East End Review

Tag: Barbican

Stage review: Henry IV Part 1 and 2 at the Barbican

Jasper Britton as King Henry IV and Alex Hassell as Hal in Henry IV Part II. Photograph: Kwame Lestrade

Shakespeare’s meditation on the universal themes of honour, duty, loyalty, and affection is packed with both dramatic action and raucous comedy.

No contemporary political parallels are intimated through costume or set – this is straight-down-the-line classic English theatre.

Antony Sher shines as Falstaff, in turns manipulative, deceitful, endearing and very human. But though Sher is by far the stand-out performance, Alex Hassell also plays a fine Prince Hal.

Part I centres on the strong attachment between the two men and its gradual unravelling as Hal responds to his higher calling as a warrior and defender of his father’s throne.

There is a clear spark between Sher and Hassell, who together elicit a wide range of emotional reaction.

Trevor White’s Hotspur is also well-judged, his bristling energy an apt counterpoint to Hal’s graceful self-assurance.

Part II picks up where Part I leaves off, but with a notable shift in emphasis as wild Hal’s sense of responsibility and filial duty becomes a heavier weight on his young shoulders.

On hearing news of a second rebellion, merry Falstaff is called away from London’s underbelly, his coquetry with potty-mouthed wench Doll Tearsheet (Nia Gwynne) and Mistress Quickly (Paula Dionisotti) put on hold.

He travels to Gloucestershire, recruiting a raggle-taggle band of old soaks and rustic bumpkins from country villages, all the while believing himself still in favour at the Westminster Court.

In the shires he meets former acquaintance Justice Shallow (Oliver Ford Davies), who provides light relief as he nostalgically, and erroneously, recalls his gallivanting youth.

But as the sick King weakens, so does the bond between Hal and his roly-poly companion – their separation is also physical as they meet only twice in the whole play.

The deathbed scene in which Hal mistakenly usurps his sleeping father by taking the crown is one of Part II’s strongest moments.

Grief for his dying father and the looming burden of the throne he must inherit combine to force the reluctant prince into maturity. Hassell is affecting, as his cocky smile slips into mask of desperation, his swagger turns to diffidence.

Once the new king is crowned, Falstaff has become an unsightly remnant of Hal’s old hedonistic life, a vestige of an ill-spent youth that he would rather put behind him. “I know thee not, old man,” he says, wrapped in pomp and finery.

Part II dwells on the extinguishing of life’s “brief candle” whereas Part I shows it burnt at both ends – it is something of a hangover – full of regrets and reminiscence.

Henry IV Parts I and II is at the Barbican, Silk Street, EC2Y 8DS until 24 January

January 15, 2015
Constructing Worlds – review: architecture that compels to silence

Iwan Baan, Torre David #2 2011. Image courtesy of the artist and Perry Rubenstein Gallery, Los Angeles

The Constructing Worlds exhibition at the Barbican challenges perceptions and understandings of the built modern world we live in today.

It brings together 18 photographers from the 1930s to the present day, each with a unique approach towards photographing architecture.

The chronological journey begins with Berenice Abbott’s documentation of New York and the construction of the iconic Rockefeller Center in 1932, a time of economic, political and social uncertainty.

Against the backdrop of the Great Depression, American photographer Walker Evans escapes from New York to capture rural America in a straightforward yet intimate way.

He looks at “the ones who have been the most severely affected, but is elevating the everyday and the vernacular”, explains Alona Pardo, co-curator of the exhibition.

Chongqing IV (Sunday Picnic), Chongqing Municipality, 2006. Photograph courtesy of Nadav Kander and Flowers Gallery

The photographs reflect global, international, social and political issues, says Pardo, as we move from the upper to the lower gallery. “Location and geography have changed, but you get the same issues being brought up about living conditions, urban density and rapid migration in Latin America, China and the Middle East.”

Ecological and environmental issues are also raised. Bas Princen’s image of ‘Cairo’s Garbage City’, shot in 2011, is a captivating panorama depicting residents stashing the Egyptian capital’s garbage in their own roof terrace.

Nadav Kander takes us to China depicting fisherman perching in front of a half-completed bridge on the banks of the Yangtze River. The atmospheric pale yellowy mist of pollution suggests the impact of rapid industrialisation on the community in an almost poetic way.

Designed by the Belgium architectural practice Office KGDVS, the overall scenography of the exhibition manages the balancing act of presenting the work of the 18 different photographers in a very consistent and convincing way.

The exhibition brings it home how much of our visual vocabulary originates from the past 80 years and how it has been refined by the construction of contemporary cityscapes.

It may help to step back from the global issues raised to gain a clearer perspective of the photography as a whole. At other times though, more confined spaces force us into engaging intimately with the issues, such as with Hiroshi Sugimoto’s poignant blurred photograph of the World Trade Center, or Hélène Binet’s more psychological and lyrical work of the Berlin Jewish Museum – two images that will compel the viewer to silence.

Constructing Worlds: Photography and Architecture in the Modern Age is at Barbican Centre, Silk Street, EC2Y 8DS until 11 January

Clinton Road, London 1997. Photograph: Thomas Struth

December 15, 2014
Walead Beshty brings rubbish installation to Barbican Centre

Walead Beshty – The Curve, Barbican Centre © Chris Jackson and Getty images

Walead Beshty’s latest installation at the Barbican is a rubbish idea. The UK-born, LA-based artist has used the cyanotype process to create over 12,000 prints at the Barbican centre. The prints, however, are projected onto detritus: cardboard, newspapers, bank statements and discarded art show tickets.

The result is a collage, pinned up inside the Curve space and is intimidating in its scale. The installation serves as a timeline of Beshty’s life and work, starting with the work done in Beshty’s LA studio in 2013 and finishing with the work done in October 2014, after a month-long residency at the Barbican.

The installation is pleasing to look at. The cyanotype is an early photographic process invented by Sir John Herschel in 1842. The result is a stark blue background with a white silhouette of objects from Beshty’s studio.

It succeeds because the viewer can create a personal narrative out of this timeline, whether it is political or as a comment on the sheer amount of information available to us. Indeed, the exhibition feels like a social media prototype, a cardboard- based Twitter tacked onto a cave wall.

Beshty’s work rewards exploration but will frustrate those who want to examine every last detail. A lot of the prints are inaccessible because they are pinned up so high. This inaccessibility is no more apparent than in the installation’s mouthful of a title: A Partial Disassembling of an Invention Without a Future: Helter-Skelter and Random Notes in Which the Pulleys and Cogwheels Are Lying Around at Random All Over the Workbench.

Do not let the title put you off; Beshty’s installation is a manic look at an artist at work, detailing his life and his process. It is impressive to look at and rewards closer inspection.

At eye level, it is possible to see newspapers – with headlines such as “Behind the masks in Ukraine, many faces of rebellion” – and objects from Beshty’s studio printed onto pieces of cardboard. The installation includes the mundane, as well as sensitive information.

Until 8 February 2015 The Curve Barbican Centre Silk Street, EC2Y 8DS www.barbican.org.uk

November 7, 2014
Festival of Latin American theatre to go ahead this month in East London

Parlamento! to be performed by Chilean theatre outfit Tryo Teatro Banda at Rich Mix on 15-16 October

When Daniel Goldman went to study abroad for year in Argentina, he had no idea it would shape the rest of his life.

Goldman is now artistic director and founder of CASA Latin American Theatre Festival, the UK’s premier festival of Latin American drama, which returns this month, to be held at the Barbican and Rich Mix.

It could have been so different for Goldman, who at the time was part-way through a degree in Spanish and Portuguese literature, and considering a career in investment banking.

“Instead of being an English assistant in Spain, I went to theatre school in Buenos Aires,” he explains.

“I thought a it would be a good place to speak Spanish and I was enamoured at the time with the writer Borges, but I wasn’t planning on being a theatre maker or a director or anything.”

This was in 2001–2002, a time of crisis for Argentina’s economy, with unemployment exceeding 25 per cent and a climate of political and social unrest.

“What was incredible was the response to it by artists and theatre makers. It was so inspiring to see theatre respond to huge social issues and audiences going to the theatre to engage in dialogue. It made me decide that it was theatre that I wanted to do instead of investment banking, which was part of an original plan.”

Goldman’s idea was to “build a bridge” between the socially engaged theatre he found in Latin America and UK theatre culture, taking inspiration from the casas de cultura – houses of culture – he discovered in Buenos Aires.

“They’re basically houses that have been converted into art spaces, where you’ve got a theatre on one floor, a gallery on the next, and instead of bedrooms you’ve got an art gallery or tiny theatre space. The aim with CASA is that we’re a home for all of Latin American culture.”

Since it began in 2007, CASA has quietly grown a formidable reputation. This year it welcomes companies from Chile, Venezuela, Columbia, Argentina and Ecuador and a range of productions from mime to farce and drama.

Highlights from the programme include the UK premiere of La Araucana, which sees four actor-musicians play more than 15 instruments in a wittily subversive take on an epic poem that recounts the conquest of Chile.

Revolution and resistance are themes that run throughout the festival. Población Arenera is a bawdy satire about a 1940s boxer who inspired revolution, while Bar Ensueño is a tale of drinking and dissent from Chile.

Most of the pieces include English subtitles, though these are not always necessary. For his show Mime, Argentine Jorge Costa, who Goldman jokingly describes as Argentina’s answer to Buster Keaton, builds an hour of material based on the first sound or movement the audience makes.

“Call it high brow or not,” says Goldman, “but we want to celebrate things about Latin American culture that are beyond tacos and salsa.”

CASA Latin American Theatre Festival is at the Barbican Centre and Rich Mix from 10–19 October.

October 8, 2014
Sam Lee and the Unthanks to play lost and found folk music of First World War

Sam Lee, Rachel and Becky Unthank. Photograph: Sarah Mason

Among the casualties of World War I were songs and stories that been passed down from one generation to the next.

Recognising this, folk singer Sam Lee and Tyneside duo the Unthanks have collaborated on a project which they hope will bring these lesser known cultural relics to a wider audience.

A Time and Place – Musical Meditations on the First World War will see them perform music from the period, as well as their own songs inspired by stories told to them first hand.

“We’re looking at songs that would have existed in the common repertoire of the soldiers and have rewritten some of the stories from those who remember the war,” Lee explains.

The musicians form part of an 11-strong line-up which includes a string quartet, brass and video design by Matthew J. Watkins, of Gorillaz fame.

Mercury Prize-nominated Lee researched the project by visiting villages in Devon, Cornwall, Gloucester and Wiltshire, where he gathered songs and stories from local people.

“There was a 104-year-old woman who remembered as a little girl seeing a Zeppelin come down in her back garden,” he recalls.

“Another woman remembered meeting an old soldier who told this story about Bideford Bridge in Devon. The first time he crossed it was with all his comrades, but the second time he crossed over the bridge he was alone, as he was the only person to return to his village.”

Lee and the Unthanks have been turning these and other stories into new songs using existing melodies from the era, as well as reinterpreting old songs to make them relevant to World War I.

“A lot of the songs of that era were songs from the Boer War that had been rehashed, just as First World War songs were rehashed as songs for the Second World War. So it’s an ongoing recycling process that happens.”

With the loss of an entire generation of young men came, according to Lee, the “silencing” of a nation.

“Those were the people who were singing in the village pubs, they were the morris dancers, the storytellers, the great hope for carrying on the oral traditions of our culture and ancestral stories,” he explains.

“What was left in their wake was that inability for communities to feel like they could continue these things in their absence, so the dancing stopped and the singing stopped, and a lot of the traditions kind of disappeared.”

Lee is excited to be working with the Unthanks, who will be creating new music set to First World War poetry.

“We’re really great friends but we’ve never done anything but sit in pubs and sing our hearts out with each other. Sometimes you can be best of friends but your voices don’t sound well together, but with the Unthanks there’s something really nice going.”

A Time and Place: Musical Meditations on the First World War is at Barbican Hall, Silk Street, EC2Y 8DS on 18 September.

September 8, 2014
Living the highlife: Ibibio Sound Machine gear up for Walthamstow Garden Party

Eno Williams of Ibibio Sound Machine

How did the band get together?

We were experimenting with some ideas and found the sound of the Ibibio dialect was very well suited to musical interpretation. We wanted to find a sound that not only looked back to the past of African music and Western styles like funk and disco. We wanted something that captured a bit of ‘now’ too. That’s where the electronic element of the music came in.

To what extent is the group’s album, Ibibio Sound Machine, one that actually reflects London?

I think it’s an album that could only have happened with the diverse combination of influences you find in London – the sound of so many different cultures coming together. Just in our band we have Nigerian, Ghanaian, Brazilian, French, English and Australian backgrounds. London has a unique set of cultural influences these days and it’s that interaction between them that interests me the most about being a musician here.

Can you tell us a bit about the folk stories that make up the lyrics?

They are generally about morals and cultural lessons – things told by elders to young ones to teach certain life lessons. They generally involve animals and mystical happenings but all have a serious message. I think the prodigal son is a special one because my Granny told it to me before I realised it was a Bible story about a parent’s undying love for a runaway child.

What is your relationship to these stories and why was it important for you to sing them in Ibibio?

They mean a lot to me as they were part of my childhood growing up with my grandparents in Lagos and elsewhere. I had never really thought to sing in Ibibio but once I started it seemed like it was something I could offer that was uniquely me.

What can an audience expect from an Ibibio Sound Machine live show?

Energy and musicality. The band is sounding great right now – we never do things exactly the same way twice and always try to keep the life in live music!

Walthamstow Garden Party is at Lloyd Park, E17 5JW from 26-27 July.

July 9, 2014
Chick Corea jazz review: ‘panoptic interpretations yielding plenty of complexity’

Chick Corea

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.

Chick Corea played the Barbican on 19 May 2014.

June 17, 2014
Brazilian songwriter Maria Gadu to perform at the Barbican

Brazilian songstress Maria Gadu. Photograph: Gabriel Wickbold

As the sporting masses prepare for the World Cup, there has never been a more fitting time for Brazilian singer-songwriter, guitarist and twice Latin Grammy nominated Maria Gadú to cross the Atlantic in preparation for a highly-anticipated performance at the Barbican this month.

Celebrating much success in many countries after her self-titled album went platinum in 2009 both in Italy and Brazil, she has since become something of a household name amongst her peers. “Maria Gadú is a popular phenomenon for her own generation,” famed Brazilian composer and songwriter Caetano Veloso has said of her. “[She is] someone with an authentic musical vocation.”

Singing in her native Brazilian Portuguese, Gadú’s voice is a distinct combination of jazz and soul; a voice that brings an uplifting aura that surrounds lyrics of peace and love. Her impressive guitar technique backs her up with a powerful edge. It’s this vibrancy that makes her stand out from other artists that fall in the ‘world music’ bracket. The sunny track ‘Shimbalaiê’ exudes every bit of this talent.

At 27, Gadú knows who she is which gives her music a kind of strength that many pop artists struggle with today. Her traditional yet blended style does justice to the original Musica Popular Brasileira movement to which she and the other artists such as Chico Buarque and Jorge Ben are associated. This classic and quintessentially Brazilian genre originated in the 1960s and has become the foundation on which Gadú and other more modern artists such as Maria Monte’s music is formed.

Whether you enjoy football or not, her performance will certainly be a welcome break from all the hustle and bustle of World Cup fever.

Maria Gadú is playing at the Barbican, Silk Street, EC2Y 8DS on 28 June.

tickets@barbican.org.uk

June 10, 2014
Calvary review – ‘An incisive, thrilling and original piece of work’

Kelly Reilly and Brendon Gleeson in Calvary

John Michael McDonagh’s Calvary is at once raging and solemn. It rushes back and forth between the two states to dizzying effect, washing through its 101 minutes like the crashing waves of Ireland’s west coast sea, on which the film’s central, and sinful, parish rests. It’s a darkly comic musing on the fragmentation of an uprooted society and its most famous – or infamous – institution, the Catholic church. For all its splendour, though, there is something amiss, something distinctly Irish.

The film opens to a shadowy confession-box exchange between Brendan Gleeson’s Father James Lavelle and a troubled parishioner, who promises to kill the good priest in vengeance for the sexual abuse he suffered as a child. He gives Lavelle a week to put his things in order before a high noon-style showdown on the waterfront. “Killing a priest on a Sunday,” he says – “that’ll be a good one.”

The early scenes often slide into stunning overhead shots of County Sligo, evoking something of Ireland’s champion of religious critique, novelist John McGahern, who was born in the adjacent County Leitrim and would set many of his bruising portraits of rural-Catholic life in the wilds of the bordering Roscommon. It’s an evocation that I couldn’t shake off for the entire film, doing McDonagh something of a disservice.

A striking difference between the director and McGahern lies in the latter’s tender handling of a fading way of life. Despite the scathing nature of his work, the author would delicately lament the loss of elements of the farming communities of which he wrote. It’s not that McDonagh’s work is off the mark in turning its back on local identity, it’s that there is too little of McGahern’s fascinating Ireland left for my liking, beyond the rolling hills and tattered reputation of the ailing church.

This is perhaps the result of the 20-plus years that have passed since the author’s thumping Amongst Women was nominated for the Booker Prize, with the generational shift leaving too little of that past to justifiably cling on to. Not one of McDonagh’s characters appears to belong, and while this is intentional, and affective in its own right, the absence of history leaves a gaping hole – for me anyway. The film’s gorgeous sounds and images suffer from a kind of hollowness as a result. Even Lavelle is an outsider, drafted onto the land that was once every bit a part of its inhabitants – for better or worse. The majority of Calvary’s figures are displaced and at a loss; it’s a bankruptcy that is a harsh but honest reflection of the times.

This half criticism is based on a personal grievance and should take little away from the film’s considerable merit. Gleeson is sublime as the widower priest, who, to begin with, looks only mildly perturbed by the murderous threat hanging over his head. Recovering from alcohol addiction and offering counsel to his damaged visiting daughter – who, following her father’s departure for the priesthood, was left to deal with the loss of two parents in quick succession – the good shepherd continues to tend his wayward, eccentric and exasperating flock, knowing that one is the mysterious confessor set on spilling his blood.

With a tongue as sharp as cheese wire, chewing hungrily on the nourishing dialogue, but softened by deep, compassionate gestures, it’s hard to think of Gleeson in better form. His composure as he marches on towards his reckoning is mightily impressive. It’s reminiscent of his turn in McDonagh’s brother Martin’s comic gem, In Bruges; I half expected Colin Farrell or Ralph Fiennes to pop up at any moment as the would-be killer.

Overall, McDonagh has plumped for and executed something that is effective almost to a fault. While I can’t help wonder if it would work better on the stage, there is no denying that Calvary is an incisive, thrilling and original piece of work. Packed with an abundance of distinct and amusing characters, coupled with penetrating insight, it might just be the best McDonagh film, and that’s saying something. I’ll have to watch it again and see – with McGahern stashed away on the bottom shelf for good measure.

Calvary is showing at the Barbican Cinema, Beech Street, EC2Y 8AE until 24 April.

April 22, 2014