Hackney-born film director Asif Kapadia has been nominated for an Oscar for his documentary about the life and career of Amy Winehouse.
Amy was nominated in the Best Documentary Feature category, and will go up against What Happened Miss Simone? as well as non-music related documentaries The Look of Silence, Cartel Land and Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom.
Amy is the highest grossing British documentary of all time, surpassing Senna, Kapadia’s 2010 documentary about the Brazilian Formula One driver.
Speaking to the Hackney Citizen and East End Review, Kapadia said he was sorting out his tax receipts when the announcement was made yesterday.
“It’s been winning quite a few prizes, but I’m very superstitious and you don’t want to get carried away so I was trying not to think about it. Luckily our film starts with the letter ‘A’ so it was the first one up.”
Despite critical acclaim and box office success, Senna was overlooked on the Oscar shortlist for 2012, making the nomination for Amy all the sweeter.
“Our aim was to show people the real girl, the real Amy – and in that way I think we succeeded,” said Kapadia.
“At least now people have more compassion and love for her now than maybe before. I think she became a bit of a tabloid persona, tabloid character, when actually she’s high art, she’s a real natural phenomenon and someone for London to be really proud of.
“Hopefully if this happens again and someone else has what appears to be a public breakdown we’ll show a bit more love and compassion and not attack them.”
After wins last year for Rebecca Lenkiewicz (Ida) and James Lucas (The Phone Call), Kapadia is happy to be flying the flag for Hackney at this year’s Oscar ceremony, as fellow East Londoner Idris Elba lost out for his role in Beasts of no Nation.
“I’m a Hackney boy born and bred,” he said. “I was born in Mother’s Hopsital which is no longer there, I went to Tyssen Primary school and I went to Homerton House secondary school.
“We lived in Stokey and we lived in Stamford Hill and although I don’t live in Hackney right now you can’t take Hackney out of the man. It definitely gave me the strength to survive.”
Asif-Kapadia receiving an honorary doctorate at the University of East London in 2012
The Oscars have once again come under fire for a lack of racial diversity, with Kapadia enjoying the dubious distinction of being one the few non-white nominees.
“I guess all you can do is be there and represent your side and hopefully other people will get the opportunity and come through,” he said.
“I’m just happy to be there as one of the Londoners. I’m just going to go there with our film and not worry too much about that other stuff.”
The 2016 Oscar winners will be announced on 28 February at a ceremony at the Dolby Theatre, Hollywood.
Vocal Constructivists perform Lektura at The Forge, Camden, November 2012. Photograph: Monika Chilicka
How can you ‘play’ a series of squiggles, or dots, or wavy lines?
I loosely paraphrase a question posed by my 13-year-old self in a school music class. We were being introduced to graphic scores, a way of representing music through visual symbols outside the realm of crochets, quavers, treble clefs and the like.
Graphic scores as we know them began in the 1950s, as avant-garde composers such as Krzysztof Penderecki and Karlheinz Stockhausen began integrating noises, effects and electronic interventions into their compositions.
These composers found traditional notation limiting and sought new ways of conveying information to the performer. Instead of five horizontal lines and various dots thereon, they employed geometric shapes, abstract patterns and symbols, which gave performers interpretive freedom and meant no two renditions would sound alike.
Vocal Constructivists is a Stoke Newington experimental chamber choir that performs graphic scores. It was founded by Jane Alden, a choral singer with a traditional choral background who was so fascinated with one particular graphic score that she formed a group to perform it.
That score was the epic 193-page Treatise, composed by Cornelius Cardew between 1963–67. Once called the ‘Mount Everest’ of graphic scores, Treatise is inspired by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and consists of numbers, shapes and symbols, whose interpretation is left to the performer.
A chance meeting in 2010 with Michael Parsons, a composer who in the 1960s helped found the experimental Scratch Orchestra with Cardew, sowed the seed from which Vocal Constructivists bloomed.
“I was at Tate Modern in 2010 and looking at all this constructivist influenced art when I ran into someone who said that’s Michael Parsons over there. So I boldly went up and said I’m really interested in Treatise and was wondering if you think it’s ever been realised just by singers. He said he didn’t think it had.”
Five years on, and a group that formed for the sake of one composition is still together, performing a programme at last month’s Stoke Newington Contemporary Music Festival inspired by the centenary of early abstract artist Kazimir Malevich.
“I’d say we’re moving in the reverse direction,” Alden says, comparing their experiments in sound with abstract art. “The whole idea of making a vase and flowers look like a vase and flowers was turned upside down by the development of form, the idea that form is what is ultimately interesting rather than the content.
“Whereas what we’re doing is looking at scores that are deliberately ambiguous, so a composer might give us a vase and two flowers and it’s up to us to use our imaginations to see what we can get out of it.”
Alden sings in the New London Chamber Choir, and the group she originally assembled consisted of fellow choristers. Now though it is more of a mix; some members have a background in improvisation, others can’t read music at all, which means talking about music in a language accessible to all.
“I originally formed the group but it’s evolved in a participatory way,” says Alden. “We’re saying let’s see what the performers can bring to the table, rather than how the composer wants it, and what is interesting about it is that the parameters are so completely open.”
After the high point of the 1950s and 60s, graphic scores became deeply unfashionable, with Cardew himself denouncing his own avant-garde work, including Treatise.
Now, however, graphic scores are experiencing a comeback of sorts, with the likes of Aphex Twin and Sonic Youth amongst those who have used them. Is this a symptom of the ever-increasing role of computers in music, or does it run deeper?
“We’re in a period where people are looking at the radicalism of the 60s and 70s wistfully,” says Alden. “Maybe people are getting interested again because it represents a kind of freedom that people hanker after now. But whether or not we can achieve it is a different question.”
A ska version of David Bowie’s ‘Heroes’, performed by brass ensemble the Hackney Colliery Band, has been released as a tribute to the music icon, who died on Sunday aged 69.
The upbeat recording is free to download, with the band encouraging donations to Cancer Research UK or Macmillan Cancer Support in lieu of payment.
The band were already planning to release the recording this week to coincide with that of Blackstar, Bowie’s 29th and final album, which came out last Friday.
Trumpet player Steve Pretty admits he was initially worried about releasing an upbeat rendition of ‘Heroes’ at a time of grief, but says the reaction so far has been overwhelmingly positive.
“I was a little worried it would feel inappropriate, but people have been saying that it’s cheered them up, people who are real Bowie fans. I think if it was morose it wouldn’t add much. It’s more a celebration than a commemoration I suppose.”
For Pretty, the most inspirational thing about David Bowie was his “creative restlessness”.
“I was sad to hear of his death but he didn’t define my youth,” he said.
“At the same time the thing I really admire about him as a creative force is that restlessness and the fact he was able to be so incredibly popular but at the same time do things on his own terms.
“That restless energy and lack of cynicism is really refreshing. Being able to keep control in an industry that is not always a nice place to operate, to stay popular, relevant and by all accounts a nice guy, is an amazing achievement.”
As part of a nationwide outpouring of grief, East London residents have been finding ways to pay tribute to the man who gave us Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane and the Thin White Duke.
Newly-opened bar Machine No 3 on Well Street is hosting a David Bowie Tribute Party tomorrow evening, with prizes for the best costume, face-paint and t-shirts, while pupils at Queensbridge primary school in Haggerston sang a rousing rendition of ‘Starman’ at a memorial assembly yesterday.
It is no hyperbole to describe Annie Leibovitz as a strong candidate for most famous living photographer.
From the iconic image of a pregnant and naked Demi Moore to the last photograph of John Lennon, taken five hours before he was shot, there are few bona fide stars not to find themselves at the end of Leibovitz’s lens.
And this month, new work by Leibovitz will be in East London for the first leg of a world touring exhibition.
Women: New Portraits features newly-commissioned photographs that reflect the changes in the roles of women today.
The photographs, on display at Wapping Hydraulic Power Station, continue a project Leibovitz started more than 15 years ago with her late partner, Susan Sontag.
That project, entitled Women, was, in Sontag’s words, a series of “photographs of people with nothing more in common than that they are women”.
It saw portraits of First Ladies and Hollywood stars alongside those of coal miners, domestic violence victims, a surgeon and an astronaut.
Women: New Portraits will feature work from the original series as well as the newly-commissioned photographs and other pictures taken in the interim.
The free exhibition is scheduled to visit nine other major global cities over the course of the year, though London is its first port of call.
Women: New Portraits is at Wapping Hydraulic Power Station, Wapping Wall, E1W 3SL from 16 January – 7 February 2016
Trials and tribulations… Hannah Hutch (Ann) and Amanda Bellamy (Jane) in Jane Wenham: The Witch of Walkern. Photograph: Richard Davenport
The fascinating story of one of the last witch trials in England is the inspiration for a play by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, opening this month at the Arcola.
Jane Wenham: The Witch of Walkern is based on the true story of an old woman who narrowly avoided execution after being accused and convicted of witchcraft in the Hertfordshire village of Walkern in 1712.
Jane Wenham was a ‘cunning woman’, a type of healer who used herbs to ward off illnesses. But after crossing certain members of the village she was accused of witchcraft and arrested. The trial caused a sensation in London, provoking a pamphlet war, while the village itself was caught between those wanting to save her life and those claiming to want to save her soul.
Lenkiewicz, who co-wrote the Oscar-winning film Ida, and whose play The Naked Skin was the first by a living female to be performed on the National Theatre’s Olivier stage, was approached by Max Clifford-Clark from theatre company Out of Joint and asked if she wanted to write about Jane Wenham.
“I looked into it and thought it was fascinating and said yes,” says Lenkiewicz, a former Hackney resident who now lives in Leyton. “Although I’ve taken a few events and let it spring from that really because what interested me more is how it still resonates today.”
Arthur Miller famously used the Salem witch trials to comment on McCarthyism in The Crucible, and Lenkiewicz similarly uses the story of Jane Wenham to draw parallels to the present day.
“She was an outsider Jane Wenham, she lived on the edge of the village and I just think that fear of the outsider is very much still present. You see it with immigration, people terrified of anything or anyone coming into their territory. It’s not just modern it’s historical, and crippling in many ways.”
Wenham’s outsider status Lenkiewicz believes can be attributed to her age and gender. Part of it, she says, was economics – the idea of communities not wanting people who weren’t contributing anymore.
“But also it was mainly women who were prosecuted,” she says, “so I suppose my question would be what terrifies men about women that at that time they would put them into torture corsets and gag them?”
Lenkiewicz’s plays often – though not exclusively – focus on women’s stories, from her debut play Soho: A Tale of Table Dancers (the first production to be staged at the Arcola, back in 2001) to 2008’s Her Naked Skin, a tale of the struggles facing two suffragettes before World War One.
Lenkiewicz feels keenly that women are hugely underrepresented in film and theatre, and tries to redress that balance. Her most recent film script is about the Second World War allied spy Noor Inayat Khan, a radio-operator in Nazi-occupied Paris who was sent to Dachau and murdered. “She was an incredibly brave young woman, and you just want to bring out the story lest we forget,” Lenkiewicz explains.
This desire to give women who have been silenced a voice explains Lenkiewicz’s anger at the cancellation of a performance of Jane Wenham: The Witch of Walkern at a girls’ school in Ipswich last October, where it was due to be staged as part of regional tour prior to the London run.
Ipswich High School for Girls cancelled the performance after learning of the play’s “references to child abuse”, something Lenkiewicz dismisses as censorious and evidence of a “nanny state mentality”.
“I just thought it was a sign of our bleak nanny state times that they were forbidding 15- or 16-year-old girls to watch something that was incredibly pertinent to them,” she says.
“One of the main characters is only 16 and a very confused female. I just think it’s an apt piece to see for anyone who’s going through that maelstrom of change really of profound change.”
Lenkiewicz, who is now in her mid-40s, explains that her intention was always to tell Jane Wenham’s story, but that the writing process brought to light more instances of silencing and oppression towards women, the most terrifying of which being child abuse. “Kids are told they shouldn’t tell, and we should be addressing that – we shouldn’t be shutting these conversations down,” she told The Stage.
The irony that a play dealing with the hysteria and the oppression of women should be deemed inappropriate was underlined when Lenkiewicz received a letter from a 15-year-old girl who had seen the play in Watford.
“It was a very heartfelt letter saying how it had helped her in many ways and that she thought it was essential viewing for young women and that it was about empowerment,” Lenkiewicz recalls.
“If I was directing this play towards anyone it would be a young female contingent because it’s all about having a voice really.”
Jane Wenham: The Witch of Walkern is at the Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, E8 3DL until 30 January arcolatheatre.com
Art curator Shaun Caton in Homerton Hospital, surrounded by art made by patients with acquired and traumatic brain injuries. Photograph: Russell Parton
If you’re looking for art, a hospital is not the most obvious port of call. But along the labyrinthine corridors of the Homerton hangs a vast and diverse collection – the envy of any Shoreditch gallery.
Hawk-eyed visitors will spot works by twentieth-century masters among the paintings, drawings and photographs by established artists. But next to canvases by Henry Moore, Burt Irvin and Bruce MacClean are brilliantly original collages and stunning abstract paintings that are far less easy to identify. This is because they are created by true ‘outsider artists’ – the patients themselves.
“People often say that the work by the untrained artist is better than the one by that celebrated Royal Academician,” says the hospital’s art curator Shaun Caton.
We meet at the front of the hospital for a trip to the Regional Neurological Rehabilitation Unit (RNRU), where for over 20 years Caton has been running art workshops for those with traumatic and acquired brain injuries. Patients may have suffered a stroke, a brain aneurysm, been hit on the head or involved in a road traffic accident. Caton aims to bring them back to health through activities that inspire their creative potential.
“This is the only ward that has every single room filled with art made by patients,” says Caton as we enter the RNRU. “As you will see it’s just not possible to display it all – there are around 3000 works, and that’s only the ones on paper.”
Although there is a sizeable collection of art in the hospital by established names, Caton is more interested in works by unknown and untrained artists. We approach a door through which lies the “nerve centre” of the operation, and duly enter.
To step inside Homerton Hospital art room is a bit like entering a secret garden. Abstract paintings of swirling patterns or of strange creatures seem to cover every surface, jostling for space with painted models, knitted fish, handmade books and collages. Paints, brushes and easels fit wherever they can, the makeshift shelves visibly buckling under the weight of art – each piece with a unique story about a person with a serious head injury.
Eclectic: a selection of artworks made by Homerton patients. Photograph: Russell Parton
Caton calls the room the “power house of the creative imagination”, and the title is not misplaced. In the 20 or so years of its existence, nearly a thousand artists from Hackney and the East End of London have volunteered their services here.
“We have had sculptors, collage artists, poets, writers, artists who make inventions with machines and installation art, we’ve had sound artists, photographers, print makers, recycled book artists, artists who make art using recycled bus tickets – it’s endless the imaginative scope of things we can introduce here,” Caton enthuses.
The art room started as an experiment to engage patients with behavioural problems, but it soon evolved. Now it treats patients with speech, language and memory problems. Some are semi-paralysed, others may not know the day of the week.
“My job if you like is to find things that suit people’s potential but push them a bit further,” Caton explains, showing me a handmade book filled with patterns, text and collages.
“Let’s say we’re trying to encourage someone to concentrate better, well something like this which requires cutting and placement and judgement and colour will stimulate the brain to work with the hand and the eye to improve coordination.”
One patient, a man from Bethnal Green, had been diagnosed with Guillain-Barré syndrome and had paralysis in his hands. He wanted to paint watercolours and spent all his time in the art room trying to get the feeling back in his fingers. Caton strapped the brushes in his hands with surgical tape and guided them over the paper.
“At first we made what some people would consider to be meaningless scribble, but as time went by he started to regain control of his movements, and was able to execute quite precise designs and illustrations which led to compositions and paintings of a very high standard,” Caton recalls.
The patient, who had no formal training, exhibited his watercolours in the hospital and went on to become an amateur artist once discharged.
Patients are referred for very different reasons: a physiotherapist may want a patient to strengthen their wrist and finger muscles, or a psychologist may refer a patient to improve their social skills.
Most hospitals practise some sort of art therapy, but this is very different: art at the Homerton is used to tackle a wider range of conditions that are not merely psychological. The success of the art room has led to the hospital piloting a similar service for patients with dementia.
Caton’s approach is less rigid than the one-to-one confines of art therapy. Workshops at the Homerton encourage collaboration and social interaction, and cater for several patients at once.
But what really makes it unique are the activities and the range of stimuli used to inspire the patients. We listen to a piece of sound art sent in out of the blue by an unknown composer called Lowell Johnson. It’s an atmospheric urban soundscape, a kaleidoscopic collection of sounds that mirrors the chaos of the mind.
“When you play something like that to a group, people respond to it in a variety of ways. It will automatically trigger conversation and remind people of things, but it’s also probably going to inspire them to make an artwork,” says Caton.
“We’re leagues ahead of other hospitals in that respect. They might just do some paintings of butterflies or some block paintings but we try to provide meaningful activities that are truly extraordinary.”
Bright future: Caton aims to inspire patients’ creative potential. Photograph: Russell Parton
Caton has refused interviews and is wary about talking to journalists. In an age of cuts, hospital art is often seen as being a waste of money.
“Those people need to come and visit this facility and meet the patients and see the evidence for themselves about how this can speed up their recovery programme by improving sense of well being,” he says.
The budget for basic art materials, as well as for framing, mounting, storage and cataloguing the art works is very small. This means Caton has had to raise funds by holding exhibitions and selling greetings cards designed by the patients.
“All these guys who come here and offer their services and time and talent are not being paid,” Caton insists. “They’re not even been paid a cup of tea, I provide that out of my own money. And I provide the biscuits as well, because that’s the way I think it should be.”
Through cuts and all kinds of adversity, the art room has kept going, which Caton puts down to having to be resourceful, and not leaving the lights on.
The situation changed in September, however, when the street artist Stik donated £50,000 by selling off 100 original prints of an NHS-themed mural entitled Sleeping Baby, which is on display in the hospital courtyard.
Members of the public camped out over night, queuing around the block to take home one of the limited edition prints, made by an artist who himself used to volunteer at the hospital.
Hospital mural: ‘Sleeping Baby’ by Stik located in the inner courtyard of the Homerton. Photograph: Stik
In a speech at the sale, Caton said: “In this hospital there are many patients who need something to focus on, so we offer them art workshops, not just as a recreation or past time, but to help them gain control of their lives again.
“The things that go on in these workshops enhance their concentration, their motor coordination and their general sense of well being. And so the money raised will enable us to buy much needed equipment, materials and really push forward with these services.”
We sit around a table on which there are at least 100 individual art works. The storage racks behind me are falling to bits, on the verge of collapsing under the weight of paper. With Stik’s donation, Caton will finally be able to invest in cataloguing and archiving the art for the benefit of future generations.
It is not an unreasonable ambition. The Bethlem Gallery in Beckenham is home to a fascinating collection of art by mentally ill patients, and in the 1920s the German psychiatrist Dr Hans Prinzhorn amassed a vast collection of his patients’ art that is famous the world over. Why not something similar at the Homerton Hospital for patients with brain injuries and dementia?
“I’d like the general public to know about this collection, what it’s about, who it’s been created by and why we are even bothering to maintain this for posterity,” Caton says. “I feel it should be maintained, because it’s an unknown universe of creative potential. A lot of people in society have an innate hidden creative talent, which can be teased out through art. This is a testament to it.”
A model for others: Caton’s workshops aim to help patients ‘gain control of their lives again’. Photograph: Russell Parton
Collage by Laura Phillimore for An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in London
“Seagulls circle over the Town Hall… A man carries an umbrella, folded… A small child with a yellow balloon.” For some, these everyday observations are not worth dwelling on, but for two local authors such details are what truly makes up the life of a place.
For their new book An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in London, Sarah Lester and Nathan Penlington set themselves the task of sitting in the cafés surrounding Hackney Town Hall and creating a written record of “that which is not noticed, that which has no importance: what happens when nothing happens”.
It would call on most people’s reserves of patience and stamina to withstand 20 minutes of scribbling, but the authors kept at it for a weekend, becoming uniquely attuned to the urban environment in the process.
“Just trying to pay more attention to stuff is a hard thing,” says Penlington, a poet and performer from North Wales who has lived on and off in Hackney for 20 years. “I think the rewards are greater though. I think if you just slow down and try and pay attention, particularly if it’s an environment that you live in, you can get a real essence of what the place and people are like.”
For the duration of three days, the authors alternated between tables at Stage 3 café, Artisserie, Hackney Picturehouse and Baxter’s Court on Mare Street. They worked alone, creating separate accounts of the square and what was happening around them.
“I like how unexceptional the space is,” says Lester, an anthropologist, writer and Hackney resident. “A lot of people laughed when we told them where we were doing it, but it’s more interesting than doing it in say Leicester Square, which is a bit more homogenous in terms of the people there.”
Sarah Lester and Nathan Penlington read from the book at its launch at Stage 3 café
It was a grey weekend in October 2014 when the pair set about their experiment, a date that marked 40 years since the French writer Georges Perec embarked on a project to describe everything he saw in Place Saint-Sulpice in Paris.
“I’m really interested in experimental literature and read a lot of Perec when I was younger and liked his approach.” Penlington explains.
“Perec started in the 1970s to be interested in place and memory and set off on a number of little projects. One was to try and remember places that he’d lived in at various points and revisit them and describe them.
“But with his book An Attempt to Exhaust a Place in Paris he set out in three days to try and catalogue everything that happened pretty much in the same way we did it.
“The result is very much a document of that time and place and I thought on the 40th anniversary it’d be quite good if we could try and genuinely capture a different time and a different place and to see if that would work.”
When I heard about the project my first reaction went something along the lines of what a great idea but will it work as a book?
But it does. The observations draw on human experience, are self-aware, witty, plaintive and tender. You identify with the teenage boy in a tracksuit trying to kick a pigeon, or the girls singing out loud using McDonalds cups as microphones, because it may have been you – or perhaps it was you.
And as an object, the book includes some capital (in both senses of the word) illustrations: one collage by visual artist Laura Phillimore shows a map of constellations around old buildings and municipal squares, while the cover image, by artist Keira Rathbone, is an image of Fenchurch Street in the City, made entirely using the keys of a typewriter.
“It’s such a simple act and I did feel so much more connected to Hackney afterwards. I think that was one of the nicest outcomes of our time doing it,” Lester says.
Typewriter art: view of the City by Keira Rathbone
In another 40 years the book could serve as documentary evidence of a time and place completely lost to the march of progress and change. The authors recently went to Paris, and whilst there they couldn’t resist visiting Place Saint-Sulpice to see how it measured up with the version Perec wrote about.
“From reading Perec’s version it’s pretty much an average square and now it’s really flashy,” explains Lester. “I only say that from the experience of reading Perec’s account, but it did seem quite ordinary and it’s very opulent now. I imagine it will be very interesting in 40 years time to see if Hackney will be like that as well.”
An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in London is published by Burning Eye Books. RRP: £9.99 ISBN: 9781909136595
Hackney Council’s caped crusader. Image by Nicola Gaudenzi
An indoor garden with roof. Part of Granby Four Streets by Assemble
A group of architects based in East London has won the Turner Prize for a project that transformed a street of neglected terraced houses in Liverpool.
Assemble, a group of 18 architects and designers, collected the prize last night at a ceremony at the Tramway arts venue in Glasgow.
The group won the prize for its Granby Four Streets project, in which it spectacularly restored a cluster of terraced houses in Toxteth, Liverpool, that had been purchased by the local council after the 1981 Toxteth Riots and been allowed to fall into disrepair.
Working alongside residents, Assemble refurbished the houses in a way that celebrated the area’s architectural and cultural heritage, creating an indoor garden and establishing a monthly market.
It has also established the Granby Workshop, a social enterprise that trains and employs local people to manufacture and sell a range of handmade products, the like of which were used to refurbish the houses.
These items, which were on display in a showroom at the Turner Prize exhibition at the Tramway in Glasgow, are very unlike most of what appears in mainstream homeware shops.
The rich textures and colours of the pieces bespeak the relatively simple processes through which they have been created from raw materials. wall tiles reminiscent of Kandinsky, elegant mantlepieces formed of recycled rubble, one-off ceramic doorknobs, and pressed terracotta lampshades.
Granby Four Streets Axonometric View
Accepting the prize from Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon, Assemble member Joseph Halligan said: “I think it’s safe to say this nomination was a surprise to us all. The last six months have been a super surreal experience but it has been an opportunity to start something which we really hope will be with us for a very very long time.”
During its 31-year history the Turner Prize has questioned traditional boundaries of what may be considered art, with Tracey Emin’s My Bed from 1998 a particularly notorious example.
Assemble’s entry is no less bold, as it blurs boundaries between art and architecture and has an explicit social purpose. It is also the first Turner Prize-winning entry that people actually live in.
Hazel Tilley, a resident on Cairns Street who was involved with the project, talked of how a sense of pride had been restored to the community thanks to Assemble.
She told Channel 4: “They brought art into everyday living and everyone has a right to that, because otherwise art just belongs to rich people who live in posh houses and it should belong to everybody – real art is accessible.
“It’s a story of humanity, and if art isn’t about humanity I don’t know what it’s about.”
Assemble is the first collective to win the Turner Prize.
The group was selected ahead of artists Bonnie Camplin, Janice Kerbel and Nicole Wermers for the £25,000 prize, which is awarded annually by Tate to a British artist under 50.
The cast of Jack and the Beanstalk at Hackney Empire. Photograph: Robert Workman
Hackneydale is in the depths of climate change: it’s been winter there for 15 years and shows no sign of stopping. Jack’s job is to save the planet, which means defeating a lovelorn giant whose magical singing harp is feeding his gold habit, and somehow causing this meteorological mess.
In this year’s Hackney Empire pantomime, it’s not only the beanstalk that is green. Reimagining Jack and the Beanstalk as a climate change fable is not only cleverly topical, as the ‘perpetual winter’ makes for perfect panto staging, allowing dancers dressed in silver to whiz across the stage on skates, a talking snowman from Jamaica to become an unlikely hero, and the residents of Hackneydale to cut a dash in their winter finery, replete with furry collars and brightly coloured hats and scarves.
The likes of Clive Rowe in the cast means strong singing is almost to be expected, and with newcomer Debbie Kurup playing Jack they’ve uncovered another gem, someone who can belt out the rasping R&B of Jessie J’s ‘Flashlight’ whilst suspended in mid-air.
Rowe himself is at his wise-cracking best as Dame Daisy Trott the milk maid, resplendent in multiple costume changes, including a cupcake dress and surreal beekeeper’s uniform.
Clumsy Colin (Darren Hart) is another strong character, a loveable wimp whose secret love for ‘eco nerd’ Molly (Georgia Oldman) gives rise to a hilariously silly version of Drake’s ‘Hotline Bling’. No corners are cut with the set and costumes, with the audience gasping as the beanstalk rises up from the middle of the stage.
Then, in the second half, which is mostly set in the giant’s lair, we meet new characters, including Giant Blunderbore himself, played by Leon Sweeney, who skilfully tramps around the stage in a costume that must measure at least 15 feet tall.
In the original tale Jack kills the giant, which isn’t exactly in the spirit of panto. So instead we learn the giant is a misunderstood lover whose attentions have turned to gold after being jilted by Mother Nature, the show’s Cockney fairy godmother (Julia Sutton).
Two hours and 40 minutes might seem a touch on the long side, but the pace is unrelenting and there are no lulls in the action. Five minutes in, and we’ve already done ‘it’s behind you’ and been treated to a round of ‘oh yes it is, oh no it isn’t’.
Writer and director Susie McKenna each year pulls a rabbit from the hat with traditional pantomimes that retain that mischievous twinkle in the eye, and this is no exception.
The script might even be funnier than last year’s – certainly it is more daring, with rude gags involving selfie-sticks (think about it), and puns galore. One word of warning though: if you’re sitting in an aisle seat take care, unless you want to run rings around Buttercup the cow in a slapstick milking routine and be the subject of Dame Daisy’s amorous gazes. But this is panto after all, and audience members looking for a quiet evening out are probably not in the right place.
Jack and the Beanstalk is at Hackney Empire, 291 Mare Street, E8 1EJ until 3 January hackneyempire.co.uk
You don’t have to look far to find examples of how East London is changing, either on the streets or indeed on this very website. Continuity – our closeness to the past – is unlikely to make headline news, though to the social historian it is of equal importance.
Author Ken Worpole acknowledges the difficulty of simultaneously holding a sense of change from and proximity to the past in his excellent introduction to Hackney Propaganda: Working Class Club Life and Politics in Hackney 1870–1900.
The pamphlet, which Worpole co-authored with the lecturer and historian Barry Burke, was first printed in 1980 by Centerprise, a radical community centre on Kingsland Road sadly now defunct, and is an extended version of two talks given there in the autumn of 1979.
“The contradictoriness of the past is captured in the popular expression, ‘the good old bad old days’, in which, of course, we continue to live”, writes Worpole in his introduction, and what follows is a brief survey (40 pages) covering Hackney’s working men’s club movement and socialist organisations during the latter part of the nineteenth century.
Radical intellectuals such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Daniel Defoe and Isaac Watts are given their due in Hackney with proposed statues and streets and pubs named after them. But for working class people in Victorian Hackney, free thought and political independence were impossible without a formal education and better living conditions.
After the Reform Act was passed to extend adult suffrage in 1867 and the founding in 1864 of the International Working Men’s Association came a boom of groups and organisations representing unorthodox ideas and non-conformist thought.
The working men’s club was a hotbed of oppositional opinion. An alternative to the public house, it was a heated and well-lit environment where men could drink ale, enjoy entertainment and educate themselves.
The Borough of Hackney Club, which opened in 1873, contained a reading room and a small library, and its activities included “weekly discussions and lectures on political and social questions”.
By the 1880s, according to Charles Booth’s survey Life and Labour of the People in London, there were 115 clubs in Hackney and East London. “To many more club life is an education,” Booth wrote.
The authors look at the members and activities of several clubs of the period, clubs with names such as the Homerton Club, the United Radical Club and the
Kingsland Progressive.
Some of the clubs were explicitly socialist, distributing literature in the streets and holding meetings that were broken up by police. Others provided an audience and venue for speakers such as William Morris.
Walking through Hackney, it is difficult to gain a sense of what the borough used to look like 130 years ago, let alone feel any connection to the people who lived in those times.
But Warpole and Burke provide anecdotes and vignettes about those long forgotten people who once inhabited Hackney’s streets, which entice the reader and force us to engage imaginatively. They also draw neat conclusions about the legacy of those times on the politics of today – though the today referred to is 1980. To make Hackney Propaganda relevant to 2015 would require at least another chapter.
Hackney Propaganda: Working Class Club Life and Politics in Hackney 1870–1900 is available from Hackney bookshops and at worpole.net. RRP: £5.
