feminism
theartsdesk
There were female pioneers of photography before Christina Broom, most notably Julia Margaret Cameron. And others have hidden their light under a bigger bushel: Vivian Meier's body of work remained stashed away only to be discovered after her death. Broom's importance is partly one of timing: she prowled the streets of London at a time of great historical significance. As suggested by Soldiers and Suffragettes, the title of a new exhibition and book celebrating her work, she was a witness to the struggle for universal suffrage and the First World War.Her career starrted late. In 1903, at the Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It takes a particular combination of talent, guts, perseverance and sheer bloody-mindedness for an artist to take the creative decisions that Thea Gilmore has across her approaching 20-year career and get away with it – thankfully, all qualities that the Oxford-born songwriter has in spades. Since the release of her debut album, Burning Dorothy, when she was still a teenager, Gilmore has won admirers ranging from Bruce Springsteen to Joan Baez, re-recorded an entire Bob Dylan album, pioneered fan-supported songwriting and even flirted with the UK Top 40 on her 14th album.If you thought that Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Almost two decades into a distinguished career, nobody would have judged Thea Gilmore for indulging herself with a greatest hits collection – indeed, it’s something that record labels have been bugging her about for years. Album number 15 Ghosts and Graffiti is perhaps intended as a compromise – part new songs and part old favourites, featuring an all-star cast of collaborators and reinterpreted with the same affection and irreverence the singer-songwriter recently brought to Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding and the lost lyrics of Sandy Denny.Two of the songs from Don’t Stop Singing Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The trouble with the general election is that while everybody talks about money, nobody talks about ideas. We know the price of everything, but the value of nothing. This might seem to be a triumphant demonstration of the essential pragmatism of the nation, yet there was a time in English history when ideas mattered. And when they were passionately discussed, and bitterly fought over. I’m referring to the English Civil War of the 1640s, and its aftermath when king Charles I was beheaded, an era explored by Caryl Churchill in her 1976 docudrama.Now revived in a large-scale production by Read more ...
fisun.guner
This is work that wears its heart on its sleeve. That’s what gets you in the end in this big retrospective of the work of Niki de Saint Phalle. The French-American artist, who died aged 71 in 2002, is probably best known for two very different bodies of work: her Shooting paintings, the series of collaborative performances in which she and others blasted paint-filled polythene pouches with a rifle, creating chance-based abstract paintings as the sacs burst over the white-plastered canvases they were attached to; and her exuberant Nanas, a nimble, tippy-toed troupe of gargantuan women, fat- Read more ...
David Nice
All Savoyards, whether conservative or liberal towards productions, have been grievously practised upon. They told us to expect the first professional London grappling with Gilbert and Sullivan’s eighth and, subject-wise, most problematic operetta in 20 years (23, if the reference is to Ken Russell’s unmitigated mess, one of English National Opera’s biggest disasters). Yet this is not Princess Ida as the pair would recognize it.In what turns out to be director Phil Wilmott’s “performing version”, the dramatis personae is essentially reduced by at least six characters of note, numbers are Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
If the mark of a good documentary is that it teaches you something new, then the awkwardly titled Hillary Clinton: The Power of Women was a very good documentary indeed. For instance, before watching it I had no idea that the famous “women’s rights are human rights” speech given by the possible 2016 presidential candidate was “the beginning of the cry for women’s rights across the globe”; and it was certainly a surprise to discover that the 2002 invasion of Afghanistan was not merely in service of a “war against terror” but rather “a war against the barbaric treatment of women”.The format Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Earlier tonight, I read - on Twitter, so I’m not vouching for its accuracy - that more people have now signed a petition to reinstate Jeremy Clarkson at the BBC than to take stronger action against female genital mutilation (FGM) in the UK. FGM, as actress Zawe Ashton (Fresh Meat) quickly finds out in a moving documentary for Comic Relief, is a hard thing to talk about, because vaginas are hard to talk about. But as she looks further into the practice both in the UK and abroad - speaking to survivors, activists and even a "cutter" - Ashton discovers that education is already beginning to make Read more ...
Katie Colombus
For the headliners of the Women Of The World Festival at London's Southbank Centre, there is less feisty feminism put on for show than you might expect. It's a nod to how far things have progressed - that other than the obligiatory thanksgiving for "being a loud woman on a stage of loud women plus a man who loves women", it's strength of self belief in the artists of tUnE-yArDs that lets us know what they believe in - and it's truly inspiring. It's testament to their credence that they are this strong in themselves, their musical talents, their creativity and their confidence to be able to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There came a moment, around three years ago, when MyAnna Buring suddenly seemed to be in everything. "I'm so sorry!" she shrieks (ironically) when I point this out to her. She had given warning of her arrival by appearing in Ben Wheatley's Kill List and, rather more prominently, as Tanya (who as you'll know was a vegetarian vampire from the Denali coven) in the concluding pair of Twilight films. Then Buring popped up in BBC One's Blackout, was Edna the Maid in Downton Abbey (where she brazenly set her cap at Tom Branson), flitted across our screens in ITV's The Poison Tree, and materialised Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Woman to Woman, the second solo album from Denver songwriter and former Paper Bird front woman Esmé Patterson, has an origin story almost as interesting as the music. Teaching herself to play Townes Van Zandt’s “Loretta” during some down time on tour, Patterson found herself getting frustrated at the song’s depiction of a passive bar-room girl so in awe of the great songwriter that she drops everything any time he passes through and “don’t cry” when he’s gone. She put down her guitar, picked up her pen and the result was “Tumbleweed”: a funny and furious riposte in which Patterson, playing Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The single spacious room that is the central location of Tena Štivičić’s 3 Winters has seen plenty of ghosts. It’s part of an old Zagreb mansion, and through the course of the play witnesses the diverse events of Croatian history of the last 70-odd years played out in miniature. Three overlapping time-schemes chart the full rotations of surrounding society: from the war-end move towards Communism in 1945, through 1990 eve-of-break-up Yugoslavia, and on to 2011, not long before EU accession. We may not literally see anything on either side of these three eras, but the action is implicitly Read more ...