Issa Samb was born 1945 in Dakar (Senegal), and lives and works in Dakar.
“Samb is considered a total artist. His practice ranges from acting – for both theatre and cinema – writing (poetry, essays, novels), installing, performing, painting and sculpting.
The only media that he has not explored so far is photography, maybe because of his persistent aversion to technology. Except for the radio, Samb does not use what he calls modern technological devices that according to him kill the magic of human interaction. So when you want to talk to him, you go to see him. When you want him to read a paper, you print it and bring it to him; or even preferable, you write to him by hand.”
The Institute of International Visual Arts (Iniva) is currently presenting the first solo exhibition of Samb’s work in the UK. Issa Samb: From the Ethics of Acting to the Empire Without Signs is curated by Koyo Kouoh of Raw Material Company. Kouoh, quoted here, has worked closely with the artist on several projects and curates this exhibition of Samb’s work which provides a unique opportunity to experience his sculptural and graphic works and consider these in relation to his live actions with which they are intimately linked.
The exhibition also focuses on Samb’s collaboration with French artist Jean Michel Bruyère which extends from their friendship that has continued over several years both in Europe and in Africa.
This exhibition follows a research trip to Samb’s atelier in Dakar in September 2013, and builds on the conversations that took place with the artist and the curator at that time.
The project forms part of Practice International, an EU-supported project that explores the term ‘international’ through the work of contemporary artists and in relation to the politics of globalisation.
Issa Samb: From the Ethics of Acting to the Empire Without Signs is at Iniva, Rivington Place EC2A 3BA until 26 July. www.practiceinternational.org
East London filmmaking duo Phil Maxwell and Hazuan Hashim’s latest documentary, to be screened at the East End Film Festival this month, started in the Pride of Spitalfields pub. A friend put them in touch with somebody in Soho, a ‘real character’. One minute they were in the pub, the next, as Hashim puts it, they “were out in Soho interviewing a man called Harvey Gould”. Their documentary takes Maxwell and Hashim away from East London and into the heart of Soho. “It was a challenge because we were out of our comfort zone,” said Hashim. Thankfully they were with a “proper Soho native”. Gould, born in 1927, who grew up in Wardour House, “wants his story out there”. Maxwell adds: “He has an extraordinary memory and really remembers how the place has changed over the years.” Gould took Maxwell and Hashim on a personal tour of his London, weaving his narrative and memory with beautiful shots of Soho. Gould tells how, after the war, he used to run lemonade to Trafalgar Square to sell to the GIs. Hashim and Maxwell also got access to an old prostitute parlour overlooking Berwick Street market, “which still had the red light outside”. Maxwell and Hashim point out that plenty of films have highlighted Soho’s sex trade, but they wanted to show a different side to Soho. Maxwell says: “Harvey says the prostitutes were always very friendly. They were just an integral part of the community. Harvey accepted it. Soho is always changing. It’s a place that has always evolved to the pressures of being in central London.” Hashim adds that Gould used to paint wickets on the walls in the alley ways of Soho. “The traces are still there,” Hashim says. The documentary is not just interested in present narrative, then; it is about the traces of an older London, kept alive by one man’s memories. Hashim and Maxwell had “difficulty keeping up with Harvey”, a man who moved with the energy of a younger man. “He just really wanted to tell his story,” Hashim says, adding that Gould is now “living with cancer”. When asked if this gave the film a sense of urgency, Maxwell said yes, but was keen to point out that Gould “was really relaxed and wasn’t one of these people who felt sorry for himself. He wouldn’t let a disease curtail his enthusiasm for life”. Hashim and Maxwell’s documentary might have been “outside of their comfort zone” but they have found a lot of similarities between the areas. “East London and Soho, they’re villages,” says Maxwell. Their new documentary is a celebration of community, memory and a city that is constantly renewing itself. Harvey’s Soho will be showing at the Rio Cinema on 22 June as part of the East End Film Festival.
It’s hard to introduce Chick Corea without getting mired in hyperbole or desiccated by lists. Briefly risking both: he was a key figure in Miles Davis’ electric excursions of the late 1960s, was at the forefront of the ensuing nascent fusion movement with his band Return To Forever, and has continually innovated in both solo and group contexts since then, bringing to bear flamenco and twentieth century classical influences onto both acoustic and electric jazz. He has also won twenty Grammys in the process.
At the heart of all of this has been his relationship with the piano; no matter how many analogue synths and MIDI patches he used over the seventies and eighties he is principally a pianist, and it was a solo piano date that brought him to the Barbican. Solo piano was good for two reasons. Firstly when multiple jazz statesmen take to a stage together the result can sometimes be stifled by their collective reputations as much as the audience’s stratospheric expectations. Secondly, given that much of his oeuvre has been electric, it was an opportunity to hear him in an unadorned and relatively transparent context.
Despite the gravitas of solo piano in a big concert hall, he was keen not to make things too formal. An impish Chick mounted the stage, his Saga Holiday issue beige velcro trainers belying his seemingly perpetual effervescence. Having exhorted us to imagine we were in a small club, it wasn’t long before he’d shown us some jazz hands standing on one foot, played Bartok over the PA from his mobile phone, and invited audience members up for duets.
The theme for the solo gigs, Chick explained, was a revisiting of various pieces he’d found influential, either in themselves or through being connected to him by the musicians who had popularised them. In doing so there would be an inevitable reinterpretation as he filtered them through the prism of his musical life over the last 50 years, together with a night-by-night re-honing during the series of solo gigs.
Things started with Van Heusen’s ‘It Could Happen To You’ – a tune popularised by Miles Davis. This saw lithe right hand lines shimmering on maudlin chord inversions. The right hand strand kept afloat in Jobim’s ‘Desafinado’. This had a non-brittle delicacy and almost holographic iridescence, as loud pedal releases created staggered, slowly decaying harmonics. Ellington’s ‘Sophisticated Lady’ saw some dense reharmonisation but with Chick circumventing the knots with trademark playful exuberance. This is Corea’s genius. He can present dense harmonic ideas and abstruse chord voicings, but 99 per cent of the time things are entirely digestible. He leaves enough space for the peaks and troughs of tension/release to settle and be fully absorbed.
This carried on in the next piece: Bill Evans’ sublime ‘Waltz for Debby’. Only partially resolved left hand chord inversions built up an ill-defined wanting, before the right hand salve instantiated the famous melody. All this was given time to crystallise and the resolution button wasn’t pushed too soon. We got there, but after a slow ascent and a sustained subtle release.
There was then a percussive nod to Thelonius Monk – with his right foot audibly keeping time through Monk’s ‘Work’ – and an unexpected liaison as Stevie Wonder’s ‘Pastime Paradise’ segued into Chopin’s ‘Opus 17 No 4’. Muted staccato runs and harp like glissandos were allied in Corea’s own ‘Yellow Nimbus’, a piece dedicated to flamenco legend Paco De Lucia and quite possibly the cigarettes that eventually killed him. His own ‘Children’s Songs’ then got an airing – somewhat subdued given that they were to encapsulate children’s energy – before two London locals Hossam Ramzy (darbuka) and Tim Garland (sax) joined for an encore.
None of the evening was marred by any of the aforementioned high expectation. In being condensed into a succinct form, Corea’s omniscient content saw him focus half a century of jazz history into nuanced and articulate pieces that were all highly digestible. This by no means meant a lack of substance, and his panoptic interpretations yielded plenty of complexity to ruminate on, just without the need for the slug of Gaviscon that a lot of jazz with meat on it requires. It was a privilege to be in the same room as this man and a piano. History is still being made, fifty years on.
Worth their salt: bagels prepared on Brick Lane. Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval
Where better to pursue the curious history of the bagel than Hackney? Far from its apotheosis in the modern New York Deli, this enigmatic ring bread has been made, revered, and consumed by people of many faiths in many lands from ancient times to the present day. In Hackney we have East End bagel bakeries producing thousands of them every day, alongside equally committed Turkish bakeries with their delectable simit and other braided or plaited breads, all part of the same family.
A bagel has been defined as a doughnut with rigor mortis, or more accurately as the Roll with a Hole, and perhaps too much has been made of the hole, its metaphysical and corporeal potential exploited in jokes and anecdotes.
The distinguishing features of the bagel are its shape: a ring of bread with a hole in the middle, and the cooking technique: a preliminary boil in salted water before baking in a hot oven. A yeasted dough made with white wheat flour is shaped by hand into rings which when they have risen are dunked in a cauldron of boiling water, taken out after 30 to 40 seconds, allowed to dry, then baked. The preliminary boiling gives the bagel its firm chewy texture and dense tough crust. “Munchy firmness” as an enthusiast put it. Cheap mass-produced versions, made with a blast of steam instead of boiling, to save time and effort, have the disappointingly fluffy texture you might expect. Avoid them.
Pretzels are made in a similar way, the intricate knotted strips of dough are first treated with lye (caustic soda) or boiled in water with bicarbonate of soda, then baked. The preliminary treatment gives the surface a sort of glazed effect, a salty sweetness and a crunch, that is irresistible.
But neither of these methods are specifically Jewish, they have been deployed all over Western and Eastern Europe for centuries. Roman soldiers marched on their conquests with buccellatum, rings of twice-cooked bread that were hard and unyielding to eat, but kept well. You could soak them in water and eat with anything, like ship’s biscuits which are also twice cooked. In Puglia in the south of Italy taralli are a much-loved snack surviving from the Middle Ages. They are rings of dough, made in the same way as bagels, but cooked to a hard crispness, and made to last, unlike bagels which are best gobbled up straight out of the oven.
Medieval paintings of the Last Supper show ring-shaped breads on Christian tables. In the 1650s Suor Maria Vittoria della Verde, a nun in an enclosed convent in Perugia, wrote down a recipe for ciambelle affogate, drowned ring breads, in her kitchen notebooks, recognisable as what we call bagels. Bartolomeo Scappi, master cook in the papal kitchens in sixteenth-century Rome, had a recipe for boiled then baked ciambelle.
For centuries the East End of London has been home to waves of immigrants, French Huguenot weavers and Dutch merchants. From the 1880s Hackney has been home to immigrants from Poland and Russia, joined in the 1930s by Jews escaping persecution by fascist regimes. By then the bagel had become an iconic Jewish bread in Warsaw, evolving from a luxury white bread for the privileged to a much-loved cheap snack for the many, and cherished here in London as a memory of home and a tangible token of solidarity and comfort.
The historian Maria Balinska in her book The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modern Bread has unearthed the fascinating history of the bagel as iconic Jewish comfort food and its migration to England – and to New York – from Poland in the nineteenth century. The bagel had a big part in the development of trade unions in New York where the battles of Local 338 to secure decent working conditions for bakery workers was a critical phase in labour relations. But by the 1960s the millions of them consumed daily were supplied by massive out of town factories, steam-baked, not dunked in boiling water, like the traditional product, but sliced, frozen and distributed far and wide. This mechanised bagel became emblematic of New York’s vibrant deli culture, and now the ‘bagelisation’ of America has given it a universal identity.
Bakeries like the ones on Brick Lane and the Kingsland Road area are survivors from the time when the population was predominantly Jewish, and are now selling wholesome old-fashioned bagels to an appreciative cross-section of the borough’s multi-racial residents.
Brick Lane has perhaps an over-hyped reputation for food from the Indian subcontinent, but it’s also home to a huge spectrum of food from other faiths and climates. An austere and sophisticated Nordic eatery rubs shoulders with the long-established Beigel Bake at number 159 where visual appeal is nil and warmth and friendliness a huge plus. You wait in a line with passing strangers, beautiful but bewildered Japanese visitors, and determined elderly food historians from Stokey along with eager gastro-tourists and their guide, all rubbing shoulders amicably with tolerant locals, patient to wait their turn for freshly baked bagels filled with lox and cream cheese, or massive portions of salt beef. A similar establishment flourishes amicably two doors down.
It is quite a contrast to another 24 hour bagel bakery on Ridley Road, supplied by Mr Bagels, a hugely successful company that makes industrial bagels for wholesale or retail sales, prepared in frozen or partly cooked form, using mechanical shaping and steam baking methods.
Halfway up Stoke Newington High Street is The Bagel House, with good bagels with a wide range of fillings, and space to enjoy them. Further north is a small, less hyped bakery, with Turkish pastries and breads as well as bagels baked on the premises. It seems to satisfy the wide range of customers at the bottom of Stamford Hill, but its Turkish products are more satisfactory than the rather mild bagels, which are not what our nostalgia calls for.
You really do have to go to Brick Lane to experience the tough love of the real genuine bagel, chewy and resistant to most molars, freshly baked and smelling of yeast and flour, perfumed by the whiffs of gherkin, lox and salt beef, that lurk within. Get there now, stand in line, and bite into a fragrant chunk of East End history.
Gillian Riley is the author of The Oxford Companion to Italian Food, published by Oxford University Press.
Cyberbullying, email scams and the frequent inaccuracy of Wikipedia are familiar online hazards, but what about the small matter of headspace?
Certain professions are thrown into confusion in a world where there is infinite space for images and information, where facts (accurate or otherwise) can be accessed at a keyboard’s patter, and where it can at times seem impossible to cope with the sheer possibilities promised by the web.
Journalists are obvious losers in all this, but pity the humble archivist whose tedious world of carefully cataloguing documents and photographs in some fusty, dimly lit storeroom has been rent asunder by the advent of the digital age.
The question of which of the quadzillions of photographs out there to include in the East End Archive, a new and evocatively named repository of photographic images being assembled by a small team from the Sir John Cass Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design, is thus pertinent.
It is addressed thoughtfully in Susan Andrews’ introduction to the various articles in this book, which has been produced as a companion to said archive.
Before we go any further, though, let’s get one thing straight. This ‘archive’ is a website. A website with photos on it. The fact it is described in grandiose academic terms is symptomatic of the excruciatingly ambiguous artist-speak one is frequently forced to endure while reading this book.
Even the sub-title, Imagining the East End, suggests a distinct lack of imagination. But putting this – and cringe-worthy references to Foucauldian discourse – to one side, there are some worthwhile insights contained within its pages.
Nicholas Haeffner has a good riff on ‘fetishised’ images of East End poverty, and there is an interesting interview with Tom Hunter about family photographs that tell affecting stories about memories of life in the utopian Woodberry Down Estate.
There is also interesting discussion of how exactly to define the East End.
But by far the best thing in this book are the photographs, like those from Susan Andrews’ fantastic series Up and Down Whitechapel High Street. Which raises the question of why the authors did not keep their words to a minimum to let the snaps speak for themselves.
Photography, after all, is what their wider project is about.
Archive: Imagining the East End is published by Black Dog Publishing. RRP: £14.95. ISBN: 9781908966377
Rolling with the times: Russell Frost gets ready to make a print. Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval
Slowly but surely, technology is becoming effortless. A toddler can use a computer these days, and as a species we’re used to all manner of machines which would have baffled our forbears.
But for Russell Frost learning about technology works both ways. His hobby, which has evolved into a passion, is letterpress printing, which from its invention by Johannes Gutenberg in the 1450s until the mid-twentieth century, was the primary method used for all things printed, including the Bible and the Complete Works of Shakespeare.
Frost is part of a letterpress revival, a craftsman who sees value in this old technology and who wants to exploit its artistic potential. His workshop in Leytonstone contains several well-travelled presses, each with their own individual mechanisms.
“I don’t live in the past,” he assures, “but I love aspects of the handmade and the way they did things.”
Frost grew up in a remote, mountainous part of New Zealand and trained as a landscape architect before becoming a “professional fly fishing guy” for six years. Now 40, he lives in Leytonstone with his wife and daughter and is trying to make a go of it selling his prints.
“Someone gave me a business card that had been letterpress printed which sort of got me thinking,” he says, explaining how he started out. “As a fly fishing guy I had my own little company and wanted to print my own vouchers so I made my own block, carving it gung ho with a dentist’s drill.”
Frost shows me a Vandercook proofing press, the gold-standard for artisan letterpress work. The ‘form’, blocks of type locked together into what you want to print, goes on the bed of the press. Then you apply ink using a roller before passing paper over it on a rotating cylinder. My effort smudges, but the visual definition and crispness is far superior to what I get from my Laser Jet at home.
Frost’s prints lend themselves to word play and visual gags. One of his latest editions shows a leaping salmon with the text: “Smoking cures.” The pun is a satirical nod to vintage advertisements and true in a culinary sense. Another print bears the slogan “Give me hops” in a homage to craft brewing. There’s often some historical association, or reason for using a particular font: when we first met, at an exhibition next to Leytonstone station organised by Transport for London, he was allowing members of the public to make a print using the original London Underground font.
It’s surprising how readily printers abandoned the letterpress, which had served us well for so long, once offset and digital printing came along in the twentieth century. Old presses were dumped in woods, sold for scrap metal or burnt on bonfires outside print works. Beautiful sets of type in Frost’s collection are badly charred, and one press he bought in Wellington he discovered had been used for toasting marshmallows at Christmas.
But letterpress printing lives on, not only through people like Frost, but in the very words we speak. A ‘chase’ is a steel frame that the type goes inside before being printed. From it is derived the expression ‘cut to the chase’. A piece of type is called a ‘sort’, from which we get the term ‘out of sorts’. It makes you wonder how many technological expressions we use today will be in circulation long after that technology has moved on.
Russell Frost is resident artist this month at The Hawkhurst Vault 240 Brick Lane, E2 7EB.
Phoebe English is a young womenswear designer who has gained recognition for her contemporary yet organic aesthetic, which grew in part out of a keen interest in experimental construction techniques and surface textiles. She graduated from Central Saint Martins with an MA in Fashion in 2011, and the same year formed a partnership with one of her earliest customers, Rose Easton, who now acts as Creative Director. Easton English incorporates the Phoebe English brand, now stocked in DSM, Bluebird and internationally.
Soon after graduating you joined forces with Rose Easton to form English Easton. This must have been an important business decision for a new graduate. What sparked it and what has it meant for you?
I made a dress for Rose, for a birthday. I think she could see I was a bit swamped. We made friends and decided to do a small collection for Vauxhall Fashion Scout, to see how it went. After that we received an order from Dover Street Market and the very next day we registered our company.
You are involved with the Centre for Fashion Enterprise in Hackney and gained a place on their New Fashion Pioneer Programme, then progressed on to the New Fashion Venture Programme in June 2013, which helps designers identify areas of growth and provides financial subsidy. What has the latter meant for the development of your brand? What do you think the centre offers young designers?
The Centre for Fashion Enterprise (CFE) has been invaluable in the development and growth of my business. I cannot express enough how much the support, advice and mentoring has helped us; it takes you from being a singular designer to a fully-fledged business. The CFE offers information to designers that it’s just not possible to find elsewhere, from how to source and build relationships with your manufacturers to cash flows. Every single aspect of your business is nurtured. We are currently working with an e-commerce developer mentor.
Do you find the changing landscape of East London inspires or informs your work?
East London and Hackney is such an important aspect of how I work, it’s where I have had all of my studios and it is also where I have lived for the last five years. It is forever changing and filled with an abundance of incredible people. Nothing inspires me more than simply walking between my home and the studio – there is always an amazing variety of characters to see along the way.
Your AW14 collection saw you reinterpret modern tailoring, with elegant yet organic jackets and dresses. What inspired this collection?
AW14 comes from lots of places, from images of early Cornelia Parker to traditional upholstery and mattress making fabrics, and also from wanting to express certain feelings of both extreme strength (wide heavy ruched straps of thick cotton) and hopeless vulnerability (fine, almost invisible nets.)
CORE is a season-less collection that you produce, turning the transience of fashion on its head. How did this project come about about?
It is a small collection of pieces, which are made in our typical materials of rubber and muslin, and also incorporates some simple matte latex pieces. They are all very simple but aim to fit into outfits you already love to wear. It really came about because of friends and clients enjoying particular pieces we had done in the past; and also from pieces that Rose and I enjoyed wearing more on a daily basis than for special occasions.
CORE seems to explore the life span of clothes and sustainability of fashion. Is this something that interests you?
Yes, I am very interested in timeless beauty, it is very important for me that the clothes can work both in London and across the world. The aesthetic must be transferable, not just London-centric.
Any new collaborative projects in the pipeline?
I will be working with my dear friend Helen Bullock for SS15. We have worked and studied together but this will be the first time we have collaborated on a project. Helen has such an opposite structure to how she works, which is so exciting for me. I want the work we do together to be like a breath of new air in the collection.
What can we expect for Phoebe English SS15?
Films, surprise projects, e-commerce and a brand spanking new collection!
A few years ago James Lucas, of London Fields, took a rough script to his friend and colleague Mat Kirkby, a commercials director at Ridley Scott Associate Films. He’d written it on a three-hour flight to Bucharest. Kirkby saw potential in the work and so the pair set about an after-hours collaboration to bring the story to life.
Two years on and The Phone Call, starring Sally Hawkins and Jim Broadbent, is pulling in rave reviews on the festival circuit, scooping Best Narrative Short at the prestigious Tribeca Film Festival and qualifying for Academy Awards consideration along the way.
“It’s really just taken off. It’s exceeded any of my expectations, that’s for sure,” says Lucas modestly. “It was nice to have our day-job roles and progress that into this creative collaboration. It’s not the norm but it seems to have worked rather well.”
The film is a stripped-back, emotional short of rare power. It focuses on a single, twenty-minute phone conversation at a Samaritans-esque call centre between Heather, a quiet counsellor, and Stan, a troubled pensioner in search of comfort.
“It was actually inspired by a close relative being a Samaritan and that got my creative ball rolling I suppose,” Lucas explains. “They’re like unsung heroes, they’re like angels. They’re people that willingly give up their time without any pay and deal with these very complex situations and scenarios and conversations. They do it I suppose out of empathy and I thought that’s just such a brilliant thing.
“I’m not going to be too dramatic, but in a world that seems increasingly selfish and self-obsessed I was just interested in looking at the other side of that, at people who still retain a sense of empathy.”
His desire to shine a light on the delicate, relatively underexplored realm of phone counsel was shared by Kirkby, who also has family working in the field. On receiving the script, the director’s first creative task was to structure the narrative and flesh out Heather’s character.
“I made her this little sort of mousy character that you maybe underestimate,” he says. “You perhaps learn that she’s actually very tenacious and she doesn’t want to let go of this guy.”
Hawkins, who was recently nominated for an Oscar for her part opposite Cate Blanchett in Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine, is extraordinary in the role. The camera is zoomed on her desperate features for a good portion of the film’s 20-minute running time, capturing a fluid facial performance that brilliantly bears the weight of an extremely heavy situation.
Kirkby explains that during filming the actress would work through the entire script in single takes. “She’d get into the whole flow of this 20-minute performance and feel it. She was shaking and crying and after each take she had to have a good old sit down,” he says. “I don’t know if I’ll ever see anything like that again. It was like watching it happen live, it was quite incredible.”
Having waited close to a year for confirmation that Hawkins would be available for the project – with a two-week window confirmed at short notice – the Academy Award-winning Broadbent signed up two days later. “So one was ten months and one was two days,” Kirkby says. “You get someone like Jim Broadbent straight away because he would love to do it opposite Sally.”
In a bold and decisive directorial move, Broadbent’s character remains anonymous throughout the film, never physically appearing onscreen at the other end of the line.
“There was an audacity in not showing his face,” says Lucas. “I think it’s almost like a novel where it’s left up to you to construct that character and that character’s physical features and his or her persona – just for the fact that it gives it added personal poignancy, I think.”
Kirkby elaborates: “To me it’s a massive dramatic device because if you see the person on the other end you immediately make judgments on them or you can see what their problem is,” he says. “I think the minute the question marks stop, that’s when the drama stops. You have to have the viewer asking questions. To be honest, when we found that we’d got Jim Broadbent I was like ‘Oh bugger, I’ve got an Oscar-winning actor and my plan is not to film him.’”
The Phone Call has taken the talented pair on a journey all over the world – from the London Film Festival to Tribeca in New York and events in Cork, Dresden, Miami and Aspen – where the piece has been met with overwhelming praise and acclaim.
With talk of a full-length feature based on the material, the friends are sure to link up again in the not-so-distant future. “To stand up in Tribeca Film Festival on stage together and then be shaking hands with Robert DeNiro. Yeah, I’d quite like to continue that,” Kirkby laughs.
What started as a loose idea and a common interest between colleagues has grown into a sensitive work of serious artistic merit, stretching the short format to its complete and glorious potential.
“It’s been about making something meaningful rather than sensational, something thoughtful,” Lucas affirms as we say goodbye, summing things up rather nicely.
The Beyreuth Festival in northern Bavaria is a mecca for opera lovers and a pilgrimage destination for fans of Richard Wagner, who himself conceived the idea for a special festival to showcase his own works.
So when in 2011 the experimental Opera singer Lore Lixenberg stood outside the Beyreuth Festspielhaus to give a rendition of John Cage’s ‘Aria with Fontana Mix’ to a crowd of opera purists, it was something of a bold move.
Lixenberg, originally from Brighton but who has lived in Stoke Newington since the mid-1990s, is a risk taker and iconoclast, operating in arguably the most change-resistant artistic form there is.
“With opera the boundary is very clear, you’re either a composer or a singer,” she says. “I make pieces but I don’t see myself as a composer – it’s just an extension of singing. There’s an interesting movement I suppose of opera singers who are moving more into creation not just interpretation.”
Lixenberg leads a cosmopolitan life. With her boyfriend she has just opened a gallery space in Berlin, and when we meet she tells me about a new project that involves streaming performances live from Berlin to Stoke Newington, and vice versa.
“I’m really interested in combining opera with things like physical theatre and visual arts – that’s why I like John Cage because he started that all off,” she says.
Opera may forever be be considered traditional, but this doesn’t bother Lixenberg. In one of her pieces, ‘Bird’, she undergoes a metamorphosis, speaking before making vocalisations, which finally evolve into full blown bird song. Another recent project is about an opera singer who finds herself at the end of the world, gathering all the bits of opera she can to save them from oblivion.
Lixenberg blurs the boundary between composition and performance, but there is no mistaking her operatic voice. She describes her voice as “a bit of a synthesiser”, and gives me a quick blast – leaving me momentarily startled.
‘Startled’ also describes the audience who heard her that time in Beyreuth, though they were soon won over by her chutzpah and originality.
Props such as a roll of sellotape, a toothbrush and even a packet of crisps were all part of the performance. At one point she even cries theatrically on the shoulder of an audience member. Is this how John Cage would have wanted it? Almost definitely, though what Wagner would have made of it is anyone’s guess.
Bracing: a swimmer poses for the camera at London Fields Lido. Photograph: Madeleine Walker
There is something pure and empowering about swimming. It’s no coincidence that most religions have purification rituals involving immersion in water. Is it taking things too far to suggest the redemptive feeling of moving about freely in liquid stems from some deeply lodged memory of being ensconced in the amniotic sac, or the genes we have inherited from our coelacanth-like ancestors? Yes, to be honest, and why intellectualise something that is inherently visceral?
This book of ‘before and after’ shots of clothed and swimsuited-up devotees of London Fields Lido is pleasingly devoid of psychobabble, or indeed babble of any kind. What it is full of is photographer Madeleine Waller’s excellent portraits, some of which are on show at this much loved outdoor pool. These images, particularly the ones that show steam rising off the water as it does on cold mornings, possess a raw power.
In his introduction to this book – a typically lovingly produced hardback offering from small publishers Hoxton Mini Press – Robert Crampton highlights the “sheer beauty of the environment that open-air swimming can provide”.
“Like cyclists,” he writes, “swimmers are, whatever their competence (slow, medium or fast lane), essentially united by the vulnerability of their shared near-nakedness.”
Sure, lack of clothes equals vulnerability, but I’ve come across pensioners who swim in the lido every day and who look like they have discovered the fount of eternal youth. This book contains photos of swimmers fresh out of the pool and standing in the freezing snow, glaring defiantly in the face of the bitterly cold weather.
I’m far from a regular at the lido, but I have occasionally swum there in the deep midwinter, and I can confidently proclaim that the combination of swimming and bracingly cold weather leaves one feeling virtually invincible. As you haul yourself out of the water, you hardly feel vulnerable. Rather, you feel capable of conquering the world.