What a drag: Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo blends high art with low comedy
MUSIC
Grinderman 2by Grinderman (Mute) If musique noire existed as a genre, Nick Cave would be playing it. Since abandoning his native Australia in 1980, this skinny, self-educated cultural outlaw has fronted the long-running act Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds. But he has also written novels, lectures and screenplays, as well as music for film directors Wim Wenders and John Hillcoat. His singularly dark and alienating aesthetic passes easily between these genres, making him a cult figure for many. Even his hit duet with Kylie Minogue, "Where the Wild Roses Grow," features the murder of a maiden on her first date. Grinderman is Cave's latest "side project," its mostly-bearded members part of the same surly bunch that make up the Bad Seeds. As the name suggests, Grinderman's trademark sound is distortion, honed to a growling perfection over years of experimentation. Cave's uncompromising and edgy lyrics are sung not from the heart but from an imagined world of desperation and turpitude, in which sex and drink play leading roles. As such, Cave's music is appealing without necessarily being likable, an odd position in a predominantly sensual musical culture. As an antidote to the pursuit of happiness, however, this second instalment of the Grinderman project is a welcome, if not humorous, reminder of human fallibility. Nick Crowe is a music writerTHEATRE
Beautiful Burnoutby Bryony Lavery. On tour and at York Hall, Bethnal Green, 16th September-2nd October, Tel: 020 7638 8891 When the Royal Court presented Roy Williams's boxing play Sucker Punch earlier this year, the theatre was converted into a gymnasium. The National Theatre of Scotland goes one better by taking its new knock-out drama to one of the world's most famous boxing halls: York Hall in Bethnal Green, east London, a magnificent Georgian building which has resounded to the thump and thwack of countless championship contests. Beautiful Burnout charts the stories of four lads and one lassie who are training in a Glasgow gym for the promise of titles and fistfuls of money. Boxing plays—the roster includes Clifford Odets's Golden Boy, Howard Sackler's The Great White Hope and Bill Bryden's Glaswegian real-life fable, Willie Rough—always deal in escape from the ghetto. But Bryony Lavery's brilliantly fought, danced and skipped drama also shows the anxieties of parents and the physical danger; it's more than a worthy successor to the NTS's unforgettable study of soldiers on the front line, Black Watch. Beautiful Burnout was launched to hosannas at the Edinburgh Festival, and also tours to Glasgow, Glenrothes, Sheffield and Chichester. It is co-produced with physical theatre specialists Frantic Assembly, with a great Underworld soundtrack; and its presentation at York Hall, in association with the Barbican, should confirm it as a hit. Michael Coveney is chief theatre critic of Whatsonstage.comART
Recorders: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer Manchester Art Gallery, 18th September-30th January 2011, Tel: 0161 235 8888 It is Manchester's turn to host the electronic artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. Twice awarded a Bafta for interactive art, he is perhaps most famous in this country for Under Scan, in which video portraits of anonymous people were projected onto the ground of Trafalgar Square, and then drowned in light so that the portraits only appeared in the shadows of passersby. Now, as part of the city's bid to become the digital culture capital of Britain, Manchester Art Gallery is opening "Recorders," a solo exhibition of interior installations by the Mexican-Canadian scientist-turned-artist. Lozano-Hemmer uses digital media to invite the audience to influence the unfolding artwork with their voices, movements or even heartbeats. This show includes seminal pieces such as Pulse Room, a room full of lightbulbs flashing on and off in a rhythm dictated by the recorded pulse rates of the audience. A new installation, People on People, involves computerised surveillance cameras filming the audience and then projecting back their video portraits into the shadows of the surrounding and subsequent audience. Whether this is an incitement to mass narcissism ("the best artwork is one that includes me!"), a celebration of digital connectivity, or a stark warning about the surveillance society, only your experience will tell. Emma Crichton-Miller is an arts writerCinema
Certified Copy dir Abbas Kiarostami. On general release from 3rd September It's easy to take for granted the fact that one of the great men of cinema is still regularly making movies—especially since his films of late have been such minimalist affairs. Abbas Kiarostami politely stopped accepting awards some years ago because there's no more room for them at the Tehran cinema museum. One critic wrote: "We're living in the age of Kiarostami, but we don't yet know it." He's famously daring in what his stories leave out (Jaws without the shark doesn't get close); so, to some, his new film Certified Copy seems disappointingly conventional. We see a couple meet in Italy, go for a drive and get to know each other. Or do we? Doubts about the nature of the couple, the moment, and what we're watching begin to drift through Kiarostami's summer romance like the perfume of orange blossom, and soon the film is subtly multiple. Film fans begin to realise that they're watching Roberto Rossellini's movie Voyage to Italy and, in a way, Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. Except that Certified Copy isn't that postmodern. It casts a spell and seems to stop the clock—and perhaps your heart too—when Juliette Binoche is acting straight into the lens. Lightness in cinema is hard to do. Kiarostami, somehow, combines it with profound questions about the nature of love. Mark Cousins is a film critic and directorDANCE
Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo Peacock Theatre, London, 14th-25th September, Tel: 0844 412 4322 Once upon a time in a Manhattan loft, a handful of brave, hairy men trussed themselves into tutus and toe shoes to amuse a few ballet-minded friends. Thirty-six years later, Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo is an international institution. This is much, much more than a drag act en pointe. Like all great female impersonators, their wicked deconstruction of the ballerina persona reveals plenty about the strengths and frailties of their subject. A Trocks parody shows us the wrong side of the ballet fabric: the bungled lifts, missed cues and stolen limelight that regular dancers work so hard to conceal. Their blend of high art and low comedy has ballet bores nodding in recognition while the rest of the house weeps with laughter. The two-week run at the Peacock, which also includes a pitch-perfect Merce Cunningham pastiche, will be followed by a British tour next spring featuring stars such as Svetlana Lofatkina (the Chernobyl Cherub), Helen Highwaters, Minnie Van Driver and others. Ida Nevasayneva (alias Paul Ghiselin) has officially hung up her ballet shoes but, like the great divas of old, she is occasionally persuaded out of retirement to give one last dying swan. Brava. Louise Levene is the Sunday Telegraph's ballet critic and a novelistSCIENCE FICTION
The Evolutionary Void by Peter F Hamilton (Macmillan, £18.99) Science fiction, and British science fiction in particular, is at a low ebb. Wizards, vampires and elves rule the bestseller charts, and writers are more likely to anatomise the recent past than reach for utopian futures. Rutland-born Peter F Hamilton is—alongside Iain M Banks—one of the few remaining purveyors of space opera in the grand style. The publication of this, the fifth volume set in his "Commonwealth" universe, is the perfect moment to become acquainted with one of the more remarkable recent SF ventures. Divided into two initial volumes, followed by the Void trilogy, these novels span a millennium and a half of human history, from the discovery of a means of instantaneous travel between two points in space at the end of the 21st century, to a civilisation-threatening war at the end of the 36th. Hamilton blends high technology—artificial intelligences, biological enhancement and the banishment of death itself—with the semi-mystical capacities of other species and worlds. Rarer and just as welcome, though, is the strength of the personalities that persist from volume to volume, and their all-too-human foibles. Since 2004's Pandora's Star, Hamilton has produced five books of epic narrative and imaginative drive in as many years—and a vision of possible futures that can be set alongside Isaac Asimov's Foundation series in its resonances for the present. Tom Chatfield is Prospect's arts and books editor, and the author of "Fun Inc" (Virgin)
MUSIC
Grinderman 2by Grinderman (Mute) If musique noire existed as a genre, Nick Cave would be playing it. Since abandoning his native Australia in 1980, this skinny, self-educated cultural outlaw has fronted the long-running act Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds. But he has also written novels, lectures and screenplays, as well as music for film directors Wim Wenders and John Hillcoat. His singularly dark and alienating aesthetic passes easily between these genres, making him a cult figure for many. Even his hit duet with Kylie Minogue, "Where the Wild Roses Grow," features the murder of a maiden on her first date. Grinderman is Cave's latest "side project," its mostly-bearded members part of the same surly bunch that make up the Bad Seeds. As the name suggests, Grinderman's trademark sound is distortion, honed to a growling perfection over years of experimentation. Cave's uncompromising and edgy lyrics are sung not from the heart but from an imagined world of desperation and turpitude, in which sex and drink play leading roles. As such, Cave's music is appealing without necessarily being likable, an odd position in a predominantly sensual musical culture. As an antidote to the pursuit of happiness, however, this second instalment of the Grinderman project is a welcome, if not humorous, reminder of human fallibility. Nick Crowe is a music writerTHEATRE
Beautiful Burnoutby Bryony Lavery. On tour and at York Hall, Bethnal Green, 16th September-2nd October, Tel: 020 7638 8891 When the Royal Court presented Roy Williams's boxing play Sucker Punch earlier this year, the theatre was converted into a gymnasium. The National Theatre of Scotland goes one better by taking its new knock-out drama to one of the world's most famous boxing halls: York Hall in Bethnal Green, east London, a magnificent Georgian building which has resounded to the thump and thwack of countless championship contests. Beautiful Burnout charts the stories of four lads and one lassie who are training in a Glasgow gym for the promise of titles and fistfuls of money. Boxing plays—the roster includes Clifford Odets's Golden Boy, Howard Sackler's The Great White Hope and Bill Bryden's Glaswegian real-life fable, Willie Rough—always deal in escape from the ghetto. But Bryony Lavery's brilliantly fought, danced and skipped drama also shows the anxieties of parents and the physical danger; it's more than a worthy successor to the NTS's unforgettable study of soldiers on the front line, Black Watch. Beautiful Burnout was launched to hosannas at the Edinburgh Festival, and also tours to Glasgow, Glenrothes, Sheffield and Chichester. It is co-produced with physical theatre specialists Frantic Assembly, with a great Underworld soundtrack; and its presentation at York Hall, in association with the Barbican, should confirm it as a hit. Michael Coveney is chief theatre critic of Whatsonstage.comART
Recorders: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer Manchester Art Gallery, 18th September-30th January 2011, Tel: 0161 235 8888 It is Manchester's turn to host the electronic artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. Twice awarded a Bafta for interactive art, he is perhaps most famous in this country for Under Scan, in which video portraits of anonymous people were projected onto the ground of Trafalgar Square, and then drowned in light so that the portraits only appeared in the shadows of passersby. Now, as part of the city's bid to become the digital culture capital of Britain, Manchester Art Gallery is opening "Recorders," a solo exhibition of interior installations by the Mexican-Canadian scientist-turned-artist. Lozano-Hemmer uses digital media to invite the audience to influence the unfolding artwork with their voices, movements or even heartbeats. This show includes seminal pieces such as Pulse Room, a room full of lightbulbs flashing on and off in a rhythm dictated by the recorded pulse rates of the audience. A new installation, People on People, involves computerised surveillance cameras filming the audience and then projecting back their video portraits into the shadows of the surrounding and subsequent audience. Whether this is an incitement to mass narcissism ("the best artwork is one that includes me!"), a celebration of digital connectivity, or a stark warning about the surveillance society, only your experience will tell. Emma Crichton-Miller is an arts writerCinema
Certified Copy dir Abbas Kiarostami. On general release from 3rd September It's easy to take for granted the fact that one of the great men of cinema is still regularly making movies—especially since his films of late have been such minimalist affairs. Abbas Kiarostami politely stopped accepting awards some years ago because there's no more room for them at the Tehran cinema museum. One critic wrote: "We're living in the age of Kiarostami, but we don't yet know it." He's famously daring in what his stories leave out (Jaws without the shark doesn't get close); so, to some, his new film Certified Copy seems disappointingly conventional. We see a couple meet in Italy, go for a drive and get to know each other. Or do we? Doubts about the nature of the couple, the moment, and what we're watching begin to drift through Kiarostami's summer romance like the perfume of orange blossom, and soon the film is subtly multiple. Film fans begin to realise that they're watching Roberto Rossellini's movie Voyage to Italy and, in a way, Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. Except that Certified Copy isn't that postmodern. It casts a spell and seems to stop the clock—and perhaps your heart too—when Juliette Binoche is acting straight into the lens. Lightness in cinema is hard to do. Kiarostami, somehow, combines it with profound questions about the nature of love. Mark Cousins is a film critic and directorDANCE
Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo Peacock Theatre, London, 14th-25th September, Tel: 0844 412 4322 Once upon a time in a Manhattan loft, a handful of brave, hairy men trussed themselves into tutus and toe shoes to amuse a few ballet-minded friends. Thirty-six years later, Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo is an international institution. This is much, much more than a drag act en pointe. Like all great female impersonators, their wicked deconstruction of the ballerina persona reveals plenty about the strengths and frailties of their subject. A Trocks parody shows us the wrong side of the ballet fabric: the bungled lifts, missed cues and stolen limelight that regular dancers work so hard to conceal. Their blend of high art and low comedy has ballet bores nodding in recognition while the rest of the house weeps with laughter. The two-week run at the Peacock, which also includes a pitch-perfect Merce Cunningham pastiche, will be followed by a British tour next spring featuring stars such as Svetlana Lofatkina (the Chernobyl Cherub), Helen Highwaters, Minnie Van Driver and others. Ida Nevasayneva (alias Paul Ghiselin) has officially hung up her ballet shoes but, like the great divas of old, she is occasionally persuaded out of retirement to give one last dying swan. Brava. Louise Levene is the Sunday Telegraph's ballet critic and a novelistSCIENCE FICTION
The Evolutionary Void by Peter F Hamilton (Macmillan, £18.99) Science fiction, and British science fiction in particular, is at a low ebb. Wizards, vampires and elves rule the bestseller charts, and writers are more likely to anatomise the recent past than reach for utopian futures. Rutland-born Peter F Hamilton is—alongside Iain M Banks—one of the few remaining purveyors of space opera in the grand style. The publication of this, the fifth volume set in his "Commonwealth" universe, is the perfect moment to become acquainted with one of the more remarkable recent SF ventures. Divided into two initial volumes, followed by the Void trilogy, these novels span a millennium and a half of human history, from the discovery of a means of instantaneous travel between two points in space at the end of the 21st century, to a civilisation-threatening war at the end of the 36th. Hamilton blends high technology—artificial intelligences, biological enhancement and the banishment of death itself—with the semi-mystical capacities of other species and worlds. Rarer and just as welcome, though, is the strength of the personalities that persist from volume to volume, and their all-too-human foibles. Since 2004's Pandora's Star, Hamilton has produced five books of epic narrative and imaginative drive in as many years—and a vision of possible futures that can be set alongside Isaac Asimov's Foundation series in its resonances for the present. Tom Chatfield is Prospect's arts and books editor, and the author of "Fun Inc" (Virgin)
