John Wyver writes:To the Barbican for Tesseract, a dance piece in two halves that played from Thursday to Saturday on the main stage. It’s the creation of filmmaker Charles Atlas and dancer-choreographers Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener, all three of whom worked with Merce Cunningham, and the piece was presented both as part of the Barbican’s Life Rewired season and in proximity to the arts centre’s celebrations of Merce’s centennial.
There were all sorts of echoes of the great choreographer’s work here, but the results were disappointing, as Lyndsey Winship’s Guardian review suggests and as is laid out in the coruscating comments by Anna Winter for The Stage: ‘a production bound up with pretension, straining towards po-faced notions of sci-fi “dimensionality”, “imagined architectures” and “interstitial spaces.” It’s an onslaught of self-indulgence that feels emotionally moribund and horribly interminable.’ For the record, this is a bit harsh, but for me the main interest was in the role of the Steadicam and its operator as a dancer.
Following yesterday’s list of recent links to interesting articles about photography, here’s another pull-together, this time of pointers to pieces about the medium formerly known as television. The wonderful image of the early television studio at Alexandra Palace was posted online recently by the delightful Twitter feed Ally Pally ‘Museum’; do follow them here.
Until quite recently I posted a list of links each Sunday of stuff that over the previous week I had found interesting or intriguing. The format had its fans (including, most weeks, me) but a combination of other calls on my time and a worry about a lack of focus meant that I stopped the practice. I’ve been wondering whether a more fruitful form might be occasional assemblies of links about specific topics – and that’s what I’m going to try out over the coming weeks, starting today with a clutch about the pasts and futures of photography. The image above is of Cauleen Smith’s slide projector installation Space Station Rainbow Infinity, 2014, discussed in the first link below. (Credit: Tomas Mutsaers, International Film Festival Rotterdam)
Tomorrow night, Friday 1 March, BFI Southbank, under the title ‘European Connections’, begins a rich season of British television productions of classic European plays. A time there was when both the BBC and ITV produced exceptional presentations of drama from the theatrical repertoires of France, Germany, Italy and beyond – and there are several great examples on offer. Henry IV tomorrow reminds us that Luigi Pirandello wrote a play with the same title as the far more familiar pair from the pen of William Shakespeare, and the signs are that this exceptionally rare screening starring Paul Scofield (above) will be a revelation. (Frustratingly I can’t get to the BFI for the showing, but I’m hoping to find another way to watch this – if anyone goes, could they record a thought or two below?)
We may have been neglecting the blog – and once again we’ll try hard to do better – but nonetheless we’ve been busy in the past months. Looking forward, here are details of a clutch of forthcoming events involving Illuminations and our productions: a panel at BFI Southbank, dance screenings at BAC (including Hofesh Shechter’s Clowns, above), a symposium about scripts in Exeter, the next RSC Live from Stratford-upon-Avon presentation, the cinema release of our screen version of Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake, and the publication in June of John Wyver’s book, Screening the Royal Shakespeare Company: A Critical History.
Links to articles and videos that have engaged me over the past week and more, starting with three essential Brexit-related essays. With thanks to those who alerted me to many on Twitter and elsewhere.
• How the Brexiteers broke history: brilliant from Richard Evans for the New Statesman, both demolishing myths and arguing for the importance of historians:
In our age of “alternative facts” and “post-truth”, where opinion seems all and evidence is pushed aside in the interests of partisanship, manipulation of the past to fit the political agendas of the present has become all-pervasive. Historians, whatever their views on current events, need to call out those who would prefer to create myths rather than respect what actually happened.
If the UK were to withdraw helter-skelter from the European Union on 29th March 2019 without an agreement… It would be the beginning of a disorderly reconstruction of the British constitution and legal system, the British economy, and Britain’s place in the world.
Britain and America, Brexit and Trump, are inextricably entwined. By Nigel Farage. By Cambridge Analytica. By Steve Bannon. By the Russian ambassador to London, Alexander Yakovenko, who has been identified by Special Counsel Robert Mueller as a conduit between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. The same questions that dog the US election dog ours, too.
Links to articles and videos that have caught my eye in the past week or more – thanks, as always, to those on Twitter and elsewhere that drew my attention to them.
• The fashion photography of Marilyn Stafford – in pictures: glorious images by the photographer who worked with Paris Haute Couture houses in the 1950s and took iconic images of ‘swinging London’ in the following decade. Courtesy of the Guardian and exhibitions at the Hull International Photography Festival, now finished, and Lucy Bell Gallery, Hastings, until 17 November; for more, see the Marilyn Stafford website. Above, a detail from ‘Paris Prêt-à-Porter 1960 on a rainy day’.
I’m not very concerned with tracking down their factual accuracy. That’s an important task, but I want simply to study what [Wayne] Booth might call the rhetoric of nonfiction. By looking at each book’s plot structure (yes, they have plots) and narration, I want to understand how narrative analysis can help us better understand what counts as ‘reliability’. Fortunately for my purposes, the books nicely illustrate three different models of storytelling.
Links to articles and videos that have caught my eye over the past week or so – thanks, as always, to those who alerted me to many of them.
• A long overdue light on black models of early modernism: a good Roberta Smith review for The New York Times , giving you a vivid sense of visiting the show, of what looks like a fascinating exhibition, Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today, currently at Columbia University’s Wallach Art Gallery but coming (expanded, and with Manet’s ‘Olympia’) to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris next summer. Above, a detail from Frédéric Bazille’s ‘Young Woman With Peonies’, 1870, from the National Gallery of Art, Washington. For more, here’s a short video with curator Denise Murrell:
• Six glimpses of the past: for The New Yorker (of course), Janet Malcolm is rather marvellous on photography and memory (and the sixth section, about her father, is especially touching).
• Pots, pans and pondering in Chardin’s domestic scenes: for Apollo, Kathryn looks carefully, and writes wonderfully, about two companion pieces by Jean-Siméon Chardin, ‘The Cellar Boy’ and ‘The Scullery Maid’, in the Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow.
Links to articles that attracted my attention in the three weeks (apologies!) since the last of these columns, plus the occasional video. There are some especially strong film-related articles this week. Many thanks to those who recommended many of these pieces to me on Twitter and elsewhere.
Such is the publicity hype around the film, and so sacred is the cow of the Great War in its centenary moment that nobody seems to have noticed how horribly distorted and ludicrous Jackson’s tarted-up images look.
• Happy Family, 1952,on BFIPlayer: …and (in the UK at least) here you can find Muriel Box’s debut feature, set during preparations for the Festival of Britain.
I have written a book (well, almost) – and now that it is on Amazon and the website of the publisher Bloomsbury – I feel I can make a modest announcement. Publication is not until next June, but it has a cover and a blurb (reproduced below) – and a very expensive price, which is essentially for hardback sales to academic libraries. I am hopeful that in due course there will be a rather more affordable paperback. In the meantime…
Here’s the blurb:
No theatre company has been involved in such a broad range of adaptations for television and film as the Royal Shakespeare Company. Starting with the Stratford Memorial Theatre company’s version of Richard III in 1910, these continue today with the highly successful RSC Live from Stratford-upon-Avon cinema broadcasts. Among the iconic productions have been The Wars of the Roses (BBC, 1965), Peter Brook’s film of King Lear (1971), Channel’s 4’s epic version of Nicholas Nickleby (1982) and Hamlet with David Tennant (BBC, 2009).
Drawing on interviews with actors and directors, The RSC on Screen explores this remarkable history of collaborations between stage and screen and considers key questions about adaptation that concern all those involved in theatre, film and television. John Wyver is a broadcasting historian and the television producer of Hamlet as well as of RSC Live from Stratford-upon-Avon, and so is uniquely well-placed both to provide a vivid account of the RSC’s television and film productions as well as to contribute an award-winning practitioner’s insights into screen adaptation’s rich potential and numerous challenges.
Meanwhile, the manuscript contains just over 103,000 words – and I am contracted to deliver 90,000. That’s one of my challenges for the coming few weeks.
