An Italian in Madrid – one of three numbers in a show by the Richard Alston Dance Company at Northampton Derngate, Sensitive and beautiful dancing to the music of Scarlatti – the titular Italian – featuring as guest dancer the very wonderful Vidya Patel, a finalist in the BBC Young Dancer competition 2015 (see her performing). So good we immediately booked to see it again at the next opportunity, unfortunately not till February 2017. I was also inspired to buy a CD of the Scarlatti sonatas, choosing a performance by Angela Hewitt, after having been blown away by her rendition of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, and I was not disappointed.
Vitreus Art Gallery and Craft Workshop – beautiful stained glass as domestic decoration, being made before your eyes, with a wide variety of other crafts on sale, publicised as part of a South Northamptonshire week-long arts trail of open studios. A lovely Saturday afternoon, rounded off by tea and cake at the on-site tea room.
Kew Gardens – my first visit, and much bigger and more beautiful than I’d anticipated, only having seen fragments on TV. You could forget you’re in London, if it weren’t for the planes passing overhead every two minutes. Highlights: (1) the Marianne North Gallery, built to showcase the botanical paintings of the Victorian traveller, recently featured in the BBC programme Kew’s Forgotten Queen (the paintings themselves are reproduced on the ArtUK website); (2) the Hive, a sculpture installation, dynamically linked to an actual beehive, so its lighting and sound reflect real-time bee activity. Both of these, plus the memory of the excellent EPIC Ireland museum in Dublin (see previous post), made me reflect on the importance, now that information is so readily available on the internet, of galleries and installations which add value from a sense of immersion or being in a space. All three of these are great places to be, not just to find out stuff.
Hypernormalisation – new documentary by Adam Curtis, his usual provocative and startling reflection on how we got to the mess we’re in, this time taking in Donald Trump, the failure of the West’s Middle East policy, and the dawn of a post-truth world.
Cats – a new version (I saw the original London production in the 1980s, with Brian Blessed as Old Deuteronomy), which marked our delighted grand-daughter’s introduction to musical theatre. Packed full of great music and great dancing, and some strong performances,
Polymnia 10th anniversary concert, with Lesley Garrett – a pleasure and an honour to perform alongside her.
Words are my matter – new collection of essays and talks by Ursula Le Guin. I particularly liked the following: “Reading is not as passive as hearing or viewing. It’s an act: you do it. You read at your pace, your own speed, not the ceaseless, incoherent, gabbling shouting rush of the media. You take in what you can and want to take in, not what they shove at you fast and hard and loud in order to overwhelm and control you…. And though you’re usually alone when you read, you are in communion with another mind. You aren’t being brainwashed or co-opted or used; you’ve joined in an act of the imagination.… Reading is a means of listening…. Listening is an act of community, which takes space, time, and silence.” So obvious, and yet (as I've previously posted) some of my colleagues continue to categorise reading as an “essentially passive” form of learning activity. What terribly dull and boring texts they must be reading. Or writing.
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