Tag: theatre
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Seeds
A Q&A with No Stone Theatre Director Nicolas Pitt about his production Seeds, following the story of Nikolai Vavilov.
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Common Salt
This is an instrument I have never seen before. A slender dark wooden box, one side opening to become a bellow, pushed back and forth in a solemn rhythm by the hand of the performer. It emits an uncompromising, steady monotone drone, which accompanies a sombre and melancholic chant: ‘This is a la……-ment’. Common Salt…
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Unrelated
A young woman slams her naked body furiously against a wall, again, again, and again, so brutally that I have to remind myself to breathe. Only moments before, I’d carefully sidestepped her as she lay on the floor, unclothed, motionless, and with her eyes shut. I filed into the studio along with the rest of…
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Lives, Loves and Loss at Fenton House
The silvery tinkling of servants’ bells welcomes me into the house of merchant Joshua Gee. There’s a fire in the grate and sweet treats on offer in the Still Room where I’m handed a candle to illuminate the winter afternoon, a parchment inventory of household goods and a quill pen so that I may note…
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Traces – Lives, Loves and Loss
“Every story, however hidden, leaves a trace…” A company specialising in site-specific, immersive experiences, Traces brings together contemporary art, theatre and design with old and disused buildings in order to reimagine the long-lost stories of the past. A collaboration between furniture and spatial designer Donna Walker and Talulah Mason, whose expertise is in sets…
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The Barometer of My Heart
On 20th February 2002, at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), in Paris, philosopher Jacques Derrida asked an audience of students the following question: “The phallus, I mean, the phallos, is it proper to man?” This question opened the eighth session of a series of lectures given by Derrida between 2001 and…
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Bitumen and Pork
Four busts and an image of creation. BITUMEN AND PORK was an installation to mark the post-performance cabaret of FEAST, a work by theatre company Clout at Battersea Arts Centre in 2014. The performance charted the gradual alienation of mankind through a framework of breakfast, lunch and dinner. The installation BITUMEN AND PORK was an…
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Strawberry Hill Anastylosis
Strawberry Hill House first poked its turrets into my undergraduate imagination as the birthplace of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, whose central image apparently came to him in a dream there – “of which all I could recover was, that I had thought myself in an ancient castle – and that on the uppermost…
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Oikeusjuttu (The Trial)
In Finland, the wolf is both more and less than an animal; it is a symbol. And this November sees a court case in which the very nature of that symbolism will be on trial. Fifteen men have been accused of the 2013 killing of three wolves (three of a population of around 150) in…