East End Review

Author: East End Review

Draw talent: Shoreditch art school holds exhibition of work by artists aged 10 to 18

Part of a piece by Shoreditch-based 14-year-old, Ananda. Photograph: Royal Drawing School

Drawing, said David Hockney, helps you put your thoughts in order and can make you think in different ways.

If that is true then drawing should be an attractive proposition for young people trying to make sense of their impending adulthood and the world around them.

Next month the Royal Drawing School will be displaying 250 drawings by members of its Young Associates Programme.

These budding artists are all aged 10–18 and for many it will be their first chance to show work in a professionally-curated public exhibition in Shoreditch.

Axel Scheffler, illustrator of The Gruffalo, one of the most popular children’s book of recent times, was impressed with the work on display at last year’s exhibition, but warned the artists that becoming a professional takes dedication.

“It took me a long time to become an illustrator. I had work constantly after leaving college but it took 13 years as an illustrator before The Gruffalo came along,” he said.

However, Scheffler describes drawing as a “brilliant human activity” and says children should start drawing “as soon as they can hold a pencil”.

“The younger you start the better you will become,” he says. “Drawing is just a great activity to establish a relationship with the world. You observe what’s outside but you can also express what’s inside you and try lots of different techniques.

“For a young person hoping to become an illustrator I would recommend they draw as much as possible and another thing is to be curious about how other people draw.”

Judging by some of the works set for inclusion in the show, the standard looks to be high, with portraits and observational drawings in a range of styles.

The Royal Drawing School was set up in 2000 as the Prince’s Drawing School to address concerns that drawing was falling off the map as an essential skill for art students.

Supported by the Prince of Wales, it received its ‘royal’ title in 2014. At the time Grayson Perry said: “In the 21st century – with all our amazing digital technology – drawing remains a skill that is as important and relevant as ever.

“We don’t have a USB port in our head and drawing is the most direct way we have of expressing our visual imagination to the outside world.”

Royal Drawing School Young Artists Exhibition
Until 29 September
Royal Drawing School
19–22 Charlotte Road
EC2A 3SG
royaldrawingschool.org

August 25, 2016
Isolation Chamber Vacation, Transition Gallery, preview – Alone time

The Champagne Suite, from Juno Calypso’s series The Honeymoon. Photograph: Juno Calypso

Solitude is something humans both crave and fear – seemingly in equal measure.

Nineteenth century transcendental philosopher Henry David Thoreau spent two years alone in a lakeside cabin in Massachusetts.

Recounting his experiences in his seminal work Walden, he wrote: “I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”

Yet fear of isolation and ‘ending up alone’ created a cultural icon for our times in Bridget Jones. And once heard, who could forget the mournful croon of country singer Hank Williams as he sings: “I’m so lonesome I could cry”?

So which is it to be? This month an exhibition at Transition Gallery explores solitude in all its manifold forms: its horror-filled connotations of madness and perversity on one hand, and its elevated status as a tool for creative genius on the other.

Curator Sarah Cleaver has been researching the subject ever since watching the film Paris, Texas, immersing herself in the subject through the work of Thoreau and reclusive American writer Henry Darger, and starting a Tumblr to document her findings.

“When I first started researching I thought maybe it was going to be a book,” says the 28-year-old.

“But when I started realising the amount of visual aspects to it I realised an exhibition would work quite well.

“Paradoxically it’s a project about being alone but it works better with other people.”

Isolation Chamber Vacation features the work of five artists as well as various ephemera from Cleaver’s research such as artists’ books, letters, back issues of magazines and a ‘library’ of recommended reading.

Juno Calypso’s photographs are self-portraits in which she adopts the fictional character, Joyce. For her series The Honeymoon, the artist posed as a travel writer and spent a week alone at a couples’ only honeymoon resort in Pennsylvania, with a suitcase full of wigs and wedding lingerie.

Kirsty Buchanan will be displaying a series of drawings made in ‘private spaces’: so whilst taking a bath or in bed.

“I’ve known her for a long time, and we would talk a lot about women’s rituals and men’s fear of what women do behind closed doors, so diaries, cosmetics and that kind of thing,” Cleaver says of Buchanan.

Other artists in the exhibition include Nicola Frimpong, whose watercolours Cleaver describes as “kind of Marquis de Sade-esque orgies”, whilst filmmaker Hannah Ford will be screening a piece inspired by period dramas and the idea of the young unmarried woman who has to stay at home with her parents. Katernina Jebb will be showing a print from a series on sex dolls which touches on technology and how we use the internet.

Alongside the art, there will be film screenings of Repulsion (1965), Paris, Texas (1984), Morvern Callar (2002) and In The Realms of the Unreal (2004). There will also be talks, with speakers including Mary Wild, an expert on film and psychoanalysis who will be talking about aloneness in horror films.

Cleaver believes now is a pertinent time to be looking at solitude in greater detail, given the influential of digital technology on our lives.

“I think there is a kind of fear about how connected we all are yet how we’ve managed to isolate ourselves, the fact you can get in contact with anyone you like from your bedroom basically. I hear a lot of people talk about how technology has made them lonelier.”

She admits that she herself revels in solitude, saying: “I love to be alone.” But she warns of this attitude proving a “trick”, particularly among artists.

“I love to be alone but also think there’s a lie to solitude,” she says. “And that is, if I get rid of enough people then I’ll produce something wonderful.

“That’s as much of a trick as anything else, it’s just another method of procrastination for a lot of artists.

“You know, I could do this if I didn’t have a family, I could do this if I didn’t have a partner. So I’m into that idea too, that it’s kind of fetishized and kind of a myth that lot of creatives like to talk about.”

Isolation Chamber Vacation
2 September– 2 October
Transition Gallery
Unit 25a Regent Studios
8 Andrews Road
E8 4QN
transitiongallery.co.uk

August 25, 2016
Jidori, Dalston, restaurant review – View-a skewer

The bar at Jidori. Photograph: Mary Gaudin, Design: Giles Reid Architects

Jidori had been piquing my interest ever since it first opened. Walking by on Kingsland Road, I couldn’t discern the cuisine, but the warm, soft lighting beckoned, and through the glass pane I could see the tables were full, with pairs of casual diners chatting at the wooden bar, the whole dining space framed by blue-grey walls lined with crockery and plants. The cuisine is contemporary Japanese, and when I finally walked in for dinner, TLC’s ‘No Scrubs’ started playing whilst I was served a Yuzu lemon slushy margarita. All my pleasure centres lit up at once, as if an algorithm somewhere was running to ensure maximum appeal to a broad, urban 30-something demographic.

In fact, the responsible parties are Brett Redman and Natalie Lee-Joe, restauranteurs and co-founders. Redman has opened several popular places in London, of which I’ve only been to the Pavilion café in Victoria Park, a very different type of venue but again, one that knows its market very well. Whereas the Pavilion serves free-range breakfasts and craft beer, the vision for Jidori is yakitori – a casual type of Japanese cuisine centred on chicken skewers, cooked on a charcoal grill and washed down with copious amounts of booze. Although there are nice vegetarian highlights, I wouldn’t recommend eating at Jidori if chicken isn’t your thing.

The tsukune, with cured egg yolk. Photograph: Aaron Tilley

The menu is quite small and we had most of it, starting with the katsu curry Scotch egg, which, in the final reckoning, was a well-executed Scotch egg, but a Scotch egg nonetheless, so not exactly a rarity in Hackney. I then had a simple bowl of chicken broth. Broth well done is lovely and understated. This had depth and flavour and was as clear as glass, indicating the stock was simmered slowly and never came to the boil. Next, the omakase, a tasting platter for two, which for £18 each allowed us sample most of the skewer menu. Chicken thigh and spring onion; aubergine and miso butter; chicken hearts and bacon; king oyster mushroom; and tsukune: minced chicken on skewer (think the consistency of kofte), dipped in raw egg yolk. The mushroom, hearts, and tsukune stood above the rest. The set menu included rice and pickles. It was supposed to also include an onsen egg, but this never materialised. We finished off with the ginger ice cream with miso caramel, which is a serious dessert and unmissable.

Jidori is certainly not the only, or the most authentic, yakitori in London – perennial favourite Jin Kichi in Hampstead comes to mind – but it is inviting and cheerful, with attentive service. It is also good value – even with drinks you can eat there for less than £20 a head. With this winning formula, there may well be more restaurants to come from Redman and Lee-Joe.

Jidori
89 Kingsland High St, London E8 2PB
jidori.co.uk

August 25, 2016
Shadow Optics at Lubomirov/Angus-Hughes, Clapton: Things falling apart

An excerpt from Solveig Settemsdal’s Segment I.I.

The art world today is so vast that it’s impossible for any one individual to have a complete understanding of everything that’s going on at one moment,” says the gallerist Iavor Lubomirov.

Lubomirov is director of Lubomirov/Angus-Hughes in Lower Clapton, which describes itself as a “charitable venue for curators” rather than a traditional gallery.

“Commercial galleries tend to have a stable of artists they show regularly big institutions are usually looking retrospectively at artists careers, so that puts us in a unique position,” he says.

Shadow Optics is the gallery’s latest venture into curation. It brings together four relatively unknown artists and is curated by CJ Mahony, a sculptor who runs an archaeological project space in Cambridge.

“She’s interested in things that have a sense of delicacy about them so as if they’re about to fall apart, barely holding together, and she’s also interested in light (which is fairly common among artists anyway). It’s these two themes she’s trying to bring together in this show.”

Among the artists featuring in the exhibition is Solveig Settemsdal, whose work exists in a hinterland between drawing, sculpture and photography. She uses materials that are easily affected by their surroundings – giving sculpture an almost liquid quality.

“I think if you at Solveig’s photos they’re fascinating because you have no idea how they’re created or what they are but there’s a sense of things floating in outer space or underwater,” says Lubomirov.

“It could be like an atomic explosion it could be an organic animal or an alien – whatever it is it looks like it’s about to float away and you’ve caught it at this precious moment of existence.”

The group show also includes work by Georgie Grace, whose videos look into technological change and our tolerance for flickering light.

A still from Georgie Grace’s Shedding.

And Reece Jones makes drawings that start off whimsical but which undergo repeated application and removal until they evolve into a finished image that is difficult to define.

“Of course the thing is these are artists who are not represented by our gallery or who are necessarily going to be seen together again, Lubomirov says.

“It is a moment that will come and then disappear.”

Shadow Optics
3–25 September
Lubomirov/Angus-Hughes
26 Lower Clapton Road
E5 0PD
lubomirov-angus-hughes.com

August 24, 2016
Blue Pen, film preview: Breaking the silence

Dorothy Lawrence as Sapper Dennis Smith.

A female journalist who disguised herself as a soldier and travelled to the front on a bicycle during the First World War is the inspiration for a film premiering next month at Hackney Picturehouse.

Blue Pen focuses on ten women journalists whose voices have been silenced through censorship, confinement in institutions and abuse.

Although largely set in the present day, the film’s title refers to the wartime government’s practice of censoring letters and reports from the front.

“I was considering the number of women journalists who are disappeared and executed to this day,” says Julie McNamara, the artistic director of Hackney-based theatre company Vital Xposure.

“So we began to make an experimental short film looking at censorship and blue pen, and Dorothy Lawrence’s story was the springboard.”

When the war broke out, Dorothy Lawrence was 19-year-old aspiring journalist brought up in the care of the church by a guardian whom she later claimed had raped her.

Although very few journalists were allowed to the front Lawrence felt she had every right to report on the war, and – in the era of the suffragettes – believed there was nothing a woman couldn’t do.

“She got the boat to Calais, bought a bicycle and then cycled to the front line,” says McNamara.

“Everyone she met along the way thought it was a jolly jape and that she’d never make it.”

Arrested by French police two miles short of the front line, she was ordered to turn back. Then in Paris she befriended a group of soldiers in a café. She persuaded them to smuggle her a uniform piece by piece and teach her how to march.

Lawrence arrived at the front in perfect disguise and enlisted under the name Sapper (Private) Dennis Smith. But two weeks later a young soldier wanting to earn his stripes “dobbed her in it”.

“All hell was let loose. She was investigated and of course they suspected she was a spy. Then they thought she was a ‘camp follower’, the term they used for legalised prostitutes working on the front line.”

The silencing of Dorothy Lawrence took various forms. Her writings were heavily censored, to the extent that she was never taken seriously. She was also threatened with court martial (even though women couldn’t serve in the armed forces) and placed in a nunnery in France, before being escorted back to Britain.

By 1925, Lawrence’s dreams of Fleet Street looked increasingly remote. Her heavily censored book Sapper Dorothy Lawrence: The Only English Woman Soldier flopped commercially, and after confiding to a doctor that her church guardian has raped her she was taken into care and later deemed insane.

She was committed first to the London County Mental Hospital and then institutionalised at the Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum in Friern Barnet. She died at Friern Hospital in 1964 and was buried in a pauper’s grave in New Southgate Cemetery.

“Blue Pen is more an art film than anything else and is not a dramatic film,” says McNamara.

“It begins with truth of Dorothy Lawrence’s story and creates in the audience’s mind an atmosphere of Dorothy Lawrence’s interrogation and what became of her.

“It then moves on to give ten names from the last decade who have each been disappeared, the majority executed, and so the final question you’re left with is: what is it with the dangerousness of women telling the truth?”

Alongside the premiere of Blue Pen, the launch will also include a screening of Emma Humphreys the Legacy, a documentary short about a teenage sex worker who spent ten years behind bars for killing her boyfriend and pimp, whose case eventually changed the law for those in abusive relationships who kill.

There will also be a panel discussion and live music from Lorraine Jordan, a singer-songwriter who wrote Anna’s Song, a tribute to assassinated Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya.

Blue Pen launch event
6 September
The Attic, Hackney Picturehouse
270 Mare Street
E8 1HE
picturehouses.com

August 24, 2016
Grimeborn Festival, Arcola, review: ‘excellent programme of rarities and standards’

Roger Paterson and Nick Dwyer perform in Mozart and Salieri at Grimeborn Festival

The Grimeborn festival is an amazing venture: over seven weeks the visitor to the Arcola can see – if they’ve got the stamina – 16 shows for as little as £10 a throw (with a ‘passport’).

As implied by the tongue-in-cheek name, it is no luxurious experience; but it succeeds in getting opera back to its experimental roots.

Consider Fire Ring, a genuine rarity – a 1930 opera produced by London Armenian Opera (which makes it sound like we have been missing a large repertoire all these years). In truth, the music in this opera is not that great with a repetitive style.

The plot is a puzzle and does not reveal why such ill-starred lovers from opposite sides of the conflict should bond so deeply. But the production has tremendous brio, not least from the spirited chorus who stand Greek-like above the fray.

Mozart and Salieri is a gem. Peter Shaffer’s play is well known as is the overacted film Amadeus, but few realise these pieces derive from this short opera by Rimsky-Korsakov with a libretto by Pushkin.

With such talented progenitors, it is no wonder that the original has a humanity and gentleness that the more theatrical variants don’t have.

The medium of opera works so well as the music gradually shifts back and forth between Rimsky-Korsakov’s long tones and sharper Mozartian passages. Depending on just two singers (outnumbered by the three instrumentalists), it keeps an intimate tone.

Grimeborn still needs to deliver the standards, the operas that people have heard of that get bums on seats. These productions come with danger in that they are intended for the opera house, but in the Arcola large voices can drown everything out, as Natasha Jouhi does in title role of Tosca, and where the single piano can make the opera sound like a silent movie.

In fact, pianist Richard Leach brings out the tenderness in Puccini’s music, and Stephen Aviss as has a classic tenor voice, which he reins in carefully. The production is spare, but it does not matter. Why all the dry ice – surely the Napoleon’s cannons are a long way off?

The Marriage of Figaro is even more of a stalwart and Opera24 & Darker Purpose deliver a solid production that conveys the right amount of energy and delivers the necessary comic timing. There is no need for much of a set though; the imaginary doors being opened are a bit irritating.

The parts are clearly sung – the loose English translation produced vernacular phrases that made the audience laugh. The star of the show is Sofia Troncoso as Susanna, who has a supple voice and acting ability.

For a bit of silliness, The Perfect Picnic, with its send up of opera and the middle classes, starts well. But the jokes wear thin – it could have been done in an hour like other short pieces in Grimeborn’s excellent programme.

Grimeborn
Until 10 September
Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, E8 3DL
arcolatheatre.com

August 23, 2016
Chatsworth Road festival to return for a fourth year

Heaving: the festival attracted over 10,000 visitors last year. Photograph: ChatsFest

Popular Hackney festival ChatsFest is back for a fourth consecutive year on Saturday 10 September.

The event, organised and funded by the local community, sees Chatsworth Road closed to traffic for what is known locally as a “good ol’ knees-up”.

Organisers expect a street party atmosphere, with all the activities, including live music, boxing, a bouncy castle and even a dog show, provided free of charge.

The festival was revived in 2013 following a 34-year hiatus, and last summer attracted more than 10,000 people.

Local resident Allan Parker, who is one of ChatsFest’s co-ordinators, said: “I was born and bred in Hackney and this festival very much represents everything I love about this community.

“The different generations and cultures, all coming together to create something positive, it makes me very proud to be from this area.

“ChatsFest has grown immensely over the three years but has kept the community at its heart.”

Amaria Braithwaite, a local resident and winner of CBBC’s Got What It Takes, is to perform live ahead of a special Mercury Music Prize-nominated headliner.

Entertainment: musicians drum up support from the crowd. Photograph: ChatsFest

A newly-added Community Stage will feature Hackney’s emerging talent, including local choirs and drum ensembles.

Award-winning street food vendors such as Hoxton Beach, Sugarshack, Pie Cart and Hanoi Kitchen will provide festival-goers with a delicious backdrop.

Drinks will also be available at the cocktail and beer bars.

ChatsFest is a family-friendly event featuring plenty of activities for children. There will also be a bike hub for cyclists and a range of community stalls from local organisations such as Hackney Winter Night Shelter.

For more information about the festival, visit the Chatsworth Road website.

August 23, 2016
London’s Olympic Legacy – book review: ‘spruced up field notes’

Author Gillian Evans outside the Olympic stadium

What lasting benefits did East Londoners seek from the 2012 Olympics? What were we promised? What have and will we receive? These are questions that have been pondered ever since planning for the Games started in 2000.

Sixteen years and two mayors on – and four years after the Games themselves – it is possible at last to begin to take stock and patch together a verdict.

The London Olympics were from the start sold as an opportunity to regenerate East London in a sustainable and inclusive manner.

In 2007 Tessa Jowell, then minister in charge of this mega-event, promised to “make the Olympic Park a blueprint for sustainable living”.

Mayor Ken Livingstone, for his part, maintained that “the most enduring legacy of the Olympics will be the regeneration of an entire community [East London] for the direct benefit of everyone who lives there”.

Little by little, however, many of the idealistic goals that motivated those involved the early phases of legacy planning were eroded in the face of a sharp economic downturn, government cuts to public spending and a change in the political complexion, first of the London mayor and then of the government at Westminster.

Gillian Evans’s volume London’s Olympic Legacy: The Inside Track provides an account of this process based on participant observation.

Though Evans – an academic anthropologist at the University of Manchester – has published the book with an academic imprint, it is written in an engaging narrative style as a chronicle of her insider view of the planning process.

Evans was embedded in the bodies responsible for legacy design from 2008 to 2012.

She recounts both the ebullience and commitment of those involved in developing plans for the Olympic Park and surrounds after the games, but also their frustration as governing structures (‘delivery vehicles’) changed and swerving political priorities unstitched years of work.

Though the volume is compelling in the dramatic style of its presentation, which is quite atypical of most academic monographs, it is in many ways an intensely frustrating book, as it reads more like spruced up field notes than a coherent analysis.

The study lacks the conceptual framing that might help readers make sense of the broader social and structural forces that shaped the evolution of legacy thinking, or the norms and role understandings that informed individuals’ visions of what they were trying to achieve.

Another underwhelming aspect of the volume is that the main narrative ends abruptly in 2012, before legacy delivery had got underway in earnest. The brief ‘afterward’ provides a sketch of the some of the achievements and failures of the delivery process, but not an overall assessment of the extent to which the original promises were kept.

This worm’s-eye view of someone working alongside Olympic legacy planners has produced invaluable documentary evidence of the evolution of thinking about how East London could and should be reshaped in the post-Olympic period, but it would have benefited tremendously from more in-depth analysis.

London’s Olympic Legacy: The Inside Track is published by Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN: 978-0-230-31390

August 23, 2016
World musicians to descend upon Barbican for Transcender festival

Whirling dervish: Meshk Ensemble are to perform at the Barbican as part of the Transcender weekend

The Barbican’s Transcender weekend has become a firm favourite in London’s contemporary music events calendar over the past few years.

Returning next month for its eighth edition, the four-day concert series aims to explore the many different facets inherent to transcendental music from across the globe.

This year’s event features musicians from Morocco, France, UK, Iran, Turkey and the United States.

It will open at Milton Court Concert Hall with two contrasting performances.

The Master Musicians of Jajouka have been performing their unique folk music for generations, but first came to prominence in the West after much promotion from artists such as Brian Jones and Ornette Coleman.

The Master Musicians will be followed by Marouane Hajji, a vocalist from Fes, who performs devotional songs in the Sufi tradition.

The Moroccan theme is carried through into the second day – this time at LSO St Luke’s – with an exclusive collaboration between British electronic producer, James Holden, and Mâalem Houssam Guinia – a leading musician of the Gnawa music tradition.

This collaboration will be mirrored by another, that between Étienne Jaumet, Sonic Boom and Céline Wadier, all of whom will be paying a drone-induced tribute to American composer, La Monte Young.

Electronic music maestro: James Holden

Saturday will see the focus shift onto the Barbican Hall for a double bill that reflects on the different aspects of the Persian poet and scholar, Rumi.

The Iranian singer, Parisa, who last performed in London over ten years ago, will be bringing a fresh, lyrical approach to Rumi’s mystical poems.

Turkey’s Meshk Ensemble will follow suit with their ritualised interpretation of the sema ceremony, put to revived compositions from the Mevlevi repertoire. Directed by Timuçin Çevikoglu, this will be the ensemble’s UK debut.

The festival will close on Sunday night with a rare performance by Texan duo, Stars of the Lid. They will be combining their highly processed ambient tones with intricate lighting and animated projections.

Texan duo: Stars of the Lid

Speaking to Barbican’s Contemporary Music Programmer, Chris Sharp, I asked what he looked for when putting on an event as eclectic as Transcender. “The whole idea was to try and juxtapose different musical traditions and suggest that there are connections between them,” he said.

“For example, the common human impulse – to escape the everyday and move into a place where time slows down – has been central within religious music, going back hundreds of years, if not longer.

“A lot of contemporary music, from club-based electronic music to stoner rock, explores similar ideas around repetition and gradual change. We try and distribute our attention around the world. This year there is quite a lot of Moroccan music, which we haven’t done in the past.

“And at the same time, we’re looking for interesting collaborations between contemporary artists who have different approaches to music making.”

Transcender
29 September – 2 October
Barbican Centre, Silk Street, EC2Y 8DS
barbican.org.uk

Sarah Yaseen of Rafiki Jazz. Photograph: Ayse Balko

August 22, 2016
Floating Cinema comes to Hackney Wick flyover this weekend

Coming soon to a flyover near you: Floating Cinema. Photograph: Up Projects

This weekend (19 – 21 August) will see a Floating Cinema moor underneath the A12 flyover in Hackney Wick.

The award-winning structure, designed by Duggan Morris Architects, will play host to a three-day festival of open-air film screenings, workshops and talks, all under the theme of ‘World Cities’, considering London’s place in the world.

Tickets are booking up fast for a variety of documentaries, films, talks and a guided walk through Hackney led by Kit Caless of Hackney-based publisher Influx Press.

Available screenings include the “documentary meets participatory opera” Public House, about how a pub in Peckham was saved from the hands of property developers and became the first Asset of Community value, and Half Way, a film about a family in Epping forced into homelessness.

Daisy May Hudson in documentary Half Way. Photograph: Nick Pomeroy

The weekend festival will also see DJs, free popcorn from Propercorn, craft beers from local Five Points Brewing Company as well as a series of drop-in events over the course of the weekend.

For further information on tickets and events, see: http://floatingcinema.info/events/2016/world-cities

August 19, 2016