Features
Paul Higgins
A man and a woman live in a hole in a forest. We don’t know how they got there, though a homespun ceremony they perform suggests some kind of loss. She has difficulty leaving the hole, while he, a creature of the forest, ranges freely, foraging for food, steering clear of the rest of humanity until an emergency forces him to visit a nearby town. We realise, though the couple are British, that we’re in France. A local farmer recognises the man and the story begins to unfold.Though I always wanted to play the man, I wasn’t sure the film would work, the premise being so strange. The first Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
With the 50th Brighton Festival taking place this year, Festival CEO Andrew Comben meets theartsdesk for a chat about the original 1967 event, and its relationship with this year’s Festival. Comben has been the Brighton Festival's overall manager since 2008, also overseeing the Brighton Dome venues all year round. He shares the festival’s curation this year with Guest Director Laurie Anderson.We meet in his office in the centre of Brighton. I start by mentioning that the great 20th century violinist Yehudi Menuhin played the 1967 Festival. Comben goes across the room and pulls a silver- Read more ...
Martin Longley
Since its UK debut in 1982, the WOMAD festival (World Of Music, Arts & Dance) followed its uncertain first steps and early threat of bankruptcy with a swift consolidation and expansion. By the time its first decade had passed, WOMAD was busy spreading around the globe, spawning alternative manifestations in Spain, Italy, New Zealand and the UAE. Not all of these were successful: attempts to colonise the USA eventually failed (Seattle, San Francisco), but along with the long-established twin Spanish weekenders, they have enjoyed a remarkable longevity with WOMADelaide, the Australian Read more ...
Thomas Rees
Basket-making is one of the world’s oldest and most universal crafts. It predates pottery by thousands of years and features in tall tales from the very beginnings of recorded history. According to a creation myth from ancient Mesopotamia, the Babylonian god Marduk made the earth from wicker scattered with dust – and since then many lesser beings have constructed traps, shields, furniture and storage vessels by weaving together whatever plant or animal fibres they had to hand. The Iñupiaq people of Alaska even made baskets from baleen, the bristly filtering material found in the mouths of Read more ...
Martin Longley
The Tectonics festival concept began in Iceland, 2012, created by the Israeli conductor Ilan Volkov. Although, loosely speaking, it’s concerned with a modern classical programme, there’s a peculiar aspect to Volkov’s orientation that lends a special quality. Much of his chosen music is devoted to environmental shaping, stasis, ambience, stately processes, repetition, and a general questioning, if not confrontation, of the accepted staging stance, and sometimes volume, of a performance. Volkov’s players and composers are frequently interested in jazz, rock, electronic and improvised sounds, Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Tad Doyle was the mainman in grunge first-wavers Tad, who helped to put Seattle firmly on the rock’n’roll map in the late ‘80s with such fine discs as God’s Balls, Salt Lick and 8-Way Santa. He’s now back in action and back on the road in the UK and Europe with his new outfit, Brothers of the Sonic Cloth: a sludge rock beast whose self-titled debut album showcases some truly heavy music with real soul.GUY ODDY: I remember seeing your first group, Tad, on the first Nirvana tour of the UK in 1989 and to be honest, I thought that you were the more entertaining act. Did it frustrate you that you Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Films, TV and books about autism often send me down memory lane; my older brother Timothy was one of the first children in the UK to be diagnosed with autism in the early 1960s, and I’ve kept a wary eye on how autism is portrayed ever since I can remember. But I wasn’t expecting the new BBC One drama, The A Word, to inspire a wave of nostalgia for Peter Perrett and The Only Ones, last seen at some grungy punk venue back in the late Seventies.The first episode of The A Word opens with a wonderful shot of a little boy (Max Vento, pictured below) stolidly marching along a hilly country road Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Marc Rees (b 1966) is an interdisciplinary artist-performer from Wales whose works are renowned for imaginitively mixing media, as well as for their underlying sense of fun. Over the years he has been based in Berlin, Amsterdam and Canada, and now runs the collaborative arts company RIPE (Rees International Project Enterprizes). He has worked with international talent such as DV8 Physical Theatre, Brith Gof and German dancer-choreographer Thomas Lehman, and has, in recent years, presented pieces ranging from Adain Avion, a contribution to the Cultural Olympiad of 2012, which involved Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The dazzling, controversial, fascinating exhibition In the Age of Giorgione at the Royal Academy inadvertently provides a striking example of an unavoidable and perhaps insoluble problem common to almost all exhibitions of painting – especially those with a high proportion of loans – in public museums and galleries.A significant number of the paintings on view, including several of the Giorgiones at the heart of the visual essay being presented, not to mention works by Dürer and Bellini, are visually vandalised. The image is disfigured and its proportions distorted by a horizontal dark shadow Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
With the death of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies from leukaemia at the age of 81, the UK has lost the most prolific composer of his generation, as well as one of the most passionate advocates for art music.Maxwell Davies, known universally as Max, wrote for every classical genre under the sun. Stevie’s Ferry to Hoy is played today by children and piano students the world over. With a simple melody of unaffected charm and satisfying rhythmic games playing just beneath the surface, the piece is as characteristically Max as the unrelenting orchestral churn of Worldes Blis, the gay and sentimental Read more ...
David Nice
"Just listen". That's an imperative, of course, but it can be a very fair and reasonable one if the tone is right. It was Claudio Abbado's encouragement to his Lucerne Festival Orchestra players to make chamber music writ large. It also sounds persuasive and not at all militant coming from the mouths of ENO chorus members as their plea to the dramatic changes proposed by Chief Executive Officer Cressida Pollock, appointed a year ago. But listening to all levels of the company is something she never did in the first place, which is why, with two petitions running respectively way above 5,000 Read more ...
Fran Robertson
Situated next to the beautiful Welsh Harp reservoir in North London, the West Hendon council estate was built in the 1960s to provide 680 homes to low income families. I first went there in November 2014. I had been following various housing stories around London and had heard about an estate where residents were fighting a multi-million pound regeneration which was forcing them out of their homes and where land valued at £12 million had been sold to developers for just £3.The day I went to the estate, representatives of the private developers, the architects and the council had set up a mini Read more ...