‘Overall unfathomable’ A UK premiere inaugurates the Barbican’s autumn/winter Theatre & Dance season with a co-commission from Pam Tanowitz Dance. Having toured New York and Luxembourg, the piece marks a unique conjoining of choreographer Pam Tanowitz (the company’s founder), Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw and visual artist Sarah Crowner. The best way I have found to understand the piece (having ...
‘Porterian Frankenstein’ Good things are said to come in threes: meals, times of day, the very structure of literature. And yet the Furies are three – bloodthirsty, vengeance-seeking, wild – so make of that what you will. The Barbican is certainly hoping for the former. Anything Goes returned twice and moved to the West End, and Kiss Me, Kate was ...
‘A thousand butterflies’ “Florals? For spring? Groundbreaking!” Despite snippy Devil Wears Prada quotes, it really is. Anne-Sophie Mutter in a voluminous flowered dress celebrates her 50 years on stage, hacking away at the violin, as fresh as a daisy. The programme is passionate, precise and wide-ranging. A bit for everyone, as we watch slack-jawed as such a petite, pointed woman makes such ...
“Two performers at the very pinnacle of their game” “Encore” is the better-bred version of screeching “one more song” while drunk at a concert. Yet to be treated by the “greatest living string player” Maxim Vengerov and the piano spectacular Polina Osetinskaya to four of them seems to be sheer gluttony. It’s a chance to throw a curveball, a break ...
“I’m ready to weep” BBC Symphony Orchestra At the tail end of the Barbican’s Fragile Earth season, we are presented with an idealised vision of America’s past and a stark warning about its (and the world’s) future if the climate crisis is not averted. Aaron Copland wrote three ballets between 1938 and 1944. The final one was for the modern ...
‘Eventual pleasure singularity’ We were only one hour into the eight-plus we had planned at the Barbican Sex Festival and had already hit a roadblock. Wandering around the stained and uncomfortably beautiful clothes of the exhibition Dirty Looks, and coming face to face with a gigantic photograph of a trussed-up vagina (by Michaela Stark), the Bonnie to my Clyde turned ...
‘More man than Pan’ So, Christmas is undeniably here, isn’t it? Halloween held it off for half a month, and then the igniting of an alleged 16th-century traitor slowed it some more. But those sleigh bells were always tingling through the month of October, rather menacingly in the background. Of course, it is the Barbican that confirms it. J.M. Barrie’s ...
‘A tale of two cities, and a story of two shows’ Something that has been flashing around in my skull for a couple of weeks refusing to fit neatly into a review format, but will now be expunged into a feature that will encompass two. I sit here, gazing into one larger screen, with a smaller one clamped to my ...
‘Prefect addition to the glowing riot of culture and glitter that is Pride’ Right, I’ll hold up my red-nailed hands. This review is shamefully late, but your reviewer is but a simple homosexual. A man hopefully a little unlike you, considering all the effort I put into rampant individuality-but a human nevertheless. Drinking, overindulging, struggling through the subsequent Pride bacchanal, ...
‘Show political films politically, and queer films queerly’ Like the vibrating water glass as the T. Rex thumps along in Jurassic Park, Pride unrolls its stomping boots, ready to rampage across the country. But does it have to be only frozen daiquiris, ageing pop stars, and endorsements from arms dealers? The Barbican (and I) say no! So, we, the artistic ...