Last month, Claes Oldenburg passed away at the age of 93. Although he is most associated with the Pop art movement, his art contained a seriousness and political critique that was absent in the work of artists such as Andy Warhol where the surface was the thing. Born in Sweden but grew up in Chicago before attending Yale where he studied literature and art history and then returned to Chicago where he attended classes at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
In the early 1960s, he help popularise Happenings, art created as part of a situation, event, or performance. In 1961 he sold models of household objects “in an ironic celebration of mass consumerism,” Andy Warhol had been a customer. The mix of the spectacle from participation in Happenings and the re-production of household objects informed his “soft sculptures” that were also a critique of art history. These were large pieces of public art of objects such as hamburgers and ice cream cones, fabricated using materials that would deflate and appear limp and were subject to gravity and chance. Using materials such as vinyl and kapok rather than marble or bronze was a critique of traditional sculpture and purposefully invoked comparisons with a flaccid penis. Oldenburg was commissioned to produce public art in his alma mater, outside a library at Yale University, “Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks” (1969) was made as a satire on America’s role in the Vietnam war. London almost got an Oldenburg with his design for a new statue in Piccadilly Circus. Eros would be replaced by a cluster of 8-meter-high orange lipsticks or a skyscraper-sized pair of women’s knees. A postcard collage of Lipsticks in “Piccadilly Circus, London” (1966) is in the Tate collection.
Lipsticks in Piccadilly Circus, London 1966 Claes Oldenburg born 1929 Presented by Hannah Wilke 1972 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T01694
Oldenburg was married twice. First to Patty Mucha who helped Oldenburg produce his work by stitching together his soft sculptures. His second wife, Coosje van Bruggen, was a rather reluctant seamstress and her contribution to her husband’s work was more conceptual than Mucha’s had been. After 1981 all Oldenburg’s sculptures would be signed by them both. Van Bruggen passed away in 2009.
After his wife’s death, Oldenburg continued to produce art. A small-scale show in 2017, Shelf Life, put on work that he and his wife had collaborated on over their 32-year relationship. His later work took on a more archival nature, with Oldenburg saying “I guess I was always an archivist,” the twist being that he was now archiving himself.
David Warner, who played Henry VI in Peter Hall and John Barton’s landmark RSC production of The Wars of the Roses in 1963, has died aged 80.
Broadcast by the BBC in 1965 and released on DVD and download by Illuminations in 2016, the iconic close-up of Warner as Henry VI adorns the cover of our DVD release, The Wars of the Roses, which can be purchased from the Film Shop.
Warner’s early success with The Wars of the Roses was followed by another collaboration with Peter Hall: a radical interpretation of Hamlet at the RSC in 1965 that saw the young Danish prince become a very modern student complete with spectacles, Aran sweater, and long red scarf. In 2001 the Telegraph proclaimed him, “the finest Hamlet of his generation”.
Warner’s early success in the theatre led inevitably to a move into film. However, despite his good looks, he was never cast in a traditional leading role and this was perhaps best summed up by Warner himself when, at the ripe old age of 24 he said, “I’m really a character actor, an old man actor.” Warner went on to star in films such as The Omen, and The French Lieutenant’s Woman, worked with Alain Resnais in Providence, and starred in three films for Sam Peckinpah including, The Ballad of Cable Hogue, Straw Dogs, and Cross of Iron.
In 1972, during the production of I, Claudius and David Hare’s, The Great Exhibition, Warner suffered from stage fright and withdrew from the theatre for another 30 years. His later return to the stage was in a Broadway revival of George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara as Andrew Undershaft.
The actor’s later work on the big screen displayed a suitably eclectic and kooky filmography. Warner was often cast as the villain, such as in James Cameron’s blockbuster, Titanic. He starred as two different characters in two Star Trek films, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, with the latter film’s subtitle originating from Hamlet and including the line, “You’ve not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon.”
Other later roles included Scream 2, Tim Burton’s much-maligned reboot of The Planet of the Apes, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze. On the latter film, Warner remarked, “Now, at last, I can look [my child’s] friends in the face. When they ask me, ‘What do you do?’, I don’t have to say, ‘I’ve done a bit of Shakespeare, a bit of Chekhov.’ I can say I was in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II.”
The Car Man revs up at the Royal Albert Hall – plus competition
9th June 2022
New Adventures is staging The Car Man at the Royal Albert Hall for the first time ever. The performances, completely reimagined for the gladiatorial arena, come as part of the Royal Albert Hall’s 150th anniversary celebrations. Shows run from 9 to 19 June with an alternating cast.
COMPETITION: to celebrate we are giving away 3 copies of The Car Man on DVD, Blu-ray, or download. The competition is open until Tuesday 21st June at 5 pm. Click here to enter now!
This new production will not be recorded so for those who can’t make it but still want to be immersed in the story, we filmed the previous show in 2015, now available on DVD, Blu-ray, and digitally. Watch the trailer below!
The RAH performances feature an expanded company of 65 dancers and musicians, a live orchestra, and epic new stage designs by Liz Brotherston. These 14 performances of The Car Man are a unique opportunity to see this extraordinary production as you’ve never seen it before.
The 19th Century Spanish cigarette factory of Bizet’s Carmen is transformed into a greasy garage-diner in 1960s America where a small-town’s dreams are shattered by the arrival of a handsome stranger. Fuelled by heat and desire, the inhabitants are driven into an unstoppable spiral of greed, lust, betrayal and revenge.
Sonia Boyce in State of the Art
16th May 2022
Earlier this year, Sonia Boyce won the prestigious Golden Lion at Venice Biennale for her work, Feeling Her Way and she became the first black woman to represent the UK. Boyce was interviewed as part of our documentary series, State of the Art, originally produced for Channel 4 in 1985 and recently released on our Illuminations YouTube channel.
Sonia Boyce first came to prominence during the 1980s and her early work used chalk and pastel to make drawings of her friends, family and herself, and which can be seen in State of the Art as she explains her art, including the featured painting, She Ain’t Holding Them Up, She’s Holding On (Some English Rose).
Boyce’s work since the 1990s has focussed on collaboration, with particular attention on improvisation and spontaneous performance using mixed media. Indeed, Feeling Her Way was produced with five black female musicians who were invited to improvise, interact and play with their voices, sometimes harmonising, sometimes clashing. The video of their performances is intertwined with Boyce’s signature tessellating wallpapers and golden geometric structures featured in the exhibition.
As well as being an artist, Boyce is also Professor of Black Art and Design at University of the Arts London. Her research work focuses on art as a social practice and the critical and contextual debates that arise from this area of study.
State of the Art, in particular, episode 6 Identity has had quite the afterlife over the past 37 years. Alongside early interviews with Sonia Boyce and Lubaina Himid, the documentary also contains one of the few interviews with Jean-Michel Basquiat and one of the last filmed interviews with Andy Warhol, who died following year. The Basquiat footage has been seen in numerous TV shows, films, and documentaries, and also found it’s way into a Jay-Z music video, 4:44.
The Wars of the Roses redux
11th April 2022
The Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon is currently previewing, as Henry VI:Rebellion and Wars of the Roses, two productions drawn from Henry VI Parts 2 and 3. The plays have also been hugely important to the modern RSC, most recently in director Michael Boyd’s The Histories Cycle in 2005-08, and before that when Peter Hall and John Barton adapted them as The Wars of the Roses trilogy in 1963-64. These extraordinary productions were recorded for BBC television and are exclusively available as an Illuminations DVD box-set.
The trilogy, written early in the playwright’s career, had only rarely been played in the two centuries before Hall and Barton adapted them for the RSC. Hall was convinced that ‘the plays do not work in unadapted form’ but he recognised how their themes chimed with contemporary political events, shaped by ambition and corruption, just as they do today.
On the stage the productions were a huge hit, and the BBC approached a television version with the intention, as BBC executive Michael Bakewell put it, of ‘finding a new way of presenting Shakespeare on television… What was intended for The Wars of the Roses was to recreate a theatre production in television terms – not merely to observe it but to get to the heart of it.’
All three plays were recorded in the RSC’s theatre in Stratford, in part at least because John Bury’s steel-deck monster of a set could not be transferred to a conventional studio. Half of the seats in the stalls were removed and replaced by a wooden platform for the cameras and sound booms. The effect, as Bakewell recalled, ‘was ‘to convert the Royal Shakespeare Theatre into a television studio… and so to adapt the stage that our cameras could involve themselves as deeply as possible in the action.’
One of the greatest glories of The Wars of the Roses as a television recording is that it captures an ensemble of astonishing actors giving exceptional performances. Watch Janet Suzman as Joan la Pucelle, Peggy Ashcroft as Queen Margaret berating Donald Sinden’s York, and David Warner’s King Henry agonizing during the ‘molehill’ speech, and you are seeing some of the most glorious, intelligent and moving Shakespearean acting for the screen.
The Wars of the Roses on DVD exclusively from Illuminations
The Matthew Bourne Collection boxset
2nd November 2021
We are delighted to present TheMatthew Bourne Collection, a new 5-disc boxset on DVD and Blu-ray that brings together five landmark Bourne productions from 2015 – 2020.
The beautifully presented boxset showcases the very best of New Adventures’ award-winning dance performances and celebrates 30 years of choreographer Matthew Bourne’s thrilling and evocative reinterpretations of classic, much-loved tales.
Bourne’s trademark storytelling is coupled with designer Lez Brotherston’s magnificent sets and costumes, and dazzling performances are accompanied by music played by the New Adventures Orchestra.
Captured on film at London’s Sadler’s Wells Theatre, each show reflects the exhilarating sense of interaction in live performance between the audience and dancers on stage, exquisitely adapted for the screen.
Each bestselling DVD and Blu-ray includes an additional Making of film featuring interviews with cast and creative members.
Like other Matthew Bourne products, DVD and Blu-ray versions of The Red Shoes feature a fabulous additional 30-minute film, The Making of The Red Shoes. Behind-the-scenes footage and interviews with cast and creative members offer a wonderful peek behind the curtain of this fabulous performance.
The double Olivier Award-winning show is Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of obsession, possession, and one girl’s dream to be the greatest dancer in the world. Victoria Page, played by Ashley Shaw who won a National Dance Award for her performance, lives to dance, but her ambitions become a battleground between the two men who inspire her passion: the composer Julian Craster played by original cast member Dominic North, and legendary impresario Boris Lermontov, with the great Adam Cooper in the role.
Filmed at Sadler’s Wells in 2019, Matthew Bourne’s The Red Shoes is a triumphant adaptation of the legendary 1948 feature film by Micheal Powell and Emeric Pressburger.
Set to the achingly romantic music of golden-age Hollywood composer Bernard Herrmann, The Red Shoes is orchestrated by Terry Davies and performed live by the New Adventures Orchestra, with cinematic designs by Lez Brotherston, lighting by Paule Constable, sound by Paul Groothuis, and projection by Duncan McLean.
Matthew Bourne’s The Red Shoes is available for order here.
Barbara Hepworth: Art & Life
14th June 2021
The Hepworth Wakefield is marking their 10th anniversary by organizing the largest exhibition of Barbara Hepworth’s work since the artist’s death in 1975. Our film on Barbara Hepworth, The Art of Barbara Hepworth, is available as a DVD or download.
The exhibition, “Barbara Hepworth: Art & Life”, will offer an in-depth view of Hepworth, from the modern abstraction of her earlier career to her iconic strung sculptures of the 40s and 50s. It will, in their words, “reveal how Hepworth’s wide sphere of interests comprising music, dance, science, space exploration, politics, and religion, as well as events in her personal life, influenced her work.”
“Barbara Hepworth: Art & Life” was called by the Financial Times as, ‘an unmissable spring art show,’ and The Observer described it as ‘invigorating, envy-inducing.
Our documentary, The Art of Barbara Hepworth was filmed at Yorkshire Sculpture Park alongside Tate St Ives, where Hepworth had a home and gallery, and the Barbara Hepworth Museum. The film uses the artist’s own words, drawn from interviews and letters to reveal her thinking and philosophy behind her art, alongside commentary from curators Penelope Curtis, Chris Stephens, and Hepworth’s son-in-law, Sir Alan Bowness.
The exhibition runs from 21st May 2021 – 27th February 2022 and is free for members.
You cannot hold back spring
22nd March 2021
As we slowly exit our third lockdown and see the rapid roll-out of vaccinations, we can – whisper it – start thinking about returning to a non-Zoom-oriented reality. The Royal Academy and Tate Britain are feeling that optimism with both galleries announcing exhibitions involving artists we have films about, David Hockney, Francis Bacon, and William Hogarth.
The Royal Academy will host an exhibition of David Hockney’s artwork created on his iPad over lockdown. Appropriately called, David Hockney: The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020, it is centred around 116 new and optimistic works in praise of the natural world. The show opens on May 23and closes on 26 September 2021. Our three films about Hockney are part of the Art Lives series exploring the artist’s life and work.
Tate Britain hosts Hogarth and Europe from 3 November this year. The exhibition places Hogarth in the wider context of Europe and examines how he addressed the new modernity of the 18th Century. It closes on 20 March 2022. Our 51-minute Art Lives film about William Hogarth, narrated by Andrew Graham Dixon, reveals how he was one of the most original British portraitists best known for his satirical etchings.
Finally, The Royal Academy opens with a major exhibition at the start of 2022, Francis Bacon: Man and Beast, which explores Bacon’s fascination with animals and how they both shaped his approach to the human body and distorted it; how, caught at the most extreme moments of existence, his figures are barely recognisable as either human or beast. The show runs from 20 January – 17 April 2022.
We have two films in our collection: The Art of Francis Bacon, which documents his ideas, his influences, and his work, is complemented by recordings of his own words by Derek Jacobi. Narrated by Melvyn Bragg, Frances Bacon, also in our Art Lives series, examines the ways in which Bacon revolutionised figurative painting in the 20th Century.
In the meantime, whilst we wait to get back to our beloved art galleries, Illuminations has released a range of its exhibitions and collections documentaries for digital download.
We’re pleased to offer a very special 25% discount on download orders during February and March. It’s to celebrate spring and is our way of bringing world-class dance to your screens in the comfort of your own home.
We know it’s tough that theatres are still closed but audiences still need to be entertained and, thankfully, we have a wonderful array of Matthew Bourne’s celebrated productions that we can share. Specially-filmed at Sadler’s Wells, Cinderella, Romeo + Juliet, The Car Man and Swan Lake are available for digital download purchase with this limited-time discount.
Quote code SPRING25 to redeem your discount between the dates given and click on the title of your choice below to purchase your download.
During the past year, New Adventures has also created new digital content following government guidelines for safe working. The beautiful duet below is from Cinderella.
Filmed in December 2020 in the empty auditorium of Sadler’s Wells Theatre, it was released on Valentine’s Day to the delight of audiences. The Bedroom Duet in the clip is performed by Cordelia Braithwaite and Andrew Monaghan.
The full film version of Cinderella, captured in front of live audiences on the same stage in 2017 with full staging, costume and in front of a packed auditorium, is available now through this offer.
