Exploring the changes in geopolitics, technology and society through the use and evolution of maps is an interesting idea, and the British Library’s exhibition does its best to add enough variety to keep the subject matter engaging. The exhibition is logically structured, with an early section on the opening of the 20th Century and a […]
I took my first trip to the Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds last weekend. Opened in 1996, it is an overspill of the National Collection of Arms and Armour, not all of which can be housed in the Tower of London or other sites. Looking into the history of the museum since my visit, I’ve […]
This exhibition, like many of the artworks in it, bears up well under the weight of history. For Revolution is firmly rooted in the historic context of the period 1917-1932 in Russia – a time of upheavals, civil war, dictators and hopes born and cruelly dashed. Despite this, it manages to educate, illuminate and engage, […]
I very much admire Complicite’s work. As you will have spotted from my reviews I’m more often drawn to big names when booking cultural outings, but Complicite is a theatre company I’m more than happy to take a chance on, even when it means spending a Sunday afternoon indoors reading German surtitles. This production didn’t […]
Ah, January. A time for great new projects, an aim of self-improvement, a flurry of activity, and then… who knows? Having challenged myself to take advantage of the many opportunities London provides of hearing talks, lectures and panel discussions on a range of interesting topics, I found myself this week attending two at the National […]
I quite like when I come out of a play with a realisation that I need time to process it: what did it mean? Did I like it? Did I think it was any good? Nice Fish is definitely one of those plays for me, and I would add to my list of questions in […]
Waiting For Godot Let me preface this by saying I had only ever seen Beckett performed once before, and it was when I was living in Korea. It was a Chinese production. Played like traditional Chinese theatre. With surtitles in Korean and English. I left halfway through, by rationalising that the second half is […]
The thing about having a particular dancer who I like to go and see (Edward Watson, since you asked) rather than being very educated about choreographers, composers or directors of ballet, means that I go to a fairly mixed bag of performances. Had Watson not been dancing in Woolf Works, I’m not sure that the […]
While visiting this overall excellent and interesting exhibition at Tate Modern, I was thinking a lot about conservation versus comprehension. Warnings abound before and throughout the galleries not to move or blow on the works as they are now too fragile, but is a static mobile still a mobile? If an installation which relies on […]
Being a Benjaminian, I value the aura of seeing the ‘real thing’ as opposed to reproductions. Find the Mona Lisa boring? Not me. Yawn at Van Gogh’s sunflowers because they’re reproduced everywhere? Not likely. I like to get up close, see the brushstrokes or the chisel marks or the other traces of the human hand […]
