Some of the biggest artists in international performance, including Peter Brook, Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, Heiner Goebbels, Cheek by Jowl and Laurie Anderson are presented alongside fledging and emerging names such as non zero one and Nic Green. Artists hail from the USA, India, Australia, Africa, Palestine and Europe. Five companies are UK-based. Work ranges from the musical, the theatrical, contemporary dance and circus to promenade, participatory performance. Shows take place in the Barbican Theatre, the Pit, Silk Street Theatre and in the Barbican’s foyers. Continuing the Arts Council’s A Night Less Ordinary free ticket scheme, young people aged 16 to 25 are able to take advantage through the Barbican’s freeB membership.
» Warriors of the Plains: 200 years of Native North American honour and ritual
Monday, 1 March 2010
British Museum Until 5 April 2010
A rare opportunity to explore the fascinating world of Native North American warfare and ritual.
The exhibition focuses on the material culture of Native North American Indians of the Plains between 1800 and the present, and the importance of the objects in a social and ceremonial context.
Men of these tribes were expected to join a ‘warrior society’ – a social, political and ritual group that engaged in warfare and organised ceremonial life.
Kenneth MacMillan’s interpretation of Romeo and Juliet’s doomed love is one of the greatest examples of 20th-century choreography. This revival by The Royal Ballet brings all the lyrical beauty and touching fluidity of its intimate moments for the two lovers along with the grandeur of the ball scene and the action-packed encounters of the opposing Montagues and Capulets.
If you want to ponder enchantments that skew ordinary lives and introduce magic into places it doesn't usually reach, then Judi Dench's five-decade collaboration with Peter Hall might be a good place to start. Dench first played Titania for Hall in 1962; now she's taking the part again, in an interpretation that reimagines the young queen of the fairies as the ageing Elizabeth I of England - which, given that monarch's notorious (if possibly overstated) virginity, will give an intriguing new spin to the marital quarrel between Titania and Oberon that kicks off the play's events.
This carving of swimming reindeer is one of the most beautiful pieces of Ice Age art ever discovered. It is a carved from the tip of a mammoth tusk and is around 13,000 years old. This places it at the end of the Last Ice Age, when animals such as mammoths, reindeer and wolverines roamed Europe.
Cyclops, unicorn, yeti, dragon, the chimera… are these creatures real or imagined? Take a journey into the strange world of Myths and Monsters and unravel the truth behind universal legends and myths. Discover the origin of the Cyclops, the links between dragons and the dinosaurs, and why the yeti is the monster most likely to be real. The exhibition was first shown at the Natural History Museum in 1998.
Chris Ofili’s intensely coloured and intricately ornamented paintings are on show at Tate Britain in a major survey of the artist’s career that brings together over 45 paintings, as well as pencil drawings and watercolours from the mid 1990s to today. One of the most acclaimed British painters of his generation, Ofili won the Turner Prize in 1998 and represented Great Britain at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003.
London-based Polish artist Goshka Macuga is widely acclaimed for her sculptural installations of artefacts and photographs, derived from art history, politics and anthropology. The artist focuses on a key moment in the history of the Whitechapel Gallery: the presentation of Picasso’s Guernica in 1939.
Organised in collaboration with the Stepney Trade Union Council in east London to raise awareness of the Spanish Civil War, the suggested price of entry was a pair of boots, left underneath the work, to be sent to the Republicans in Spain. Forming the centrepiece of Macuga’s installation is a life-size tapestry of Guernica.
Commissioned by Nelson Rockefeller in 1955 it was created, in collaboration with Picasso, by weaver Jacqueline de la Baume Dürrbach, of the great Dürrbach Atelier in Paris. In 1985, the Rockefeller Estate lent the tapestry to the United Nations Headquarters in New York, to offer a deterrent to war. It has hung ever since outside the United Nations Security Council.
Macuga’s project draws connections across historic and contemporary world affairs, their protagonists and the cultural ripple effects they have triggered. Evolving throughout the year, this major new commission intertwines narratives and constellations of objects to demonstrate the profound relation between aesthetics and politics.
The Michael Hoppen gallery is delighted to announce an exhibition of work by one of America’s foremost fashion photographers Fernand Fonssagrives.
Once the highest paid photographers in the world, he was ambivalent about the acclaim he received in his chosen field, preferring to remain anonymous. Little was written about him, even at the peak of his success. He was linked to the early ‘Design Laboratory’ classes of Alexey Brodovitch, and was a key member of the close knit group of photographers now celebrated as ‘The New York School.
Drawing on traditions of group portraiture at public street parties, Melanie Manchot’s new work explores individual and collective identity through photography and film.
For this commission, Manchot has worked with residents of Cyprus Street, east London, to hold a street party and make a new film. She documents this event with a single tracking shot, capturing residents as they gather in front of the camera. The film bridges still and moving image, to look at the process of forming and dissolving a group portrait. It asks questions about what it means to form a community: both through the collaboration between residents and artist for the party, and in the relationships captured on film among the participants.
Barbican Art Gallery stages the first major survey in the UK of the internationally acclaimed, London-based design maverick Ron Arad.
Ron Arad: Restless explores three decades of Arad’s designs from his early post-punk approach of assembling products from readymade parts to his exclusive and highly polished sculptural furnishings. Featuring a dramatic exhibition design by Ron Arad Associates using the latest LED display technology, Ron Arad: Restless also includes architectural designs and immediately recognisable mass produced pieces. Highlighting the significance of experimentation, process and materials in Arad’s work, the exhibition offers a timely insight into the development of objects from initial idea and fabrication to finished design.
Radical, experimental and avant-garde, Henry Moore (1898–1986) was one of Britain’s greatest artists. This stunning exhibition takes a fresh look at his work and legacy, presenting over 150 stone sculptures, wood carvings, bronzes and drawings.
Highlights of the show include a group of key reclining figures carved in Elm, which illustrate the development of this key image over his career. Moore was an Official War Artist and his drawings of huddled Londoners sheltering from the onslaught of the Blitz captured the popular imagination, winning him a place in the hearts of the public. Don’t miss this fantastic opportunity to truly understand this artist’s much-loved work / Britain’s most successful sculptor.
In 1841, an exotically named 21-year-old Irishman, Dion Boucicault, found fame with this comic melodrama about a middle-aged London fop, Sir Harcourt Courtley, lured to the countryside by the promise of a very young, beautiful bride, only to have her attractive cousin and Sir Harcourt's lovestruck son send his well-laid plans agley.
Boucicault, a terrific actor and playwright but a terrible theatre impresario, went on to a bumpy but periodically glorious career: lots of successful acting and playwrighting, some very ill-conceived managing of financial sump-holes calling themselves theatres. Still, it's the plays that have lasted: Nicholas Hytner will direct a production designed by Mark Thompson, and comedy will be provided by the characters' names (the ingénue's foxhunting vixenish cousin rejoices in the appellation Lady Gay Spanker) if by nothing else.
The debut was enlivened by a couple of the era's finest actors; this time, Simon Russell Beale and Fiona Shaw star as Sir Harcourt and Lady Gay respectively, suggesting that the parts Boucicault wrote are as endlessly enticing to top actors as nubile girls to a superannuated roué.
The world's most commercially succesful piece of entertainment is returning in a new guise. Yes, the 'Phantom of the Opera' is back and this time he's moved to New York. Andrew Lloyd Webber's 'Love Never Dies' is set in the grotesque and dazzling slpendour of Coney Island during its heyday. Can Lloyd Webber repeat the success of the original, with its hackle-raising melodies and '80s goth-meets-Paris design? Well, from what we've heard of the score, it sounds like an atmospheric return to form for the one-time King of the West End melody. 'Love Never Dies' will open at the 'Adelphi Theatre' on February 20 2010, with the rather suave current Phantom Ramin Karimloo as the man in the mask.
The V&A will present its first ever exhibition of British quilts, with examples dating from 1700 to the present day - a unique opportunity to view the V&A's unseen quilt collection as well as key national loans.
The exhibition will show 65 beautifully crafted quilts, predominantly
from the V&A's own collection but also including a number of important loans and new works by contemporary artists, many of which have been commissioned especially for the show.
Earliest examples include a sumptuous silk and velvet bedcover, with an oral narrative that links it to King Charles II's visit to an Exeter manor house in the late 17th century. Recent examples will include works by leading artists such as Grayson Perry and Tracey Emin and commissions for the exhibition by a number of contemporary artists including Sue Stockwell and Caren Garfen.
The curators have unravelled some of the complex personal narratives and broader historical events documented in the quilts. Examples by both named and unnamed makers will be shown with objects relating to their subject matter and makers including paintings and prints, as well as needlework tools and personal keepsakes. One example is a cot quilt made at Deal castle, displayed for the first time alongside the maker's diary and portraits of the two grandchildren who slept under it.
A day exploring Kensington Palace with Curator of Historic Buildings Lee Prosser who will reveal the surprising history of some of London's less well-known royal apartments.
Kensington Palace began life in the early seventeenth century as Nottingham House, but through its adoption by William and Mary it was transformed into a small royal palace ultimately suited to the domestically-inclined Georgian monarchs. Architects such as Christopher Wren, Nicholas Hawksmoor and William Kent shaped and painted the buildings; Queen Victoria was born here. Today, Historic Royal Palaces embarks on a bid to restore and present the palace.
Includes all entrances, lunch and refreshments throughout the day.
