DANCE REVIEW: Lemi Ponifasio / MAU

On a slick black stage, stabbed through the heart by a monolithic shard, dance troupe MAU terrified me with a tense, urgent, masterful piece with a throbbing, ritualistic score. You’ll never sleep again. In Birds with Skymirrors, Samoan choreographer Lemi Ponifasio deals with the big issues: our relationship to the environment and to each other, relating… Read more »

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ACTORS: Pros or Props?

As Jocular Theatre Company stages another comedy this weekend, I question the artistic prestige of a profession that, in reality, draws a comparison with marketing. “No scripts on the night.” Don’t get me wrong. I think theatre is vitally important, or I wouldn’t have spent a month chasing Calixto Bieito telephonically around Belgium. Where newspapers… Read more »

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READ ABOUT IT: Urban graffiti

Click here for an excellent reminder of the all-pervasive evil of advertising from George Monbiot. Someone, please, clean this ugly, banal and virulent form of urban graffiti off our city streets, buses, cinemas, schools, homes …

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WHAT’S ON? Camp Magnético

To purge its dark soul, through this month and next the plaça Catalunya placed, cultural space of Spanish bank Caja Madrid hosts a series of concerts by weird experimental music artists. It seems that the same light-sensitive sound manipulators that probed our minds with LEM now seek to amass us like iron-filings to a mysterious ‘Magnetic… Read more »

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REVIEW: Robots or Ghosts

For all the talk of ‘collective memory’ and ‘universality of emotions’ on Macba’s notes it is the isolation and the drudgery that for me made Sejla Kameric’s version of the film 1395 Days without Red the more engrossing and haunting of the two films. Created in conjunction with Albanian filmmaker Anri Sala (left), the film project… Read more »

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WHAT’S ON? 1395 Days Without Red

  MACBA MUSEUM UNTIL JANUARY 9, 2012 Two films set in the same city, using the same footage, characters and soundtrack, and screened on floor 1 and 2 of the Macba museum (swing to the left and to the end of the corridor as you come up the stairs) show two dramatic representations of the… Read more »

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BEEN & GONE: LEM end – Institut Fatima nibble the fingers that feed them, Cargo go safari.

  Can music experiment and engage at the same time? Can it remain individual and also reach a public without compromising that? Does it matter? LEM festival uses its experimental tag very liberally, but if there’s one thing that struck me this year it’s that it all depends on the space. La Fontana is a very ‘public’… Read more »

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