My dream is to renovate my bathroom and put in wall-to-wall showering. In the middle, I’d have a huge, bubbling jacuzzi that takes up most of the floor space, with a sauna option operational via a toe button. Tropical plants would surround me, a robot would bring me drinks, and there I’d sit, sniffing steam… Read more »
Author: Alx Phillips
Review: Kerry James Marshall – Painting and Other Stuff
Is it possible to reinvent yourself completely? After all, it gets to the point when you just don’t feel like you. Pick a university in some far-off town, move house, dump your partner, move abroad… Some call it running away; some call it finding yourself. ‘Course, ‘you’ are the least of your problems: family, mates,… Read more »
Loop Art and the Meaning of Engels
It’s only a matter of time before everything turns into bad theatre. Oh, the theme park that history becomes! All those momentous events and monumental ideologies… Walls slapped up and beaten down. Files filed and family members disappeared. Slivers of land fought and died for. Gruff men with bushy beards, whose big ideas engulfed 20, 50 years, entire lifetimes. All of… Read more »
Estudio Nómada – Loop art route around the Barri Gòtic
Creator versus curator… aye, that old chestnut. Seriously, who wants to sleep with the guy with the great music collection to the same extent as he who composes his own minuets? And yet, when it comes to the visual arts, perhaps it’s worth reconsidering.* On Saturday afternoon I enjoyed a wee stroll through Barcelona’s Barri Gòtic, refreshingly deserted as a storm… Read more »
What’s On? Informe per a una acadèmia – A Report to an Academy
There’s nothing quite like the shocking finale of a football match, between two teams that you do not habitually support, to leave you floundering in contradictory emotions. On the one hand, you don’t give a toss; on the other, you do – and usually for a whole bunch of irrational reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with football. The paradoxical… Read more »
What’s On? Richard MacDonald sculptures at Barcelona’s MEAM
Only in the heights of extreme physical pain can one feel relief from the constant emotional torture. I reckon that’s the whole point behind study, sport, really loud concerts and really long after-parties … and thank god (we hope) that something might do it! albeit for a very short time. In this spirit, Richard MacDonald creates small, life-sized and… Read more »
What’s On? A casa (Kabul) by Tony Kushner, dir. Mario Gas
I’m pretty much convinced that life is a series of boxes. Boxes that we’ve made ourselves out of cardboard clichés and fantasy cement. We sit in one box – that we’ve furnished, perhaps, in the orientalist style, or done sparse and modern with white walls, plastic furniture and a hormone-boosted plant from Ikea that will never die…. Read more »
What’s On? L’Encarregat by Harold Pinter, dir Xicu Masó
By popular demand, l’Encarregat’s back! See it at Espai Lliure from 8th to 26th October, 2014. It’s so often said that plays are timeless, universal, could have been ‘written just yesterday’, … it’s never true, though. Take a play from the 1960s Britain and restage it in 2010s Barcelona and its either going to turn out… Read more »
REVIEW: Un Enemic del Poble, by Henrik Ibsen, dir. Miguel del Arco
As wikipedia tells it, so incensed was the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen at the public uproar following his new play Ghosts (a haunting account of a charitable mother whose son, a nice young man, goes bonkers having inherited syphilis from his slutty father), that he then wrote … … An Enemy of the People (1882), a… Read more »
REVIEW: El policía de las ratas – dir. Àlex Rigola / cia. Heartbreak Hotel
El policía de las ratas (Police Rat) is a wonderfully intense Spanish-language 2-man play directed by Àlex Rigola. It is based on the short story by the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño, “one of the most improbable international literary celebrities since William Burroughs”, according to the New York Times (who doesn’t give any further explanation). Possibly the… Read more »