MILLENNIUM MONEY GROWS ON TREES
The year 2003 dawns, and millennium funding blunders on. Large cultural institutions, flexing their new-found fundraising muscles, keep pumping lottery lolly into Britain's museum and gallery-building boom.
Following the success of its revamped British Galleries (?31m, half lottery-funded), the V&A is embarking on a scheme to reorganise its whole 12.5 acre site, starring Daniel Libeskind's notorious spiral. This will cost ?150m, more than the entire Tate Modern (a mere ?134m) or the British Museum's Great Court (?100m). Who wangles these deals? The V&A poached Ian Blatchford, the Royal Academy's much admired finance director, and its new director of development John McCaffrey is known for the nifty job he did at Cambridge, getting Bill Gates to part with ?130m for new scholarships.
English Heritage has also declared its largest ever project: ?57m for a crucial overhaul of the "visitor's experience" at Stonehenge, ?26m of it coming from the Heritage Lottery Fund.
The South Bank has just got the go-ahead for the ?54m revamp of the Royal Festival Hall (?15m promised from the HLF; ?20m from the Arts Council), and the Hayward Gallery is closing till autumn for a few million pounds of improvements.
And don't forget the Royal Academy's ?50m plan for the old Museum of Mankind, plus a slew of other wee projects like the ?25.5m redevelopment of Glasgow's Kelvingrove Museum. Indeed, Glasgow City Council has acquired the services of the man who advised Manchester during the largest expansion of a regional museum in recent decades, the ?35m Manchester Art Gallery which re-opened to muted praise in May, along with the more headline-hitting ?46m Baltic art centre in Gateshead and the ?30m Imperial War Museum North.
Millennium schemes have produced some spectacular failures (the swiftly shut ?15m National Centre for Popular Music in Sheffield; the unloved ?50m Doncaster Earth Centre; the ?10m sinking tower at the Glasgow Science Centre) but the money keeps sloshing about. 2003 sees the Royal Albert Hall completing its ?66.3m redevelopment; the ?22m Laban Centre will open to the dance-mad of Deptford; and the Barbican Centre is remoulding its foyers and refurbishing at a cost of ?30m.
What's sad about this cash being spent on capital projects is that it isn't nearly matched by the sums given to museums to run them. Most haven't been so badly-off for 20 years, and their acquisition budgets are pathetic: ?100,000 for the British Museum, which is why 150 staff are being sacked in January.
CHURCH BURNINGS
Church gigs get their nod in the Book of Common Prayer: "In Quires & places where they sing, here followeth the anthem." But not for much longer, if the government's licensing bill becomes law. Almost half of all Britain's rural churches are used for concerts. The new bill seeks to impose a licensing system on churches which put on more than five events a year. Local authorities would issue licences (fee at their own discretion) only when buildings conformed with fire and safety measures. Regulation could cost the Church of England ?2.6m annually. But why protect audiences more than congregations? How many churchgoers have been burnt to death in recent centuries, because of medieval seating and exit doors?
SUMMER HALLYDAY
The great Johnny Hallyday's career is basking in a second summer. The former y?-y? "French Elvis" has finally been embraced by Parisian cinema snobs. The public has always adored him over there, but his intellectual credibility au cin? was almost terminally damaged by his early appearances in lamentable imitation Presley films. But in Patrice Leconte's L'homme du Train, which opens in Britain in March, Hallyday has achieved his life's ambition with a performance pronounced formidable by the critics-just a few months short of his 60th birthday, which will be a national event in France. It's still odd, of course, that like Tintin and Jacques Brel, this French hero is really Belgian.
THE MILD INTENSITY OF THE CENSOR
Unconscious comedy is the natural language of censorship. Videos have long been sternly classified as containing "bad language," "sex/nudity," "violence," or (ominously) "other." But now that the age limit on "12" films has become advisory rather than mandatory, the British Board of Film Classification has loosened its language to provide "consumer advice" on its film posters. As distributors offer consumers (ie parents) hints about content, they are providing unwitting critiques of their own product. So the film of Meera Syal's Anita and Me (12A) "contains moderate language, violence and sexual references," while One Hour Photo (15)-about a deranged stalker-"contains strong language and moderate sexual violence." And pity the filmmaker whose work registers less strongly on this Richter scale of offence. The spooky posters for M Night Shyamalan's Signs (12A) were belied by the reassurance that it contained only "moderate menace." And can Phillip Noyce be pleased to have his Rabbit-Proof Fence (PG) emblazoned with "contains mild emotional intensity"?
LIKE GLYNDEBOURNE WITH SUBSIDIES
Nicholas Snowman, sacked by Glyndebourne last year, has hooked a nice new job running the opera in Strasbourg with French levels of public subsidy assured in a town that hosts the European parliament. His Austrian predecessor, Rudolph Berger moves to take over the Volksoper in Vienna.
PREVIEW FEATURE
25th London International Mime Festival
In theatre, the greatest British export is still the written word. Edward Bond is the second most performed playwright in France after Moli?re; Howard Barker's plays have become a regular feature at the Avignon Festival; the late Sarah Kane has been produced 65 times on the continent. When you look up Martin Crimp on Google, the first nine entries are in French.
Imports, by contrast, are rare. Apart from the Edinburgh Festival (our only natural European centre) and the Gate and Royal Court, which doggedly produce European plays, Britain is Eurosceptic when it comes to narrative. It is in physical theatre that we look enviously abroad. British mimes, clowns and puppeteers have long taken their cue from the continent. Since Steven Berkoff went to Jacques Lecoq's Paris mime school and absorbed Lecoq's influences into his play East; and since Lecoq's prot?g? Philippe Gaulier set up his ?cole here in 1991, a generation of British physical actors has emerged. But new circus has taken longer, and we still refer to it in French. Le nouveau cirque has seen Frenchmen wielding chainsaws (Archaos) and French-Canadian daredevils (Cirque du Soleil) but few Brits.
It's not that British companies are bad at physical theatre. Ophaboom is one of the only commedia dell'arte companies outside Italy, while Complicite (who recently dropped the accents in their name to go Franglais) includes some of Lecoq's most talented alumni. But ask them for their influences and the only British name they mention is Peter Brook, who upped sticks for Paris in 1970. Why do British performers need Europeans to free them from speech?
Perhaps it's only a matter of time. This January, the London International Mime Festival (LIMF) celebrates 25 years of Euro-envy, but for the first time British acts outnumber those from across the channel (such as Belgian clown duo Okidok, pictured). Physical theatre is just entering the mainstream. But mime is money. In Britain, rehearsals last four weeks. In Europe, three months is not unusual. Physical theatre relies on the fringe, if only because that's where actors will rehearse seriously without serious pay.
Britain's oldest devising company for physical theatre is the People Show, a lawless collective set up in 1966 by artists including director Mike Figgis. But it's now being given a run for its money by younger groups such as Told by an Idiot and Improbable. Of the 11 British companies taking part in LIMF half are at London's beacon for physical theatre, the Battersea Arts Centre.
There is a physical theatre tradition that is identifiably British, chiefly in comedy, which can be traced back to the music hall origins of Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel. But this hasn't been a real source for the new work. Touring companies like Ridiculusmus and Spymonkey still owe their success to continental influences. In Britain, we are likely to remain exporters of the word and importers of the body.
Samantha Ellis
www.mimefest.co.uk
UNDER THE RADAR
Low frequency listings
Did Henry Moore put the hole into sculpture or was it Barbara Hepworth? Find out at Hepworth's centenary show at the New Art Centre, Salisbury, from 12th January.
A postscript to his searing Shoah, Claude Lanzmann's new film, Sobibor: 14 October 1943, 16:00, commemorates an uprising against the Nazis led by Yehuda Lerner, who also escaped from several camps. ICA, London, from 3rd January.
Sophie's Choice is sold out but ex-New York City Ballet and Fame star Antonia Franceschi stars in Cathy Marston's choreographic adjunct, Sophie, at the Royal Opera House's experimental Linbury Studio, London, 11th January.
Californian avant-gardists the Riot Group bring Victory at the Dirt Palace to the Riverside Studios, London, from 7th January. Part farce, part satire, it rips the stuffing out of the US media's coverage of 9/11.
Retro-futurism is back: Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane have made a steam-powered computer for "Ill Communication," a group show at Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee, from 25th January.
It's ten years since Rudolph Nureyev's death, which means only one thing: galas. Escape them and see him on celluloid at the NFT, London, from 1st January.
