DESH
Sadler’s Wells, 2nd to 9th October
Akram Khan’s semi-autobiographical work reveals a choreographic storyteller at the peak of his powers. The Anglo-Bangladeshi artist has always mixed imaginative staging with traditional and contemporary dance forms. But never before have all the elements combined so triumphantly.
Desh means “homeland” in Bengali and the work is an exploration of Khan’s relationship with his cultural roots, his past and his family. With the aid of a wide-ranging score by Jocelyn Pook, outstanding lighting by Michael Hulls and endlessly inventive visuals by Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon designer Tim Yip, this is an extraordinary example of dance/theatre fusion.
Alone on stage, Khan conjures characters out of the air—from the little girl to whom he tells a folk tale, to a village cook he recreates with a face painted on top of his bald head. The use of naïve animations projected onto a gauze allows him to interact with birds, an elephant and even a crocodile. Khan’s cocktail of folklore, history, humour and horror folds into a continuous narrative that delivers a triple whammy to the heart, mind and guts.
Neil Norman
Art
Seduced by Art: Photography Past and Present
National Gallery, 31st October to 20th January 2013
Right from the beginning, early photographers in Britain and France saw their medium as the equal of painting. Pioneers such as Julia Margaret Cameron and Gustave le Gray took on the high themes of religion, history, portraiture, and landscape, drawing consciously on Old Master painting for inspiration and to justify their own ambitions.
This October the National Gallery deigns to consider this upstart sibling, in its first exhibition devoted to photography. Historical paintings from the collection will hang alongside early masterpieces by the greatest French and British photographers, as well as work by contemporary photographers and video artists who draw consciously from painting traditions.
Martin Parr’s photographs will hang beside Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews, while Ori Gersht’s digital still life, Blow Up No. 05, will be displayed alongside the Fantin-Latour that inspired it. The work of certain contemporary photographers will even infiltrate the august main galleries, while Maisie Broadhead and Jack Cole’s video piece An Ode to Hill and Adamson—inspired by a photograph of the wife of the National Gallery’s first director—reminds us that the Gallery and photography grew up together.
Emma Crichton-Miller
Science
Manchester Science Festival
27th October to 4th November
This year’s Manchester Science Festival will be a celebration of order. Or at least an attempt to prove that mathematical order can be found in nature. In March, the festival’s organisers launched an appeal for sunflowers—if more than 3000 people grew one, they would have enough data to test Alan Turing’s theory. He proposed that the number of seed spirals on a flower would always be a number from the Fibonacci sequence (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, and so on). Growers’ diaries (including some captivating time-lapse footage) will be unveiled alongside the results.
As well as film screenings, talks and debates, there will be an installation from fashion designer Helen Storey, showing how clothes could be used to counter air pollution, and the duo Science Junkies, who explain—through adrenalin sports—how the human body works. The festival will also host Manchester’s first Hackathon, a 24-hour coding competition, where caffeine and Wi-Fi will flow freely. Even in the systematic, rational world of scientific inquiry, moments of brilliance can arrive during frenzied all-nighters.
Laura Marsh
Theatre
The River
Royal Court, London, 18th October to 17th November
Long before their collaboration on Jerusalem, playwright Jez Butterworth and director Ian Rickson were exploring the dark secrets that lie on the edge of suburbia and beneath the marshlands of East Anglia. These poetic and mysterious plays—The Winterling, The Night Heron, Parlour Song—contained the same sort of simmering magical tension that erupted in Mark Rylance’s now legendary, larger-than-life performance as Johnny “The Rooster” Byron in Jerusalem. So it will be fascinating to see how Butterworth and Rickson scale back—or will they?—in their new collaboration at the Royal Court’s studio theatre, in which a man and a woman are discovered on a moonlit night in a remote cabin on the cliffs.
Butterworth has been a slow burner for 20 years, heavily influenced by Pinter, writing fastidiously and working on the occasional film (he produced and co-wrote the spy thriller Fair Game, starring Sean Penn). After Jerusalem, the stakes may be higher, but you can’t see him selling out or changing his tune.
Michael Coveney
Opera
Wexford Opera Festival
24th October to 4th November
It sounds like a joke: a festival of unknown operas by unfamiliar composers in a tiny Irish coastal town in windswept October. But now in its 61st year, with a superb new opera house tucked away among the cobbled streets, Wexford Festival Opera is anything but a punchline. For two weeks every year this maverick festival showcases the rarities and rediscoveries that bigger opera companies wouldn’t dare to tackle. And what’s more it does it to a packed house and—don’t let the black tie fool you—with none of the airs and graces of other opera festivals .
This year’s lineup includes Chabrier’s sharply modern comedy of an unwilling king, Le Roi Malgré Lui, and, most excitingly, a production of A Village Romeo and Juliet in celebration of the 150th anniversary of composer Frederick Delius’s birth. Walk through the meandering streets to the waterfront, attend a lunchtime concert, talk music with strangers in the opera house café with its glorious view, and then you’re beginning to get the full measure of the Wexford experience. Alexandra Coghlan
Sadler’s Wells, 2nd to 9th October
Akram Khan’s semi-autobiographical work reveals a choreographic storyteller at the peak of his powers. The Anglo-Bangladeshi artist has always mixed imaginative staging with traditional and contemporary dance forms. But never before have all the elements combined so triumphantly.
Desh means “homeland” in Bengali and the work is an exploration of Khan’s relationship with his cultural roots, his past and his family. With the aid of a wide-ranging score by Jocelyn Pook, outstanding lighting by Michael Hulls and endlessly inventive visuals by Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon designer Tim Yip, this is an extraordinary example of dance/theatre fusion.
Alone on stage, Khan conjures characters out of the air—from the little girl to whom he tells a folk tale, to a village cook he recreates with a face painted on top of his bald head. The use of naïve animations projected onto a gauze allows him to interact with birds, an elephant and even a crocodile. Khan’s cocktail of folklore, history, humour and horror folds into a continuous narrative that delivers a triple whammy to the heart, mind and guts.
Neil Norman
Art
National Gallery, 31st October to 20th January 2013
Right from the beginning, early photographers in Britain and France saw their medium as the equal of painting. Pioneers such as Julia Margaret Cameron and Gustave le Gray took on the high themes of religion, history, portraiture, and landscape, drawing consciously on Old Master painting for inspiration and to justify their own ambitions.
This October the National Gallery deigns to consider this upstart sibling, in its first exhibition devoted to photography. Historical paintings from the collection will hang alongside early masterpieces by the greatest French and British photographers, as well as work by contemporary photographers and video artists who draw consciously from painting traditions.
Martin Parr’s photographs will hang beside Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews, while Ori Gersht’s digital still life, Blow Up No. 05, will be displayed alongside the Fantin-Latour that inspired it. The work of certain contemporary photographers will even infiltrate the august main galleries, while Maisie Broadhead and Jack Cole’s video piece An Ode to Hill and Adamson—inspired by a photograph of the wife of the National Gallery’s first director—reminds us that the Gallery and photography grew up together.
Emma Crichton-Miller
Science
27th October to 4th November
This year’s Manchester Science Festival will be a celebration of order. Or at least an attempt to prove that mathematical order can be found in nature. In March, the festival’s organisers launched an appeal for sunflowers—if more than 3000 people grew one, they would have enough data to test Alan Turing’s theory. He proposed that the number of seed spirals on a flower would always be a number from the Fibonacci sequence (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, and so on). Growers’ diaries (including some captivating time-lapse footage) will be unveiled alongside the results.
As well as film screenings, talks and debates, there will be an installation from fashion designer Helen Storey, showing how clothes could be used to counter air pollution, and the duo Science Junkies, who explain—through adrenalin sports—how the human body works. The festival will also host Manchester’s first Hackathon, a 24-hour coding competition, where caffeine and Wi-Fi will flow freely. Even in the systematic, rational world of scientific inquiry, moments of brilliance can arrive during frenzied all-nighters.
Laura Marsh
Theatre
Royal Court, London, 18th October to 17th November
Long before their collaboration on Jerusalem, playwright Jez Butterworth and director Ian Rickson were exploring the dark secrets that lie on the edge of suburbia and beneath the marshlands of East Anglia. These poetic and mysterious plays—The Winterling, The Night Heron, Parlour Song—contained the same sort of simmering magical tension that erupted in Mark Rylance’s now legendary, larger-than-life performance as Johnny “The Rooster” Byron in Jerusalem. So it will be fascinating to see how Butterworth and Rickson scale back—or will they?—in their new collaboration at the Royal Court’s studio theatre, in which a man and a woman are discovered on a moonlit night in a remote cabin on the cliffs.
Butterworth has been a slow burner for 20 years, heavily influenced by Pinter, writing fastidiously and working on the occasional film (he produced and co-wrote the spy thriller Fair Game, starring Sean Penn). After Jerusalem, the stakes may be higher, but you can’t see him selling out or changing his tune.
Michael Coveney
Opera
24th October to 4th November
It sounds like a joke: a festival of unknown operas by unfamiliar composers in a tiny Irish coastal town in windswept October. But now in its 61st year, with a superb new opera house tucked away among the cobbled streets, Wexford Festival Opera is anything but a punchline. For two weeks every year this maverick festival showcases the rarities and rediscoveries that bigger opera companies wouldn’t dare to tackle. And what’s more it does it to a packed house and—don’t let the black tie fool you—with none of the airs and graces of other opera festivals .
This year’s lineup includes Chabrier’s sharply modern comedy of an unwilling king, Le Roi Malgré Lui, and, most excitingly, a production of A Village Romeo and Juliet in celebration of the 150th anniversary of composer Frederick Delius’s birth. Walk through the meandering streets to the waterfront, attend a lunchtime concert, talk music with strangers in the opera house café with its glorious view, and then you’re beginning to get the full measure of the Wexford experience. Alexandra Coghlan
