Port Talbot’s staging of The Passion with Michael Sheen won the highest accolade at the Theatre Management Association Awards yesterday, which honour the best of work touring Britain beyond London during the 2010-11 season.
As great changes happen in the British arts economy, what lies ahead for dance? What are the questions to ask about what we will watch in future, what we will create for others to see, what we will perform, what we will pay for?
There’s a lot of Soviet art about at the moment – the excellent show that opens this Saturday at the Royal Academy has Constructivist and Suprematist paintings and drawings loaned by the George Costakis Collection in Thessaloniki. Now, at Annely Juda, a smaller, but no less excellent, show highlights one single Malevich painting, Black Square (main picture, above), a tiny gem of the early 20th century, also from the Costakis Collection, together with a series of Malevich’s working drawings.
New Order’s “Blue Monday” might be the bestselling 12” single ever. It might not be. Either way, Factory Records released it on the 12” format only and it was given dry runs by club DJs. Although Factory had an overriding visual aesthetic, it was a wilful label with little musical coherence and no set way of doing things. Dance music, though, was central to Factory, and the new compilation Fac.Dance celebrates that in a way that was impossible in the scattershot Eighties.
Beijing International Fringe Festival, virtually unheard of in the UK, closed last Sunday after three weeks’ showcasing the best talent in drama, musical theatre, dance and experimental theatre in China. It was conceived in 2008 as a small local festival using university performance spaces to give voice to young directors and young talent. Back then it comprised a mere 10 productions. This year there were 54 productions in 11 venues around Beijing.
Few comedy writers can claim to have extracted so much mirth from the slightly foxed fabric of British life as David Croft, who (with his writing partner Jimmy Perry) created It Ain't Half Hot Mum, Hi-de-Hi! and, above all, Dad's Army. Though the latter initially fell foul of BBC One's controller Paul Fox, who protested that "you cannot take the mickey out of Britain's finest hour", its ineffably absurd and eccentric portrait of the Home Guard in wartime Walmington-on-Sea proved irresistible to millions of viewers.
By 1977, disco was a cliché to be mocked. But a few years earlier, before its ubiquity, disco was a liberating music uniting minorities on the dance floor. Funk, too, became a cliché, little more than a reductive musical cypher. Two new reissues celebrate these genres when both were still vital, still able to surprise. Disco Gold: Scepter Records & The Birth of Disco is exactly what its title says it is, while Darondo’s Listen to My Song: The Music City Sessions collects A-grade funk that had languished in the vaults until now.
Hard on the heels of the death of Lucian Freud comes the departure of another British art great, an artist who was Freud’s exact contemporary but who seems to belong in a different aesthetic universe – Richard Hamilton. While he was the more influential of the two, by some distance, Hamilton was never a contender for that nonsensical soubriquet "Britain’s greatest living artist". His work was too challenging, too difficult to pin down and it never told Britain anything it wanted to hear about itself.
At the start of September, the fourth Outlook Festival takes place in a 19th-century fort on the Croatian coast. Already this festival has become a vital point in the calendar for those involved with dubstep, grime and other UK underground scenes – not only a jolly in the sun (“dubstep's Ibiza”), but the one time in the year when everyone involved takes a break from international touring and comes together in the same place, a time to compare notes and take stock of the progress.
With theartsdesk readers still reeling from the demise of Italianate sleuthing series Zen, now comes news of the axing of glossy MI5 drama Spooks. The BBC has announced that the show's 10th series, starting next month, will be its last, though it seems the decision to pull the plug was taken by production company Kudos rather than by the Corporation.