‘Come up and see my Schieles.’ Those were the words that ended a friend’s fledgling relationship with an art collector. One evening looking at Egon Schiele’s skinny naked scarecrows was enough. Staging Schiele, a one-act dance piece by choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh, is unsettlingly faithful to the spirit of Schiele’s art. If the skin creeps, if
In 2011 Britain’s first skyscraper was finally given Grade I listing. The citation for 55 Broadway — the Gotham City-ish home of Transport for London, which sprouts up from St James’s Park Station — said that the building was important in a number of ways: its architect Charles Holden, the designer of Senate House and
Grade: B- Horribly woke boilerplate slogans welded inexpertly to the usual incompetent Crazy Horse grunge. Young and his pick-up band of now 50-years standing usually work well together — as on Zuma, Everybody Knows This is Nowhere and even Ragged Glory. But that’s when there were a few decent songs in the mix, stuffed with
Grade: B– Kanye West has found Jesus Christ. Lucky old Christ. If I were Christ I’d have hidden out a while longer, frankly, but there we are. The most lauded (mysteriously) performer in the world right now wishes us to believe that he has been reborn, as a kind of cross between Billy Graham and
Were those gerberas in Francesca Hayward’s bouquet on opening night? Gentlemen admirers take note: no woman, ballerina or otherwise, has ever welcomed a bunch of gerberas. Hayward deserved better for her adorable Dorabella in Enigma Variations. In white flounces and gathered bloomers she lighted the stage with sprightly sweetness in Frederick Ashton’s one-act ballet set
One of Lucian Freud’s firmly fixed views about himself was ‘I’m not at all introspective’. This was, like many opinions we hold about ourselves, both true and not true. Perhaps it was more that he did not want to look within: his gaze was directed outwards. Lucian had trained himself to see everything — animate
Deep in the guts of Russian library stacks exists what remains — little acknowledged or discussed — of a dead and buried atheist dream. The dream first took shape among Russian radicals of the mid-19th century, to whom the prospect of mass atheism seemed the key to Russia’s salvation. When Lenin seized power in 1917,
Manon: minx or martyr? There are two ways to play Kenneth MacMillan’s courtesan. Is Manon an ingénue, a guileless country girl, pimped by her own brother and corrupted by Monsieur G.M.? Or is she a pleasure hunter, a man-manipulator, a schemer out for all she can get? In the Royal Ballet’s revival of Kenneth MacMillan’s
Grade: A– The outlaw country genre has shifted a little over the decades since Waylon and Willie, with each proponent trying to out-badass each other, the guitars getting louder, the lyrics either more obtuse or (in the case of David Allan Coe) more obscene. This takes it all one stage further. I don’t think Sound
Sixteen years into a stop-go production saga, I got a call from the director of The Song of Names with a suggested script change. What, said François Girard, if one of the two protagonists was perhaps, er, not Jewish? My reply cannot be repeated. I was, for a minute or so, completely speechless. My novel,
Grade: D+ Pleasant memories — of hearing ‘Raw Power’ for the first time and later the amiably shambolic chug of ‘The Passenger’. And of watching my daughter, aged ten, dragged along to some open-air concert where she danced, an ingenue, to ‘Cock In My Pocket’. At least I hope she was an ingenue. All gone.
At present we have a series of ‘culture wars’ over a wide range of issues — race, gender, sexuality, power and privilege. But the one culture war we don’t have any more is over culture. Yes, we fight about the ideological messages of literary texts, but not about matters of personal taste. We scrutinise and
Hit them with your best shot? Or save the best till last? Almost 30 years after Alvin Ailey’s death in 1989, his dance company still ends every night with Revelations, an autobiography in ballet and gospel music. First danced in 1960, and presented at Olympic opening ceremonies and presidential inaugurations, Revelations remains an electrifying piece.
The figure is back. Faces stare, bodies sprawl, fingers swipe, mums clutch, hands loll. The Venice Biennale was full of it. After decades of being pushed to the margins, figurative painting is once again dominating the art world. Peter Doig, Alex Katz, Chris Ofili and Jenny Saville head the sales at auction houses, but there
Grade: B+ Get the razor blades out, Ms Misery is back. Only the truly affluent can immerse themselves in such morose and earnest introspection. Listen to the music of Africa’s most benighted countries and, on the whole, you will hear very cheerful fellows. Not so with the USA. Lana, a middle-class New Yorker of some
Grade: B+ I’m not sure about ‘Projects’. Aren’t those what ageing rockers produce, in a haze of sedatives, when their ego finally outgrows their talent? In classical music, there’s something unseemly about the idea of Maestro X condescending to bestow their attention upon music that is — or should be — bigger than they’ll ever
The Bright Stream is a ballet about a collective farm. Forget everything you know about collectivism — the failed harvests, the famines — this is Soviet agriculture without mud or hunger. The Bright Stream, which opened in Leningrad in 1935, was Dmitri Shostakovich’s attempt to write a ‘socialist realist’ ballet. Our heroine is Zina (Daria
The old observatory on Edinburgh’s Calton Hill may be the most favourably positioned art venue in the world. Recently resurrected by a group called Collective, the space, with its panoramic views and Enlightenment history, is an ambitious and imaginative addition to Edinburgh’s art scene. In their Hillside gallery there’s a firing-range warning sign on the
Grade: B- So a queen dies as her giant baby is being born. The baby grows very big indeed and soon everything in the universe is inside his necessarily large head. One day he sacrifices himself to save his subjects from a deluge of snow. The townspeople cut off his head and preserve it in
It’s togas-a-go-go as the Bolshoi bring Yuri Grigorovich’s 1956 ballet Spartacus to the Royal Opera House. Oh dear, I did giggle. This is Spartacus in spandex with gladiatorial G-strings and slave girls dressed for Thracian strip shows. On comes Crassus (Artemy Belyakov) in the Roman empire’s tiniest tunic with a legion of soldiers swinging their