EXHIBITION
Hamish Fulton: Walk
Turner Contemporary, Margate, 17th January-7th May
For Wordsworth, Dickens and Dr Johnson, walking was an essential part of creative life. But Hamish Fulton is not just an artist who walks: he describes himself as a “walking artist.” In 1973, he covered the 1,022 miles from Duncansby Head on the coast of Scotland to Land’s End on foot in 47 days. By the end of the trip he had decided he would “only make art resulting from the experience of individual walks.”
In the last 40 years, Fulton has climbed Everest, retraced Sitting Bull’s footsteps at Little Big Horn and walked 106 miles without sleep on Kent country roads. The walks, he says, shift “where the mind’s located,” like a form of meditation. His shows are typically minimalist: vast gallery spaces house photos from his journeys, alongside sketches and spare, haiku-like descriptions.
“Walk,” Fulton’s first solo show in nearly a decade, brings out the political dimension of his work, the Romantic idealist. In 2009, Fulton, who usually walks alone, began to choreograph walks in which hundreds of people took part—walking single file, a metre’s distance from one another, in silence. His slowed-down group walk in support of Ai Weiwei this year (above) was collective action as art; its geometry is worth seeing this winter in Margate.
Laura Marsh
CLASSICAL MUSIC
Total Immersion: Jonathan Harvey
Barbican Hall, 28th-29th January, Tel: 0844 243 0753
Composer Jonathan Harvey once wrote: “It’s for music to articulate the true nature of man in his blissful, enlightened form. No less than that should be demanded.” That enlightenment could come from many sources. Harvey, the soft-spoken mystic of British music, practises Buddhism, but retains a lingering attachment to the Anglicanism with which he was raised.
Harvey’s music also has a tough-minded modernist core, rooted in a rigorous analysis and synthesis of sounds, often using digital technology. Yet it is full of sensuous appeal. At the root of his glistening, mysteriously “electronic” sounds there is the glow of simple major chords: Harvey is not afraid to symbolise spiritual narratives in a naively pictorial way. There is a delightful example in “Madonna of Winter and Spring,” where the descent of Mary to hell is symbolised by a falling harmony.
This is one of the 15 pieces of Harvey’s that make up a weekend portrait of his music at the Barbican, performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, the BBC Singers and the Guildhall Symphony Orchestra. The climax is the British premiere of Wagner Dream, which builds on hints of the Buddhist opera Wagner envisaged but never composed.
Ivan Hewett
FILM
Shame
On release from 13th January
Like his debut, Hunger, the new film from artist-turned-director Steve McQueen, is about a man obsessed. Once again, he has cast his muse Michael Fassbender in the leading role. But there the similarities end. Moving from the theatrical formalism of his portrayal of Maze Prison hunger striker Bobby Sands to the cool, shifting rhythms of Manhattan’s powerbrokers, McQueen brings an outsider’s eye to his subject.
As the sex-addicted protagonist, Brandon, Fassbender holds the centre of the movie, slinking through the arid corporate landscape like a predator. A loner whose empty life can only be filled by the temporary relief of orgasm, Brandon is a wolf in designer clothes whose routine and crystalline, compartmentalised world is interrupted by the arrival of his sister, Sissy, a self-harming, damaged Carey Mulligan.
While it shares some of the sterile surface gloss of Paul Schrader’s 1980 film American Gigolo, this is much closer in tone to Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream (2000)—another film that dealt with addiction in an uncompromising manner. The scenes of Brandon’s sexual encounters are unprecedented in mainstream US cinema and are designed to trigger strong reactions. Scripted by Abi Morgan—whose screenplay about Margaret Thatcher (see John Campbell's essay this month) is a rather different affair—Shame is filmed with a calculated stealth that makes voyeurs of us all.
Neil Norman
OPERA
Il prigioniero
Royal Festival Hall, 26th January, Tel: 020 7960 4200
The only Italian opera since Puccini’s Turandot to gain significant international attention, Luigi Dallapiccola’s work Il prigioniero has a rare one-off performance in January. Set in 16th-century Spain, with a libretto based on a short story by the 19th-century Symbolist writer Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, the opera tells of a prisoner consoled by a gaoler who allows him to hope for release before he is finally led to the stake by the Grand Inquisitor. Gaoler and Inquisitor are traditionally sung by the same tenor, in this case Peter Hoare.
In the first 12 years after its premiere in 1950, it was performed no fewer than 186 times. Since the 1970s performances of this innovative work have become infrequent. It is an opera of ideas, intended as an allegory of Nazism, with avowedly expressionistic music. As musicologist Massimo Mila said, Dallapiccola “had in mind a form of oratorio-like theatre, where the physical presence of the actors and stage ends up as a cumbersome surplus, and all the dramatic substance of the action is transmitted through the music.”
Christopher Silvester
THEATRE
Tendre suie
Purcell Room, 19th-22nd January, Tel: 0844 847 9910
After the gluttonous season of turkey and pies, isn’t there always the feeling that the brain has been benignly put to sleep? Does anyone want to return to pre-feasting sobriety? The London International Mime Festival (various venues, 11th-29th January) is there for all anti-cerebral new year revellers who like more sensuality than sense in their theatre. Not, however, that most acts in the 34th edition are anything other than clever and often close-to-the-edge ingenious.
From Brits juggling apples à la Pina Bausch to a Japanese sound artist dancing in and out of dissolving planes of light, 2012’s festival shows off both global muscle and theatrical daring. France (the true home of physical theatre) features heavily. The duo Toron Blues—circus graduates, Clémentine Lamouret and Elsa Caillat—provide one of the festival’s must-see shows. Tendre suie (“soft soot”) is an entrancing, erotic aerial duet threaded together by an umbilical rope. Are the two characters lovers, foes—or giving birth to each other?
Based on Jean-Paul Sartre’s play Huis clos, whose most infamously misunderstood phrase is “Hell is other people,” Tendre suie will surely jolt any post-Yuletide slumberer awake. However horrible we can be, we must connect. As this show reminds us, mime can, actually, make us think hard.
James Woodall
FESTIVAL
Celtic Connections
Glasgow, 19th January-5th February
It’s an intrepid soul that heads to Glasgow for two weeks in January, but the festival Celtic Connections, now in its 19th year, pulls an audience of over 120,000 to 14 venues around the city. Though the name suggests Scottish and Irish fare, the pipes and the penny whistle, it also attracts the cream of American roots and bluegrass musicians, many of whom consider it their most important European date and rarely turn up elsewhere in Britain. American roots music has always embraced its Celtic ancestry and the whirlwind jazz/bluegrass hybrid of bands like Béla Fleck and The Flecktones owes as much to the Scottish reel as it does to duelling banjos.
Other highlights this year include mandolin whiz Chris Thile and his Punch Brothers, and Louisiana folk singer Mary Gauthier. During the day there are workshops—harmony singing, ukelele—for the practically minded; the late night shows give rise to surprising musical experiments. The Transatlantic Sessions, curated by fiddle legend Aly Bain and Alison Krauss’s Dobro player, Jerry Douglas, close the fortnight with a kind of all-star roots drop-in. The festival is always broadening its remit; this year it hosts the veteran Senegalese-Cuban fusion band Orchestra Baobab and Bruce “That’s Just The Way It Is” Hornsby, whose live performances feature inspired jazz improvisations.
Kate Mossman
Hamish Fulton: Walk
Turner Contemporary, Margate, 17th January-7th May
For Wordsworth, Dickens and Dr Johnson, walking was an essential part of creative life. But Hamish Fulton is not just an artist who walks: he describes himself as a “walking artist.” In 1973, he covered the 1,022 miles from Duncansby Head on the coast of Scotland to Land’s End on foot in 47 days. By the end of the trip he had decided he would “only make art resulting from the experience of individual walks.”
In the last 40 years, Fulton has climbed Everest, retraced Sitting Bull’s footsteps at Little Big Horn and walked 106 miles without sleep on Kent country roads. The walks, he says, shift “where the mind’s located,” like a form of meditation. His shows are typically minimalist: vast gallery spaces house photos from his journeys, alongside sketches and spare, haiku-like descriptions.
“Walk,” Fulton’s first solo show in nearly a decade, brings out the political dimension of his work, the Romantic idealist. In 2009, Fulton, who usually walks alone, began to choreograph walks in which hundreds of people took part—walking single file, a metre’s distance from one another, in silence. His slowed-down group walk in support of Ai Weiwei this year (above) was collective action as art; its geometry is worth seeing this winter in Margate.
Laura Marsh
CLASSICAL MUSIC
Total Immersion: Jonathan Harvey
Barbican Hall, 28th-29th January, Tel: 0844 243 0753
Composer Jonathan Harvey once wrote: “It’s for music to articulate the true nature of man in his blissful, enlightened form. No less than that should be demanded.” That enlightenment could come from many sources. Harvey, the soft-spoken mystic of British music, practises Buddhism, but retains a lingering attachment to the Anglicanism with which he was raised.
Harvey’s music also has a tough-minded modernist core, rooted in a rigorous analysis and synthesis of sounds, often using digital technology. Yet it is full of sensuous appeal. At the root of his glistening, mysteriously “electronic” sounds there is the glow of simple major chords: Harvey is not afraid to symbolise spiritual narratives in a naively pictorial way. There is a delightful example in “Madonna of Winter and Spring,” where the descent of Mary to hell is symbolised by a falling harmony.
This is one of the 15 pieces of Harvey’s that make up a weekend portrait of his music at the Barbican, performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, the BBC Singers and the Guildhall Symphony Orchestra. The climax is the British premiere of Wagner Dream, which builds on hints of the Buddhist opera Wagner envisaged but never composed.
Ivan Hewett
FILM
Shame
On release from 13th January
Like his debut, Hunger, the new film from artist-turned-director Steve McQueen, is about a man obsessed. Once again, he has cast his muse Michael Fassbender in the leading role. But there the similarities end. Moving from the theatrical formalism of his portrayal of Maze Prison hunger striker Bobby Sands to the cool, shifting rhythms of Manhattan’s powerbrokers, McQueen brings an outsider’s eye to his subject.
As the sex-addicted protagonist, Brandon, Fassbender holds the centre of the movie, slinking through the arid corporate landscape like a predator. A loner whose empty life can only be filled by the temporary relief of orgasm, Brandon is a wolf in designer clothes whose routine and crystalline, compartmentalised world is interrupted by the arrival of his sister, Sissy, a self-harming, damaged Carey Mulligan.
While it shares some of the sterile surface gloss of Paul Schrader’s 1980 film American Gigolo, this is much closer in tone to Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream (2000)—another film that dealt with addiction in an uncompromising manner. The scenes of Brandon’s sexual encounters are unprecedented in mainstream US cinema and are designed to trigger strong reactions. Scripted by Abi Morgan—whose screenplay about Margaret Thatcher (see John Campbell's essay this month) is a rather different affair—Shame is filmed with a calculated stealth that makes voyeurs of us all.
Neil Norman
OPERA
Il prigioniero
Royal Festival Hall, 26th January, Tel: 020 7960 4200
The only Italian opera since Puccini’s Turandot to gain significant international attention, Luigi Dallapiccola’s work Il prigioniero has a rare one-off performance in January. Set in 16th-century Spain, with a libretto based on a short story by the 19th-century Symbolist writer Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, the opera tells of a prisoner consoled by a gaoler who allows him to hope for release before he is finally led to the stake by the Grand Inquisitor. Gaoler and Inquisitor are traditionally sung by the same tenor, in this case Peter Hoare.
In the first 12 years after its premiere in 1950, it was performed no fewer than 186 times. Since the 1970s performances of this innovative work have become infrequent. It is an opera of ideas, intended as an allegory of Nazism, with avowedly expressionistic music. As musicologist Massimo Mila said, Dallapiccola “had in mind a form of oratorio-like theatre, where the physical presence of the actors and stage ends up as a cumbersome surplus, and all the dramatic substance of the action is transmitted through the music.”
Christopher Silvester
THEATRE
Tendre suie
Purcell Room, 19th-22nd January, Tel: 0844 847 9910
After the gluttonous season of turkey and pies, isn’t there always the feeling that the brain has been benignly put to sleep? Does anyone want to return to pre-feasting sobriety? The London International Mime Festival (various venues, 11th-29th January) is there for all anti-cerebral new year revellers who like more sensuality than sense in their theatre. Not, however, that most acts in the 34th edition are anything other than clever and often close-to-the-edge ingenious.
From Brits juggling apples à la Pina Bausch to a Japanese sound artist dancing in and out of dissolving planes of light, 2012’s festival shows off both global muscle and theatrical daring. France (the true home of physical theatre) features heavily. The duo Toron Blues—circus graduates, Clémentine Lamouret and Elsa Caillat—provide one of the festival’s must-see shows. Tendre suie (“soft soot”) is an entrancing, erotic aerial duet threaded together by an umbilical rope. Are the two characters lovers, foes—or giving birth to each other?
Based on Jean-Paul Sartre’s play Huis clos, whose most infamously misunderstood phrase is “Hell is other people,” Tendre suie will surely jolt any post-Yuletide slumberer awake. However horrible we can be, we must connect. As this show reminds us, mime can, actually, make us think hard.
James Woodall
FESTIVAL
Celtic Connections
Glasgow, 19th January-5th February
It’s an intrepid soul that heads to Glasgow for two weeks in January, but the festival Celtic Connections, now in its 19th year, pulls an audience of over 120,000 to 14 venues around the city. Though the name suggests Scottish and Irish fare, the pipes and the penny whistle, it also attracts the cream of American roots and bluegrass musicians, many of whom consider it their most important European date and rarely turn up elsewhere in Britain. American roots music has always embraced its Celtic ancestry and the whirlwind jazz/bluegrass hybrid of bands like Béla Fleck and The Flecktones owes as much to the Scottish reel as it does to duelling banjos.
Other highlights this year include mandolin whiz Chris Thile and his Punch Brothers, and Louisiana folk singer Mary Gauthier. During the day there are workshops—harmony singing, ukelele—for the practically minded; the late night shows give rise to surprising musical experiments. The Transatlantic Sessions, curated by fiddle legend Aly Bain and Alison Krauss’s Dobro player, Jerry Douglas, close the fortnight with a kind of all-star roots drop-in. The festival is always broadening its remit; this year it hosts the veteran Senegalese-Cuban fusion band Orchestra Baobab and Bruce “That’s Just The Way It Is” Hornsby, whose live performances feature inspired jazz improvisations.
Kate Mossman
