Getting the Rite right: Stravinsky's groundbreaking work turns 100
Dance The Rite of Spring/Petrushka Sadler’s Wells, 11th to 13th April
Michael Keegan-Dolan’s dance company unveiled their own version in 2009. Transferring it specifically to Ireland, it divided critics like a guillotine. Now revived as the first work in a series of three events entitled “A String of Rites” commissioned by Sadler’s Wells to mark the centenary of Stravinsky’s masterpiece, its radical reworking of the sacrificial myth is ripe for reassessment.
In spite of the liberties that Keegan-Dolan takes with the story —bringing it out of prehistory into a modern age of cigarettes and flat caps, shifting the gender focus and reversing the polarity of the ending—it digs deep into Stravinsky’s extraordinary music to read the truth in its entrails. This production includes dancers in animal masks and men removing their clothes to put on dresses before a deity known as The Chosen One. It all adds up to an intense and absorbing blast of theatrical voodoo. Neil Norman
Art Metropolis: Reflections on the Modern City Gas Hall, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, from 23rd March
Created in recent years, these works span the globe, from a frantic Beijing (in Miao Xiaochun’s monumental photographic work Orbit) to the marginal Paris of Mohamed Bourouissa’s photographic series Périphérique. Some works take Birmingham, the UK’s second largest city, as their subject—Christiane Baumgartner’s diptych Ladywood, using video and woodcut, which was inspired by reflections of a railway bridge onto the canal, and Beat Streuli’s 2001 Pallasades, video of passing crowds.
There is a strong emphasis on photography and film, perhaps because these forms are particularly adapted to the fleeting, elusive life of cities, where significant events can erupt in moments and innumerable human interactions take place daily against a backdrop of mute architecture. Emma Crichton-Miller
Theatre TableThe Shed, National Theatre, from 9th April
Every home should have a shed, somewhere to store things that might be useful later, somewhere to mess about and experiment. Such is the philosophy behind the red, box-like structure arising in front of the National Theatre on the South Bank this spring. The Shed is a short-term replacement for the Cottesloe, the NT’s third auditorium, which is closed for redevelopment until this time next year. New, semi-improvised spaces have a habit, though, of sticking around longer than intended, and it’s quite possible the Shed will become a South Bank mini-institution in its own right.
The programme opens with a play by Tanya Ronder, directed by her husband Rufus Norris, which declares itself in one simple sentence: “Six generations, nine performers, 30 characters and one very special piece of furniture.” As those performers include the top talent of Rosalie Craig and Paul Hilton, and as the show is designed and lit by Katrina Lindsay and Paule Constable, there’s no hint of the project being a mere sop or “add-on” to the NT’s core repertoire. Like any good shed-owner, artistic director Nicholas Hytner must be hoping for a result. Michael Coveney
FestivalHuguenots of SpitalfieldsVarious venues, 8th to 21st April
This festival, celebrating the legacy of Huguenots in London, was inspired by a modern bronze sculpture which stood in Spital Square until April 2012. It was a monument to the work of Huguenot silk weavers, French protestants who in the 17th century sought refuge in Britain from religious persecution. To raise funds for a permanent memorial, the Huguenot Society and the Spitalfields Trust have collaborated on this fortnight of talks, historic walks and exhibitions, as well as a huge craft fair on 13th April.
At the centre of events is the 18th-century silk designer Anna Maria Garthwaite. Coinciding with the 250th anniversary of her death this year, the programme includes talks about her life and her distinctive, intricate brocades. The festival also showcases the landmarks of Huguenot London, among them Hawksmoor’s magnificent Christ Church, completed in 1729, and a sumptuously restored silk-weavers’ house, where guided tours are conducted in silence. Some of the buildings tell a larger story about the East End, such as 19 Princelet Street: built for French weavers, it later housed a concealed synagogue and is now a museum of immigration. Laura Marsh
Film The Place Beyond the PinesOn release from 12th April
It opens with a swaggeringly audacious sequence: the camera pulls out from Ryan Gosling’s tattooed torso as he pulls on a leather jacket. It follows him, in one unbroken shot, as he saunters through a fairground into a circus tent, bestrides a motorbike and roars into a caged globe where he and two others perform crazy, literally over-the-top stunts, round and round. The crowd screams: so much testosterone in a tinny microcosm.
This is radical—melodrama for men. Director Derek Cianfrance uses revved-up action and close, gorgeous digital photography to tell the story of two young fathers, Gosling’s stunt biker and Bradley Cooper’s obsessive cop. The plot is heavy on coincidence but then the film is structured in triptych form, with portraits of the two (who intersect briefly) followed by a third section featuring their sons as they reach maturity. Gosling’s elegant vulnerability contrasts with Cooper’s muscular nerviness as both struggle to escape destructive patterns and be good (manly) men. There are clichés—the women for example are confined to tears or pleas—yet the characters retain dignity and individuality. This is a heightened emotional ride with irresistible moments of heart-pounding tension. Francine Stock
