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  • Mezcal mania at 184 Hackney Road

    Choose your poison: Mezcal at 184 Hackney Road
    Choose your poison: lining up the Mezcal at 184 Hackney Road

    Amigos, have I got a great new place for you. It’s open late, there are mezcal Paloma slushies on tap, shelves stacked with fine drinks and you can even have a decent conversation with the bartender.

    Down a dark stairwell behind the Golden Grill they’re playing loud music and serving liquor – but not just any tipple. Jose Cuervo isn’t welcome and nor is his cousin Jack Daniels.

    There are pale Icelandic ales, stouts from Manchester and a shelf glittering with scotches. Stagg & Barber know a thing or two about delicious drinks while Symonds is a mezcal specialist, to the extent that she imports her own brands.

    Like tequila, mezcal is made from agave and is gradually becoming more popular in the city. The first one I try is made with espadin agave and produced in Santiago Matatlan – billed as the world capital of Mezcal. It doesn’t disappoint, with the classic smoky flavour of the spirit lifted with a toffee-like sweetness and a peppery earthiness that comes from the volcanic soil in the lush lowlands where this particular agave grows. It is produced by master mezcalero Zosimo Mendez, the latest in his family to produce the spirit.

    Like wines and whiskeys the flavour will vary from batch to batch. There are a million different variables – not just those affecting the agave – such as the wood it’s roasted in and, of course, the recipe. In a world where the Ugly Vegetable Campaign even needed to exist, there’s something pleasant about that.

    The second I try is made from agave grown on the river bank of the San Juan del Rio, where Don Modesto Hernandez is the fourth generation in his family producing the spirit. This mezcal tastes totally different – it’s floral and nutty and a bit sharper. The agave that goes into this bottle grows in a cooler highland climate, which – I’m told – tends to produce fruitier flavours.

    With tastings, World Cup screenings and what promises to be the booziest pub quiz on the cards, number 184 is beckoning.

    184 Hackney Road, E2 7QL
    @184hackneyroad

  • Zavier Ellis – Type One Zealotry at Cock ‘n’ Bull Gallery

    Details from The End of Days by Zavier Ellis
    Details from The End of Days by Zavier Ellis

    Whilst in recent years, the work of Zavier Ellis has been making waves within museum presentations across Europe and the United States, his first solo show in London for a decade proves a dark and testing exhibition, playing upon religious semiotics and the daily subconscious absorption of signs in the street.

    Hidden beneath the rambunctious bustle of Tramshed, Ellis’s takeover of the Cock ‘n’ Bull gallery provides a quiet purgatory to contemplate the nature of spirituality, insanity and the occult, and their place in our highly urbanised society.

    From the moment of entering the space, it’s hard to miss the darkly alluring, colossal canvas of The End of Days, that stares unabashedly from the furthest wall. Indeed, its presence is so overwhelming and intense that it seems to lord over the room with the sacrosanct conviction of a deity.

    Its emotional potency is in keeping with the graffitied collages that span the space alongside it. They sit like billboards of political leaders past, that have been faded and stripped away at by time to reveal the backdrop of the exposed, raw brickwork of the city. The pieces are littered with ancient iconography, and Ellis uses his work as a vessel to tap into the eternal arguments that art has always been used to question – where is the line between reality and insanity? How do we bridge the gap between the known and the unknown? And, with the more modern clash of religion and culture, how does our primitive need for mysticism fit in with our Western ideologies?

    As with Pollock or Rauschenberg, the physical act of painting is as important a part of viewing these pieces as the finished result as a whole, adding depth to the dialogue. Between the swoops and smears of paint you can almost tangibly feel Ellis at work. Textures are scratched, brushed, stripped, dripped and poured upon the canvases, each layer like a repeated mantra, creating a cacophony of intricate detail.

    Moving away from these frenetic and densely-filled pictures, Ellis’s soft, delicate, pencil portraits not only demonstrate his artistic diversity, but also seem to suggest a different narrative. Drawn on lined paper, as if torn from a child’s journal, their minimalism whispers of an innocence that makes you momentarily forget the dark subject matter of Mad Pope and Mad Nazi Priest, in the same way that giving a cute pet name to a snake can undermine the idea of danger it holds. They are a reminder of how the way something is delivered can alter the perception of the thing itself, and thus call into question the relationship between semiotics and reality.

    For the final element of the exhibition, Ellis has teamed up with restaurant owner, Mark Hix, to devise a Hix Lix dinner, designed to be an apocalyptic Last Supper, served in the underground gallery, surrounded by the installation. With a menu featuring the likes of ‘Holy F*****’ chicken hearts’ and ‘Wild Boar with Heaven and Earth’, and watched over by an ethereal Damien Hirst cow preserved in formaldehyde, the scene is perfectly set to be a multi-sensory feast to placate the Gods.

    Zavier Ellis, Type One Zealotry is at the Cock ‘n’ Bull Gallery, 32 Rivington Street, EC2A 3LX until 25 July.

  • There’s a Monster in the Lake – review

    The acting company performing at the Hay Festival (see Katie Glass story). (L-R) Tara Postma (standing), Hugo Nicholson, Cressida Bonas, Zoe Stevens (sitting top), Zena Carswell (sitting front) and Florence Keith-Roach (standing) (28 May 2014)Photograph: Adrian Sherratt
    Spoken Mirror production company: (L-R) Tara Postma (standing), Hugo Nicholson, Cressida Bonas, Zoe Stevens (sitting top), Zena Carswell (sitting front) and Florence Keith-Roach (standing) Photograph: Adrian Sherratt

    Nothing is sacred from health and safety checks in this surreal production by Spoken Mirror at the Rosemary Branch theatre, featuring a headache-prone devil, two squabbling sisters and an out-of-shape wolf played by Cressida Bonas.

    Inspired by playwright Tallulah Brown’s four months working with Mira Hamermesh towards the end of the Polish filmmaker’s life, the Lily Ashley-directed play flits between a bland, uncompromising care home and the wooded mental refuge of the ageing Kazek, with songs delivered by Kazek’s daughters and a clutch of unseen sirens.

    “I want to die…let me die!” utters Kazek at the outset, played with tremulous, stubborn vulnerability by Zoe Stevens. To the audience’s relief, the statement does not trigger a play-long debate on life versus death, but rather a thoughtful meditation on memory, story-telling and making amends.

    Kazek’s carer (significantly named just ‘Nurse’), is executed with wonderful impassivity by Tara Postma and provides necessary injections of humour into the narrative. Her straight-laced and unsympathetic – though not unkind – method of care is sharply contrasted to Kazek’s daughters emotional coming-to-terms with their father’s ageing process.

    Esme (played with wide-eyed impetuosity by Florence Keith-Roach) is the idealistic daughter, excellent with their father but absent when it comes to the gruelling practicalities of his decline – which her more pragmatic sister Mari (Zena Carswell) has to take on. Brown deftly describes the fraught sibling interplay, universal to those who have had to deal with poorly parents.

    There’s A Monster In The Lake is perhaps most poignant when highlighting the helplessness felt by those faced with the impending death of themselves or loved ones. “He’s my dad, not my child!” Mari says sharply to Nurse. The hints that Kazek was not always the perfect father also combat the romanticisation of the father-child role and add depth to the fantasy-fuelled vignettes.

    The care home scenes are the best drawn, but the woods also have a charm, with Cressida Bonas playing a sprightly, health-and-safety-obsessed wolf, springing across the stage with alacrity, whilst the lecherous, maladied devil (Hugo Nicholson) nuisances his way through the dark undergrowth.

    A child-like wistfulness persists throughout the play, a thread of fantasy and hope which challenges the idea of age equating to wisdom, and sensitively explores what it means to care and be cared for.

    There’s A Monster in the Lake is at the Rosemary Branch theatre, Shepperton Road, N1 3DT until 19 July.

  • Yvonne Rainer: Dance Works

    Yvonne Rainer dance performance at Raven Row
    Dancers perform an Yvonne Rainer dance work at Raven Row

    Dancer, choreographer, filmmaker and writer Yvonne Rainer (born 1934, lives in New York) is widely acknowledged as having played a key role in revolutionising post-war dance, inspiring generations of performers. In the sixties and early seventies, initially as part of the Judson Theater in New York (alongside Trisha Brown, Simone Forti and Steve Paxton), Rainer made dance works that were concerned with social and political form. Her choreography incorporated ‘ordinary’ movement and ‘neutral’ performance, rethinking the performer-audience relationship.

    This exhibition is the first to present live performances of Rainer’s dance works alongside other aspects of her practice: theoretical and lyrical writing, sketches and scores, photographs of performances, documentary and experimental films, and an audio recording of one of her early performative lectures. Together these convey a vivid picture of Rainer’s production from 1961 to 1972, and its proximity to the visual arts of the time, notably to minimalist sculpture.

    A highlight of the exhibition is a 45-minute dance programme performed four times daily. Dancers trained for the occasion by Rainer and her long-time collaborator Pat Catterson will perform her celebrated works Trio A (1966) and Chair Pillow (1969), as well as the UK premieres of the very rarely seen Talking Solo and Diagonal (both 1963).

    The exhibition is curated by Catherine Wood, Curator of Contemporary Art and Performance at Tate Modern, and made possible through the generous co-operation of the Getty Research Institute. The live performances are organised with Martin Hargreaves, Programme Leader at Trinity Laban Conservatoire.

    Due to limited audience capacity for the live performances, the exhibition will open for the first time on Friday 11 July at 11am.

    Yvonne Rainer: Dance Works is at Raven Row, 56 Artillery Lane, E1 7LS until 10 August 2014.

    +44 (0)20 7377 4300
    www.ravenrow.org

  • The Frida Kahlo of Penge West – review

    Cecily Nash and star both star as Frida Kahlo in The Frida Kahlo of Penge West
    Raising eyebrows: Cecily Nash and Laura Kirman star in The Frida Kahlo of Penge West

    If you like your revolutionary history brief, and brash and sexual, this is one for you.

    This mega-consolidated satirical history of the life of Frida Kahlo, weak in ‘back, legs and womb’ is a filthy bit of GCSE history – in the best way possible.

    But despite all this high politics and high sex, this play-within-a-play has altogether more banal groundings.

    A terribly meek Zoe (Laura Kirman) has her Penge West sofa colonised by a loud-mouthed, embittered uni mate, out-of-work actress Ruth (Cecily Nash). A motley crew of revolutionaries are filtered through the minds of these two equally, but differently, hapless friends putting on a play to appease Ruth’s ill-conceived feminist streak, and boredom.

    The muralist Diego Rivera graces the stage as a pot-bellied Manc. There’s Leon Trotsky, with a bad Russian accent. Kahlo herself is a blonde ‘Mehican.’ Like Kahlo’s works, this two woman show is surreal and overtly sexual in a grotesque kind of way. In not much more than an hour it packs in an impressive amount, drawing innuendo from every little piece of political theory. And on top of being a two-woman show about two women making a two-woman show is, this is a revenge tale in disguise.

    Following its run at the Rosemary Branch Theatre on Shepperton Road, the show skips town this week. A fresh set of dates are set to be announced later in the week.

  • Hackney Empire cafe reopens as the latest food and music venture by Platterform

    Revamped Hackney Empire cafe is now
    The Hackney Empire cafe has been revamped

    Did you like the Skylodge pop-up over by London Fields before Christmas? And the Sea Adventure dining experience? If so you’re going to love immersive food and music crew Platterform’s latest venture.

    After a succession of temporary installations the creative collective is setting up shop permanently – in Hackney Empire’s cafe no less – with an exotic new venue called Stage 3.

    From 12-course Indonesian feasts and art installations to Tai-chi masters, bands and DJs, Stage 3 promises to be an ambitious affair, with the usual cocktails, craft beers and food, only this time the emphasis is on music.

    The team is collaborating with a network of local artists, musicians and DJs for a programme of live performances this summer. Director Jules Bayuni says: “This is Hackney’s cultural quarter – with the museum, the cinema and the theatre. We’re the missing puzzle piece: music.”

    Inside, it’s a nod to both the building’s thespian history and Bayuni’s Indonesian heritage, with beautiful tropical prints patterning the walls and brightly-coloured puppet masks strung up over the bar.
    So what can we expect? Thursdays will be supper club night up on the mezzanine floor, with a different theme each week – ranging from French Creole to New Orleans to Caribbean nights.

    “The food is what we’ve collectively grown up on – it’s our soul food,” says Bayuni. Fridays will see art collectives like Unity take over the walls and DJ decks, Saturday is for more partying and Sunday is for hangovers, when you can drag yourself down for a day of healing or hedonism –the choice is yours.

    You’ll be able to pick from detox and retox cocktails, gorge on oriental-style duck and pork roasts and even take part in some tai-chi to restore the natural order after a heavy night. Sounds like you’re in safe hands.
    Watch out for updates about what’s on each week, it’s already looking excellent and this imaginative bunch have plenty of surprises up their sleeves.

    Stage 3
    Hackney Empire
    291 Mare Street, E8 1EJ

  • East End designers celebrate summer at London Collections: Men

    Kit Neale SS15 designs at London Collections: Men
    Kit Neale SS15 designs at London Collections: Men

    East London designers playfully drew on the simple pleasures of a summer holiday at London Collections: Men, the capital’s menswear fashion week. Reinterpreting the luggage and holiday attire of Brits abroad and shaped by their own brand identity, a handful of designers tapped into our nostalgia for the summer experience.

    Master of print Kit Neale incorporated symbolic holiday motifs from family holidays on the Med and a Neapolitan ice-cream colour palette into this season’s spring/summer ‘15 collection. The Ravensbourne alumnus printed a medley of potted cactus plants onto heavy white cotton board shorts and jackets, while the in-flight emergency manual became the basis of another print, the designer accentuating the cartoon-like nature of the instructions. Neale gained access to the Coca Cola archives for this collection, and reworked the classic logo on candy-coloured diamond print shirts. Trousers were rolled up (prepared for a paddle), hair was 1950s quaffed, and sweaters were worn over the shoulders, completing the carefree hyper-holiday aesthetic.

    Playing with the same themes to different ends was sportswear inspired duo Cottweiler. Matthew Dainty and Ben Cottrell took us on the entire journey, from airport departure lounge through to sunburnt noses and a feeling of ‘I don’t want to go home’. The collection opened with Cottweiler’s signature tracksuits, this time employing a palette of dusty grey and white, and was worn by a set of pale models with wheelie suitcases. The collection evolved, as did the models’ tans, into shorts, sleeveless vests and t-shirts nearly all in crisp white, with accents of colour in swimming pool blue piping, and Mediterranean terracotta jackets. Short shorts, funnel necks and the deployment of burnt reds and greys brought a touch of 1970s nostalgia to the aesthetic, while the overall collection made for a wholly contemporary and unique reinterpretation of travelling to foreign climes.

    For SS15, J.W. Anderson featured knitted tops of pastoral British landscape scenes – rivers and lakes, complete with threatening skies, evoking memories of camping holidays or hours spent in the car, watching the rolling countryside pass by. Astrid Anderson transported us to Japan for her collection, exploring her own fascination with the art of sumo, by creating kimonos in soft sunset shades of orange and pink.

    It was back to basics this season, with designers drawing on precious personal memories and evoking ours through a focus on travel, holidays and kicking back.

  • Futures – book review: things are never ‘stupid A to B’

    Futures' author John Barker
    Author John Barker

    Is there any deeper link between finance and cocaine than the role credit-cards and twenty-pound notes play in its ingestion? In 2009, the UN illegal drugs ‘tsar’ Antonio Maria Costa claimed an estimated $315 billion of drugs profit was “the only liquid investment capital” available to some banks in the aftermath of the 2008 credit crunch, the only thing keeping them from seizing up.

    Costa’s accusation was one of the reasons former Angry Brigade member John Barker resurrected a manuscript from the late 1980s and reworked it into his new novel, Futures. The year is 1987, and inspired by ‘Big Bang’ deregulation, City analysts and inveterate snorters Jack and Phil plot to score a huge cargo of cocaine, in anticipation of a massive price rise.

    Trouble comes their way as it becomes apparent that even the not-altogether rectitudinous business practices they know from high-finance are, morally, a cut above those of the criminal underworld their new commodity throws them into trading with. Cue fast cars, pornography, pub-brawls, beatings and killings, and the endless search for a working phone-box.

    It is this messiness of doing deals, rather than any critique of what City folk choose to do with their noses, that the presence of cocaine in the novel serves to highlight. It zooms in behind neatly abstract contracts and indices to show the lives and difficulties of the people buying and selling, with the drug world a particularly pungent example of this on-the-ground intractability.

    Hence the novel’s structure: chapters alternate between separate narratives, each following different characters. As Futures proceeds, stories connect and overlap. Carol – “a survivor”, in Barker’s phrase – is a single mum who makes ends meet selling small amounts of coke every few weeks. It turns out she’s Jack’s dealer, through whom he’s conducting the research into market conditions which underpins his and Phil’s cocaine ‘futures’ enterprise.

    Shadowing everyone is gangland big-cheese Gordon Murray, for most of the novel the only character who gets to speak in the first person. Barker wanted Murray’s voice in the book because he finds him “boring” for the way he “mimics neo-liberal language”. (Barker is working on a new book, Terms and Conditions, a dictionary of buzz-words and the ideology they can serve or conceal).

    Big-business talk – “leverage”, “deliverables”, “offer”, “strategy” – is a bête noir of contemporary discourse. But commercial and economic literacy has always been seen as useful on the Left. Barker has been writing about economics for decades, with articles in the magazines Mute and Variant. An essay at the end of the book explores the connections between US agricultural and foreign policy and the rise in cocaine cultivation in South America.

    Barker is a slightly better essayist than he is a novelist, the same emphasis on complexity and flux making for a compelling modesty in what he writes. His arguments, he says, are valid, and his facts are true, but are not the whole story – there are other truths and other facts. As his analyst characters are fond of saying, things are never “stupid A to B”.

    Futures by John Barker is published by PM Press. RRP: £9.99 ISBN: 9781604869613

  • New hidden Dalston Tango hub

    Tango like a pro
    You can dance: learn the Argentine Tango at beginners’ classes in Dalston

    Tango is one of the world’s most sensuous dances – and among the most exciting. It’s also known as a social, inclusive dance, and Tango at the Light has done justice to the spirit of this with its beginners’ classes. You don’t have to bring a partner and there’s no need to feel nervous about getting the steps wrong.

    As the classes are aimed at newcomers to dance, you’ll learn the fundamentals of Argentine tango, from posture to step and connection. The lessons will give you an awareness of the music and will teach you to relax, have fun, make mistakes and learn from them. Above all, they will familiarise you with this, one of the world’s most exuberant and beautiful dances.

    Beginners’ Tango Classes Every Thursday Night @ Saint Barnabas’ Church Dalston

    Beginners’ Class 7 to 8pm, £10 (includes dancing until 11pm)
    Práctica (social dancing) 8 to 11pm, £5
    Student discount £5 per class (includes dancing until 11pm)

    First class is free.

    Visit www.tangothelight.com

     

  • Joseph Mercier: ‘The erotic has a different appeal to that of pornography’

     

    Queerrrr
    Of Saints and Go-Go Boys: ‘exploring party culture through a queer lens’

    Joseph Mercier is a theatre director, choreographer and performer who is fast becoming known for his erotic, provocative dance. His latest work Of Saints and Go-Go Boys explores party culture through a queer lens. Brave, innovative and interrogative of the explicit, he is building a reputation with fearless and shocking work

    Of Saints and Go-Go Boys is said to “explore the world of misfits and sinners”. Where did this fascination come from?

    It has something to do with not necessarily my own sexual questioning, but witnessing that of others. As an extension of that, the idea of critical questioning is important to me. I’m always rubbing up against a limit, seeing how flexible it is; hanging out at a challenging place, purposefully shocking and provoking. The state of shock can be interesting: in this show it’s playful.

    What can we expect from this production?

    Viewers will be invited into a hyper-theatrical flat with three characters and guided through by a narrative. It’s instructive and interactive with a light touch. There’s too much to see and hear, but it’s intimate, with only thirty at each performance. It’s the kind of show in which you can decide your own experience.

    You’ve been described as a “choreographic provocateur” – is that an accurate description?

    It’s quite delightful! I do try to create provocative art – it’s my reason for making work. In the wider sense of the word, it’s engagement with critical thought in all sorts of ways, not just sexually. I love it – it’s a compliment. 

    Do you think there are any similarities between the Parisian underworld of the 1940s and queer culture in Britain today?

    A sense of hedonism definitely unites them. But now we’re living in a time where our lives are entirely monitored. In a funny way it’s like Foucauldian reverse discourse: now we’ve named everything there’s less room for fluidity. The queer family has been absorbed by heterocentric models. I’m curious about what happens to concepts of the queer family that Jean Genet describes in Our Lady of the Flowers. Our subculture has got smaller, and in this performance we contemplate that space – it’s a fantasy of that space, anachronistic and contemporary at once.

    What do you think is the enduring appeal of the erotic, outrageous and explicit?

    The erotic has a different appeal to purely that of pornography. We’re not honest as a culture about our bodies and how they relate to each other. Eroticism is important socially, and the body is overlooked. Explicitness is inherently of the body, and Of Saints and Go-Go Boys faces the viewer with the body laid bare. I think nudity is beautiful in all spectrums of the word.

    What do you want viewers to take away from this experience?

    I’d love for someone to come and start to think about the beautiful in the abject or profane. In Liverpool an audience member avoided the show in horror, but came again the next night – and had the same reaction. She later told us she was repulsed and intrigued, delighted and challenged, which was wonderful. In this back and forth, in and out production there’s a contradiction of emotion, and that’s just it.

    Of Saints and Go-Go Boys is at Toynbee Studios, 28 Commercial Street, E1 6AB from 17 – 19 July.