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  • East London designers to watch: Faustine Steinmetz

    Queen of jeans: Faustine Steinmetz
    Queen of jeans: Faustine Steinmetz

    Parisian born, East London-based designer Faustine Steinmetz is turning heads with her deconstructed garments made from hand-woven denim and ethereal threads. Working with her team on hand looms in her studio, she puts the exquisite craft and skills gained from training in Parisian couture houses to new, less conventional uses. Named a One to Watch at AW14 by NEWGEN – the Topshop initiative supporting young designers – Steinmetz has quickly established herself as one of East London’s most exciting emerging talents.

    Your last two collections have seen you re-imagine denim in some way. What draws you to this fabric?

    Since a young age I’ve been drawn to denim. When I was younger I would drive my parents crazy by cutting up all my denim to make new pieces. It is amazing to work with because it is so recognisable and very meaningful. It is pretty much everybody’s staple.

    All your garments are hand-woven on looms by your team here in London. Tell us a little bit about the process.

    Each individual piece is made by one person so that they can put their name on it at the end and you know exactly who made that piece for you. We have a few different types of looms of various sizes so the process changes a bit from loom to loom.

    After the yarn has been prepared you first have to set the loom, which on our smaller looms can take a few hours and on our bigger looms can take over a day depending on how difficult the yarn is to work with. Once the setup is finished the weaving process can begin, which isn’t terribly difficult, it’s just very time consuming and you need a lot of patience. A pair of jeans can take up to a week to complete depending on the type.

    Where do you source your fabrics and yarns?

    We try to source everything in the UK, but of course that isn’t always possible. Some things you just have to go abroad to get. We’ve been lucky enough to develop close relations with some small UK suppliers of yarn and we like to try and do business with them. To be honest, the most important to me is to make sure that the animals are not mistreated.

    For AW14 you created a collection of hand-woven jeans and trench coats with hints of copper so they can be bended and melded to fit. Where did the idea for this collection come from?

    I’ve always been a big fan of Issey Miyake Pleats Please and I wanted to work around pleating, but I wanted people to be able to create their own piece by pleating it themselves.

    Your SS15 collection references the mega couture houses. Do you think the role of the couturier has changed and what is its future?

    Yes, it has completely changed. I think it is not about beauty anymore it is about creating something which is very unique to you. The garments in the SS15 collection are beautiful and intricate but are also rough and imperfect – using knotted threads and frayed hems.

    Is this a reaction to the finished and polished garments of couture?

    Not really, it was more about the yarn in itself. I was very inspired this season by the process of making fabrics and the threads are exposing that.

    What is next for Faustine Steinmetz?

    We’re hoping to launch our e-store very soon. Other than that we’re just working really hard on our new collection and getting very excited about it!

    www.faustinesteinmetz.com

  • Book review: Salt by Lucinda Lloyd

    Death and salty
    Photograph from Salt by Lucinda Lloyd

    Salt, a collection of poetry and photography by actor and writer Lucinda Lloyd, explores love and loss as well as innocence and experience. Published by A Little Bird Whispered – Lloyd’s own creation too – it is a collection put together with great care.

    Poems such as ‘Naked’, ‘Milk’, ‘Quiet Time’ and ‘The Cage’ are terse and controlled. They are refreshing in their brevity, their economy of language.

    ‘The Weight of a Tear’, too, is excellent. Lloyd contemplates the coffin that will hold the body of her loved one. She writes about the “black dress” that will “contain your flesh”; the dress acting as a vessel for the body rather than merely clothing it. The collection is dedicated to Lloyd’s mother and this poem is certainly a fitting tribute.

    However, not all of Lloyd’s poems work as well. ‘A Potent Sea’ is particularly overwrought, invoking “ancient echoes”, “azure air” and “tombs of majesty”. The imagery is overwhelming and, as a result, the poem loses power.

    Lloyd’s poetry works best when it is confrontational and efficient. At other times it indulges in the language of the land and the elements, betraying her more honest poems. Her strengths lie less in describing nature than in portraying how we come to terms with tragedy.

    Lloyd clearly has the ability to publish beautiful books, too. The physical quality of the collection is excellent, and includes some startling photography.

    Salt is published by A Little Bird Whispered. RRP: £9.99. ISBN: 9780993070006

  • Vanity Bites Back: the quick witted clown cookery show about anorexia

    Jill ta
    Jill takes on a cheesecake in Vanity Bites Back. Photograph: Impressive PR

    Some subjects are more irresistibly comic than others (whoopee cushions, hairpieces …) though the best comedy is always found in unexpected places. For her one woman show Vanity Bites Back, Helen Duff chose a subject that few talk, let alone make comedy about: anorexia.

    Duff, a trained actor, comedian and clown, plays Jill, a genteel 1950s-style Stepford wife who wants nothing more than to host her own television cookery show. Her big moment arrives and the audience joins her for the pilot episode. “It’s going to be the best bloody cookery show you’ve ever seen,” she confides in deadly seriousness.

    As well it might be, though not in the way she intends. Instead Jill, an eccentric described as a cross between Alan Partridge and Margaret Thatcher, makes a comically epic mess. As her dream unravels the mask slips; her practically perfect persona gives way and a person suffering with anorexia is revealed.

    “Stories keep cropping up that are not really part of the cookery show,” explains Stoke Newington resident Duff. “It’s not about eating so much as little moments of vulnerability and fears, and feelings that you haven’t lived up to expectations. They keep coming out no matter how hard she tries to keep this perfect persona up.”

    Vanity Bites Back premiered at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe, where it was warmly received, and this month the show returns to London for Vault festival in Waterloo. It’s the 27-year-old’s debut show, and stems from her own experience with anorexia as a teenager.

    “One of the reasons that I made the show is that when you have anorexia people don’t ever talk about it. Even family members and friends. They don’t want to say the wrong thing or isolate anybody so people don’t talk about anything. So coming out and saying that I’m suffering with anorexia is a really intimidating thing to do.”
    The title of the show was inspired by a conversation Duff had with a friend who didn’t yet know about her anorexia.

    “I realised they knew other people who’d suffered and they essentially said to me that everyone says it’s this or that but really I know it’s just attention seeking, she’s always been vain and she just cares about what she looks like.

    “I felt so deeply that that was wrong and wanted to be able to correct that view and wanted to be able to explore that view and why I disagreed with it. But I couldn’t because at the time I was so vulnerable.”

    Duff started a blog and called it Vanity Bites Back, about the idea of whether anorexia really was attention seeking. If so, says Duff, it is rooted in something other than vanity, which is a sense of pride in what you look like.

    “Anorexia is just the opposite, it’s about a complete lack of self-worth as opposed to a sense of everyone look at me.”

    The blog was well received, and writing about the illness gave Duff confidence. She was also gaining confidence as a theatre maker following a spell studying clown at the École Philippe Gaulier in Paris. The two things converged and the character of Jill was born.

    Learning clown, such an intensely physical art form, might not be the obvious choice for someone who has experienced an illness linked to body image. However, Duff refutes this, saying that anorexia is less about body image than it is a physical manifestation of needing control and feelings of inadequacy. Clowning, she explains, provided a freedom that was the perfect tonic.

    “Clown is about accepting yourself and your audience in the space in the moment. It’s about happy accidents and really allowing yourself to be open to what happens. So it’s the opposite of anorexia which very much about controlling, about not allowing yourself to be spontaneous or to divert from the plan.”

    Improvisation is a big part of the show, and there’s also plenty of direct contact with the audience. For that reason Duff is keen to build in new jokes and frivolity to keep the show fresh. “I have to be sharp to what’s happening in the room,” she explains.

    Jill can suddenly shift from profound silliness, singing about Hobnobs or covering herself with butter, to moments of genuine pathos. Some audiences apparently laugh all the way through; at a recent performance in Bristol some people were still laughing whilst others were crying by the end.

    “Generally I use comedy to puncture moments and to make them almost more moving because that’s a better way of approaching a difficult subject matter. I think people receive information and open their minds more when they feel comfortable and are having a good time, rather than receiving a sort of lecture.”

    Duff tells me that one of the most enjoyable processes was using her own fears as someone who has had anorexia to construct the form of the play. I ask if she was ever afraid that the play would be perceived as insensitive.

    “I’m always in the character who’s obviously suffered with the illness,” she replies. “I’m never making jokes about not eating. It’s never that explicit or that cheap.”

    Duff plans to take Vanity Bites Back to Australia to comedy festivals in Melbourne and Adelaide this year, as well as develop something new for next year’s Edinburgh Free Fringe. Her days of striving for perfection are over, but the best is yet to come.

    Vanity Bites Back is at London Vault Festival from 28 January –1 February at The Pit, Leake Street, SE1 7NN

  • The Gentle Author on Spitalfields Nippers: ‘These children were born in these circumstances and these photographs are the result’

    Tommy Nail and Willie Dellow. Photograph: Horace Warner
    Tommy Nail and Willie Dellow. Photograph: Horace Warner

    For over a century, Horace Warner’s photographs of Spitalfields were hidden in his grandson’s house in East Anglia.

    The Gentle Author, pen name of the Spitalfields Life blog’s anonymous author, managed to contact Warner’s grandson and see the snaps.

    They show the youth of Spitalfields in alleys, byways and yards, chopping wood, washing windows and playing games. In one photograph children are playing Sally Go Round the Moon, a game still played by children today.

    The Gentle Author points out that Warner’s photographs are in stark contrast to those by social campaigners in the same era.

    “There’s a lot of joy in these photographs. Warner knew these children. He was the superintendent of the Sunday school at the Bedford Institute and they loved him.

    “Images by social campaigners wanted to make the children look as poor as possible. The children became emblems of poverty.” The images join a selection purchased by the Bedford Institute in the Gentle Author’s latest publication Spitalfields Nippers.

    Thanks to information gathered from the 1901 census, the book includes more than 20 biographies of the children in the photographs.

    They show how the children went on to work as boot finishers, mould makers and pressers. There are accounts of families living on Commercial Road with four of their ten children dead. Others went on to fight in World War II and live until they were 70.

    Warner was a wallpaper designer as well as a photographer and there is a wonderful texture to his photographs, visible in the streets and clothes.

    The clothes children wear contain their own history. Spitalfields was the centre of the clothing and textile industry for centuries. Children’s clothes came from the Houndsditch Rag Fair, and had been through a lot of owners. The market was eventually shut down because the clothes spread smallpox.

    These are honest and compassionate photographs, carefully selected and bound. “These weren’t the good old days and they weren’t the bad old days,” adds The Gentle Author. “These children were born in these circumstances and these photographs are the result.”

    Spitalfields Nippers is published by Spitalfields Life. RRP: £20.00.ISBN: 9780957656949

  • Sex Workers Opera: raising marginalised voices and challenging sterotypes

    Sex Workers Opera.
    Accusing: the cast of the Sex Workers Opera

    Sex work and opera may seem unlikely bedfellows, but one thing both have in common is strong public preconceptions.

    The desire to challenge stereotypical thinking and stigma has brought the two together in the Sex Workers Opera, which comes to Dalston’s Arcola Theatre this month.

    The show lets prostitutes, escorts, webcam performers, strippers and other sex workers tell their stories on stage through performance and music, foregrounding personal experiences good and bad.

    “Everyone has an opinion on sex work,” explains Siobhan Knox, co-director of the show and co-founder of Experimental Experience theatre company. ”But when it comes down to it, the only people who really have the right to talk about it are sex workers themselves.”

    “Very rarely is sex work represented in art through the words of the people actually doing it,” adds Alex Etchart, also co-director and co-founder.

    “We put a call out for stories we could use in the opera, and received them from all over the world. We want to represent the diversity of sex workers on their own terms.”

    As such, the less obvious aspects of selling sex are highlighted in the show, such as the close ties some forge with their clients and the personal empowerment – and disempowerment – experienced through the profession.

    The term opera is used in the loosest sense, with the show incorporating other musical styles like hip-hop, jazz and spoken word. It was in part inspired by Bertold Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera of 1928, following the tradition of using a supposedly highbrow artform to explore gritty, earthbound themes. Nonetheless, the concept has been embraced by the opera establishment, with the Royal Opera House providing financial backing and guidance.

    “Opera is one of the most established music and art forms, while sex work is one of the most marginalised professions,” says Etchart. “People often stop and stare when they see the poster for the show!”

    The sensitivity of the opera’s subject matter is brought home by the Experimental Experience’s choice to cast a mix of sex workers and their allies in the production. As no-one reveals who is who, anonymity is ensured.

    Contributing to the opera has been an intensely personal experience for many of the performers. The directors insist the intention is not to glorify sex work, rather to present a spectrum of viewpoints, unvarnished and straight from the horse’s mouth.

    “Our main message isn’t ‘sex work is really great!’ or ‘sex work is really bad!’” says Siobhan. “It’s just literally: listen to sex workers.

    “Whether you think it’s good or bad, objectification or empowerment, come and listen to a sex worker tell you about their life. Then you can open up a new dialogue.”

    The Sex Workers Opera is at Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, E8 3DL from 26–29 January 2015

  • New Dalston cafe makes healthy dishes from food diverted from landfill

    Save the Date
    Save the Date cafe. Photograph: Coralie Datta

    A new café and sustainable start-up in Dalston is providing fresh meals on a pay-what-you-can basis prepared from food that would otherwise go to waste. Ruth McCabe and her co-director James, a chef, were inspired by a video by the Real Junk Food Project in Leeds, a restaurant that serves perfectly good food diverted from landfill.

    They decided to replicate the project in London and were met with support from local businesses and the Food Surplus Entrepreneurs Network. The Bootstrap Company in particular (also based in Dalston), helped by donating a piece of land to the team in August 2014.

    So far the most popular menu item is deep fried tomatoes and the café, which aims to cater for everyone, had a large selection of vegetarian and gluten free fare, although it also serves chicken and, most recently, ribs. The outdoor venue is warmed in winter months by firepits and a chimney, although it will probably benefit most from the summer months.

    Customers so far have ranged from the homeless to families with children and Ruth says on the whole the money they receive balances out the times people don’t pay. “Our aim is to demonstrate that you can start and run a business cheaply,” says McCabe, “and we have a policy of not judging people about payment at all – the point is that the food would have gone to waste anyway.”

    The Save the Date café was built entirely with reclaimed materials by a core of volunteers and opened in two months. Food is donated from wholesalers at Borough Market, local groceries, and a high street chain known for their chicken that have declined to be identified. The café benefits from a tremendous selection of fresh ingredients and a menu that can be adapted everyday – “a chef’s dream,” McCabe says.

    When asked about the name Save the Date, McCabe says she chose it to demonstrate the arbitrariness of best before dates on food: “They are not necessarily an indication of the quality. For example, groceries can only keep vegetables on a shelf for a few days or bakers have to sell all their bread within one day when it’s still great
    to eat.”

    Save the Date, Abbot Street, E8 3DL
    www.savethedate.london

  • Hackney Autobiography project launched to remember Centerprise

    Centerprise. Photograph: Maggie Hewitt
    From the archives: Centerprise on Kingsland Road. Photograph: Maggie Hewitt

    An oral history project has been launched to remember a much loved Hackney institution and symbol of the borough’s radical past.

    A Hackney Autobiography: Remembering Centerprise will record the history of Centerprise, a bookshop and cultural centre that from 1971 until 2012 facilitated ground-breaking work in oral history, literacy, history, story writing and more.

    Oral history organisation On the Record has received a Heritage Lottery grant for the project, and is looking for volunteers as well as people who remember Centerprise, which was located on Kingsland Road.

    By July 2016 organisers hope to have published a book on the history of Centerprise and have launched a map-based app so people can discover the stories published by Centerprise on their phones whilst they walk around Hackney.

    Rosa Vilbr, co-director of On the Record, says: “Centerprise was one of the first community publishers in the country and it was an idea that took off and spread all around the country after that.

    “It was a vibrant place that involved people in the community and gave people access not only to experience culture but also a means to produce it.”

    A Hackney Autobiography will focus on the community publishing, writing and literacy works carried out by Centerprise during the 1970s and 1980s, led by author Ken Worpole, then a teacher at Hackney Downs School.

    Work published by Centerprise included creative writing by local children, poetry and books about Hackney’s past. The project will bring back into prominence some of these works, such as a book on Dr Jelley, an eccentric medical practitioner from Homerton who dispensed medicine and advice cheaply to the poor and boasted of being able to treat 100 patients in an hour.

    Worpole believes the speed at which Hackney is changing makes the project an urgent one, saying that we live in a culture “which is often blind to the struggles and achievements of earlier generations in shaping their own lives”.

    Vilbr adds: “There’s a lot of culture – new culture – in Hackney, and it often feels like it’s coming from the outside rather than being generated from within. What the history of Centerprise shows is that there’s always been artists and writers and poets amongst the general constituency of people that live in Hackney.”

    On the Record is hosting a free gathering at the Bishopsgate Institute, 230 Bishopsgate, EC2M 4QH on Saturday 24 January for people who remember Centerprise. To RSVP and for further information email info@on-the-record.org.uk

  • FKA twigs and more acts confirmed for Field Day

    Field Day revellers. Photograph: Carolina Faruolo
    Field Day revellers. Photograph: Carolina Faruolo

    Mercury Prize-nominated FKA twigs is one of a slew of acts just confirmed for Field Day festival in Victoria Park on 6–7 June.

    The alternative R&B singer’s performance is set to be a London festival exclusive. She will be joined on the Field Day Saturday line-up by hip-hop duo Run the Jewels, Radiohead drummer Philip Selway, Norwegian producer Todd Terje and father and son pairing Toumani and Sidiki Diabaté.

    Last week it was announced that Mac DeMarco, the poster boy for Canadian slacker rock, will be part of the Field Day Sunday line-up, alongside the likes of Patti Smith and Ride. A fuller picture of Sunday line-up has now been revealed, with post-punk outfit Savages, psychedelic five-piece Hookworms and indie rockers Viet Cong all due to perform.

    Complementing the live music will be DJ sets from the likes of Awesome Tapes from Africa, Barcelona producer John Talabot and DJ Floating Points.

    All these acts and more will feature on Field Day Radio, with Field Day supremo Tom Baker hosting a series of shows over the next couple of months to whet the whistle of festival-goers. The first episode is available here.

    Field Day
    6–7 June, Victoria Park
    Tickets: http://fielddayfestivals.com/tickets

     

  • In the Dark radio: the ‘mini-revolution’ that will not be televised

    Audio slave: Nina Garthwaite. Photograph: In the Dark
    Radio enthusiast: Nina Garthwaite. Photograph: In the Dark

    Video never quite managed to kill the radio star. Instead, radio survived into the 21st century, evolving with the times rather than becoming outmoded. Its longevity might be down to how it moulds to our daily lives and routines: waking up, commuting, or hanging out the washing. But doesn’t treating radio as background noise dilute the listening experience?

    A group of volunteer radio enthusiasts and producers have set out to challenge how we think about spoken word radio. Under the banner of In the Dark, they hold monthly themed listening events they describe as “celebrations of stories through sound”.

    Group listening

    I go along to one at bicycle-friendly cafe-bar Look Mum No Hands on Mare Street. Fittingly the theme is bicycles. For an hour I sit listening to clips from radio documentaries, learning about the lifestyle of a cycle courier (they apparently have 99 different words for rain), hearing the travails of a transgender teenager trying to choose a bike, and even listening to Frank Zappa using a bicycle to make music.

    “It’s just a case of listening and listening and listening to loads of stuff and seeing what we find,” says Nina Garthwaite, In the Dark’s founder, explaining the curation process. Locations tend to match themes; so a selection of documentaries about water were set on a boat, while an event about death was held in a cemetery.
    “What can be quite fun about group listening is that you can really take people on a journey,” Garthwaite tells me. “One of our all time favourites was the erotic audio event, which was quite explicit at times, and we just had a bunch of people squeezed into a room.

    “It was a good example of one where we played with this thing where you’re trapped in a room, you can’t tune off or click away or distract yourself, and we’re going to make you feel really uncomfortable. But then we’re going to make it pay off, hopefully, by the end.”

    Let there be dark

    In the Dark started exactly five years ago, when Garthwaite was looking to switch career from television to radio. She found good audio more difficult to access than film or television, and as an industry radio seemed closed, celebrity focused and convinced of its own decline.

    “A lot of the time it’s still the case that people think of radio as a bit of a disabled medium. That it’s constantly having to compensate for the lack of visuals. I think audio can tell as many stories as any other medium, only it tells them in a different way.”

    Another motivation came from the feeling that the broadcaster was the ‘keeper of the keys’ to radio.

    “At the time it felt like we were saying: watch this, we can get a bunch of people to not only listen to audio but get out of their house and go to a place to listen to stuff that a broadcaster might say was a bit too esoteric or strange.”

    But what do people gain from listening to radio in this way, I ask. She responds: “Getting together and listening is such an antithesis to the way we consume things nowadays. It’s like the counterpoint of the internet age.

    “But the reality, as opposed to the gimmick of it, is that it’s a really different way of listening. You hear the pieces so many times by yourself putting it together, but suddenly you’re in a room with other people and you hear it in a different way. People laugh or look sad, and suddenly it’s a different experience.”

    But the irony of this down-home experience being the “counterpoint of the internet age” is that it is also fuelled by it. The five years since In the Dark was founded have seen a resurgence of interest in audio as a creative form, with American podcasts such as This American Life, 99% Invisible and Radiolab leading the way. Then there’s Serial, single-handedly credited with bringing podcasting into the mainstream.

    Garthwaite talks of there being “wonderful momentum” in radio documentary making, but is wary of the increasing dominance of American podcasts and the growing tendency among UK broadcasters to look for ‘British versions’.

    “I think there’s a danger of going ‘look this is great, now you go and make something as great’, which is immediately stifling, right? It’s like the ‘be funny’ thing, no one’s going to be funny if you do that.”

    In the Dark’s fifth anniversary show on 19 January will feature the cream of pieces from past events, as well as a conversation about what the future holds.
    “The grounds keep changing and that’s why it’s stayed interesting and why we’ve kept doing it for five years,” Garthwaite adds. “Constantly we’re trying to keep making these events something that keeps pushing a little further and keeps offering people something they wouldn’t hear otherwise.”

    inthedarkradio.org

  • London International Mime Festival comes to East London this month

    Image from Light. Photograph: Alex Brenner
    Stab in the dark: Light by Theatre Ad Infinitum. Photograph: Alex Brenner

    The curtain’s up on the London International Mime Festival this month, with a season of physical and dance-theatre that aims to leave viewers – like the performers – at a loss for words.

    East London audiences can look forward to the premiere of Light at the Barbican, inspired by Edward Snowden’s revelations and the ensuing debate on state surveillance. Fusing anime-style storytelling and a layered soundscape, it depicts an Orwellian future where a totalitarian regime uses implants and cyberspace to infiltrate its citizens’ minds.

    At the dance end of the festival’s programming is Olivier Award nominee Aurelien Bory’s new work Plexus, showing at Sadler’s Wells, as well as 32 rue Vandenbranden by Belgian company Peeping Tom, a piece of dance-theatre at the Barbican in which six performers portray a small mountain community in a foreboding world of cold, wind and ice.

    Also appearing at the Barbican is American puppeteer Basil Twist, part of the creative team for Kate Bush’s Before the Dawn concerts, whose new work is Dogugaeshi, inspired by the Japanese art of creating illusions through perspective.

    London International Mime Festival
    Until 31 January 2015 at various venues