of the highest possible quality. Here, then, is our line-up, a dream festival pulled together from our writers’ highlights of the past year. It’s two days over two stages and, best of all absolutely no danger of getting some hideous water-borne disease while sleeping in a substandard tent. SATURDAY MAIN STAGEThe Prodigy: 10.00 - 11.30The Prodigy may have been going for a quarter of a century but their fire is far Read more ...