Tilda Swinton sleeps in a glass box – ‘maybe’ madness?

The Maybe

Tilda Swinton & Cornelia Parker, Museum of Modern Art, New York

Has the art world gone mad? Or perhaps to sleep? Today, Tilda Swinton is slumbering in a glass box at the Museum of Modern Art as a ‘surprise’ performance piece. She will pop-up at unannounced locations within the museum throughout the year, presumably thereby fulfilling the ambiguity of the piece’s title The Maybe.

Is this the ‘still life’ of the modern age? Does it allow us to appreciate a greater level of stillness, allowing a living human to be examined and observed asleep, expressionless, unpenetrable? Or is it just a meaningless stunt that has assumed an apparent legitimacy because Swinton is one of those rare creatures, a respected celebrity?

What’s more, this isn’t even the first time this piece has appeared. The Maybe premiered in 1995 at London’s Serpentine Gallery, which thus deprives it of the novelty factor that might have been its saving grace, might have made it fresh, modern, even innovative. But between then and now, we’ve had David Blaine imbecilically starving himself in a plexiglass prison over the Thames, Damien Hirst pickling and preserving multiple unfortunates in formaldehyde-filled vitrines, and Southbank Centre proposing a floating glass box as its pioneering new performance space (in which I’m sure much more legitimate performance art will occur). Do we really need another see-through spectacle, an attempt at meaning that is as transparent, vacuous and hollow as the box that contains it? I think not.

Follow me on twitter @BetweentheReeds

Daughter - If You Leave: album review

Daughter, If You Leave

Released 18^th March 2013

‘If you’re in love then you’re the lucky one/ Because most of us are bitter over someone.’ This optimistic outlook typifies Daughter’s debut album release If You Leave, a haunting electronic-folk concoction that sits somewhere between The XX and Laura Marling. Singer Elena Tonra has clearly suffered acute heartbreak and some of these songs are genuinely evocative, musically compelling explorations of those universal but excruciatingly personal experiences. But much of the album blurs into wistful oohs and bleakly minimal guitar refrains to leave you feeling drained and rather uninspired.

The subtle changes Daughter have made from their stunning debut EP His Young Heart – a more acoustic, intensely moving, deceptively simple exploration of love and pain – have made their sound feel a little generic and so less potent. The band have been praised for their originality and there are still signs of that in If You Leave. But the moments of fresh creativity seem to shine out from among forgettable fillers and misguided attempts at more upbeat songs (which are essentially the same as the more melancholy tracks but with an incongruously faster tempo).

Tonra’s gossamer-fine voice does send shivers down the spine, and there are moments when the shockingly bold honesty of her lyrics brings home the brutal emotions of a cataclysmic breakup. The best track on the album, ‘Youth’, is a desperately dystopian vision of youth and disillusionment. It begins with beautifully tender vocals over iterative, intricate fingerpicked guitar riffs, builds through a drum-punctuated bridge and reaches an intense climax of resonant post-production echoes and blossoming cymbals. And the three members of Daughter (singer Tonra, guitarist Igor Haefeli and drummer Remi Aguilella) magnify their sounds and manipulate their instruments in such a way as to conjure the impression a full band working seamlessly together to create striking soundscapes. From sparse beginnings out in the wild, their melodies and rhythm grow to embody passionate railings against this foul world that reach King Lear proportions.

But instead of Lear’s elegiac raving in the untamed outdoors, you feel as if Tonra is producing the same overwhelming emotion but in a stifling living room where its energy is dissipated and somehow inappropriate. As she says on ‘Smother’, ‘I’m a suffocator’. By the end of this album, you don’t feel you have come through a musical catharsis and enlightenment but that you have been numbed by the repetition and desolation of these songs. Daughter undeniably have an interesting sound and an elemental rawness that could become something great. But listening to the entirety of If You Leave is a dampening rather than revitalising experience. I look forward to watching Daughter play a gig to see if there is a visceral passion in their live performance that brings out the power in these songs, a power you can feel vibrating just below the surface but unable to break out.

Follow me on twitter @BetweentheReeds

Does the digital revolution mean the death of film?

Side by Side: The Science, Art and Impact of Digital Cinema

A Documentary

Every movement in every artform across the ages is inevitably accompanied by resistance to change, tentative excitement about innovation and progress, and a wistful gaze through rose-tinted glasses at the past. Our cinematic versions of these glasses are very fetching 3D ones, which perhaps perform the dual function of making us nostalgic for a simpler, more innocent age of cinema and enlightening us to the potential of the digital revolution.

Side by Side is an intelligent documentary looking at how the landscape of filmmaking is being transformed by such proliferation of digital technology. It ranges from the specific scientific developments involved in capturing moving pictures to the age-old philosophical question of whether our rapidly changing world should welcome technological developments or remain wary of the razzle dazzle of modern pretenders.

Although not a flawless documentary, it’s worth watching just to be enlightened about the myriad techniques available to filmmakers in the digital age. But it really shines as a platform for the debate between those who champion new methods and those who believe that traditional photochemical techniques will always have more artistic integrity. Director Chris Kenneally and producer Keanu Reeves have consulted a wide variety of directors, cinematographers, colourists, actors and industry experts to tease out the nuances of these two sides. The result leaves you with a sense that digital has opened up brave new worlds but that the teachings of the old film masters and the unique effects of celluloid must not be abandoned.

Much of what the documentary records is fairly obvious: art is led by technology and vice versa, the marriage of technology and art can help to ‘outpace the audience’s imagination’. And frustratingly it doesn’t always tell you immediately who the talking heads are. But the expertise of those heads, from staunch digital advocates George Lucas and James Cameron to the more equivocal Christopher Nolan and Martin Scorsese, gives both an interesting overview and quirky little insights into the history and current practice of Hollywood fimmaking. The extent to which digital is democratising the industry, and conversely is jeopardising its more traditional counterpart, is still very much unresolved.

So if, as cinematographer Michael Chapman avows, ‘cinema was the church of the 20^th century’, where does that leave us now? We may have our 3D glasses on but are we seeing, experiencing and creating more through them? Or will we end up with the inevitable headache from watching a film in more dimensions than it should aspire to achieve, or from whizzing our eyes about at 48 frames per second, or from seeing colours so searingly clear that we crave the distinctive grainy aesthetic of celluloid? It seems somewhere between the two. And I think if you watch Avatar or Sin City, you can't deny the exhilarating possibilities that digital affords. But it is clear from the way that these eminent filmmakers talk about celluloid that there is a unique magic to film and a visceral engagement with it that cannot, and should not, be lost in the furore. But do watch Side by Side, and make up your own mind.

Follow me on twitter @BetweenTheReeds

See a trailer for Side by Side here

Cloud Atlas: puzzling, dazzling, discombobulating

Cloud Atlas

Released 22^nd February 2013

Who would have thought one film could contain such a confusing cumulonimbus of character concoctions? Directors Lana and Andy Wachowski and Tom Tykwer have tried to translate David Mitchell’s epic novel into a digestible film, and their success is mixed. Cloud Atlas can feel like a daunting thousand-piece jigsaw, with seemingly unconnected fragments that must be painstakingly fitted together without the conviction you’ll ever quite get the full picture. But it can also be a beautifully rich tapestry, woven from a giddying array of genres and across many epochs, its threads interweaving to tell thrilling tales through a smorgasbord of ideas and intricate details.

Those character concoctions are the directors’ audacious filmic solution to the six-part structure of Mitchell’s novel. Each actor is reincarnated in different roles, sporting impressive prosthetics through which their acting calibre can (mostly) still shine through. So we witness Halle Berry as a gritty 1970's journalist, a silver-wreathed oracle from the future and even (only just believably) the white Jewish wife of a composer in 1930's Edinburgh. The most startling reincarnation is Hugh Grant, who plays a series of rather preposterous villains including an unexpectedly convincing, bloodcurdling cannibal.

The brilliance of the film, for someone who has read the book, is that the directors have taken a seemingly impossible combination of plots and made them exhilarating and surprisingly resonant. Themes of retribution, subjugation and accountability are nicely teased out – occasionally the script is too obvious, which I think is why some critics have accused the film of vapidity. But Cloud Atlas does have something to say about how your actions affect those around you, what your legacy will be when you’re gone, and questioning what freedom really means and whether any of us truly achieve it. And it does this with such style and technological daring that you cannot but be impressed.

Prolific links between the narratives, from theme to plot to subtle camera angle cuts, are revealed with breathtaking dexterity. One such tense moment intercuts between two scenes: a black runaway slave tightrope-walks the ship’s rigging to prove his worth to hostile, murderous sailors below; and a futuristic battle is fought on a precipitous sky-high walkway by rebels rescuing a genetically-engineered clone from perpetual servitude. The inevitability of enslaver and enslaved is made palpable as every camera angle is mirrored, reminding us of the ominously repetitive nature of humanity's flaws.

But watching the film with someone who hadn’t read the book did raise the question: without an anchoring knowledge of Mitchell’s more clearly divided narratives, would you understand what on earth is going on? The hasty cuts between scenes can be bewildering and take serious concentration to follow. There is also the temptation to play the ‘who’s who’ game – the prosthetics may be remarkable (and admirably racially non-discriminatory) but they are sometimes artificial to the point of farce – Hugh Grant as a geriatric cockney geezer and Hugo Weaving as an ostensibly Korean bad guy spring to mind. More time can be spent deliberating about, marvelling or laughing at the metamorphoses of these famous actors than paying attention to the earnest film the directors have tried to make.

Mitchell’s novel has a wonderful capacity to absorb you in six discrete worlds, each with their own inimitable voice in which you completely invest before moving on to the next. Each is disorientatingly different but immediately hypnotic. By intercutting the characters' tales, the directors have achieved a distinct kind of dramatic intensity but lost some of the novel’s immersive quality and some of its coherence. It takes time to appreciate fully a tapestry of this ambition and intricacy, weaved of such multifarious threads. And perhaps the medium of film, by its very nature, can never allow enough time to devote to such complexity. But the threads are beautiful nonetheless, and I think it is worth the 172 minutes to entwine yourself in the exquisite stories they spin. 

Follow me on twitter @BetweentheReeds

Whirling in Noël Coward's vortex

The Vortex by Noël Coward

Rose Theatre, Kingston, Friday 15 February (running until Saturday 2 March)

The jazz hands of 1920s glamour open this play; the wringing hands of Florence and her son Nicky, conscious echoes of Gertrude and Hamlet, wring your heart by the end of it. We are thrust from the wit and frisky joie-de-vivre of the first act into a mortal coil of bitter self-discovery and betrayal, which feels as relevant and shocking now as it must have been in 1924. Noël Coward has an uncanny ability (considering he was only 24 when the play premiered) to stick a dagger into the concerns of age and of youth and expose the fears of us all. The Rose Theatre has put on a production that teases out these real psychological anxieties with brilliant panache, embracing the play's hysteria without ever giving way to gratuitous sentimentalism or melodrama.

Stephen Unwin’s accomplished direction produces virtuosic changes of tone that take the audience hurtling through emotions faster than Scott Joplin’s fingers move over a piano in the Maple Leaf Rag. One minute you’re laughing at light-hearted socialite repartee, the next witnessing an unspoken, heart-jolting revelation that prompts you to interrogate exactly what you were laughing at and how you failed to see the tragic cracks just below the artificial surface of rouge and perfume. The wonderfully Art Deco set from Neil Warmington locates us in the decadence of the age, while reminding us that Coward’s concerns are equally modern. An anachronistic Mick Jagger lips sofa and a broken yellow frame surround the stage to suggest a fragmented, undeniably contemporary world.

Within an excellent cast, David Dawson shines particularly – his Nicky, grappling with probable homosexuality and clandestine cocaine addiction, is brilliantly pitched. He never veers into over-emotive frenzy or contemptible self-pity. You can always perceive a basic moral integrity and elusive rationality that lie buried beneath the addled, insecure exterior. The acting throughout is consummate – with a few minor exceptions, all the actors maintain a superlative control of the shades of grey within their roles, however slight their character may be. James Dreyfus deserves a particular mention for his turn as a bitchy dandy who wafts in and out of scenes with ineffable flair.

‘We are all swirling in a vortex of beastliness’: this is how Nicky characterises his whole experience of life. And when he utters it in such anguished desperation, we feel instinctively that this applies to us just as much as to him and his world. Watching this play acts as an intense reminder of just how threatening that vortex is, just how closely it whirls beneath us and how we must remain vigilant against its magnetic pull. And the Rose's production provides this reminder with such finesse that we cannot help but want to absorb ourselves in Coward’s world, however disquieting it may be.

Follow me on twitter @BetweentheReeds

Finally in the headlights: Frightened Rabbit's Pedestrian Verse tour

Frightened Rabbit at The Forum, London
Wednesday 13 February, touring the UK until 28 February

Tall white posts, each crossed by three horizontal slats, flank the spartanly spiritual stage. They act as artful metaphors for Frightened Rabbit’s music. When singer Scott Hutchinson puts such raw passion into lyrics like ‘Well I can dip my head in the river/ Cleanse my soul, oh/ I'd still have the stomach of a sinner’ in ‘Holy’, they become mutated Christian crosses, embodying the tension between doubt and faith that runs throughout the new album. And with the panegyric ‘Old Old Fashioned’, on which Hutchinson croons ‘There's a radio in the corner/ It's dying to make a scene/ So give me that soft soft static/ With a human voice underneath’, the posts transform into pylons beautifully transmitting the band’s music, celebrating its amplified energy and its simultaneous old fashioned-ness, its allegiance to their traditional Scottish roots. Frightened Rabbit embody Celtic indie rock at its best, slowly building into anthemic guitar riffs layered with hauntingly honest lyrics.

It is these lyrics that really make Frightened Rabbit a heart-in-mouth kind of band. Hutchinson (also the songwriter) articulates himself through unusual, symbolic, breathtakingly frank depictions of loneliness and anguish. Occasionally some of this intensity is lost in the live performance – surprisingly for a nominally indie rock gig, it was the acoustic songs that had the rawest power. Every word of pain was agonisingly audible. The intricate finger-picking of ‘Poke’, with Hutchinson’s resonant voice intoning wistful ‘oohs’ between verses of exquisite desolation, made me cry (without any poking at my iris…)

But the coarser full-band songs had their own potency, despite a few moments when enthusiastic guitar riffs overwhelmed the finer complexities of lyrical beauty. This was a forceful, crisp and lucid gig, truly worthy of a band now deservedly selling out venues off the back of their first release on a major label with their fourth album, Pedestrian Verse. Tracks from this record were vigorous and robust, but I still think the visceral ache of their second, The Midnight Organ Fight, remains Frightened Rabbit’s best work. It clinches the longed-for condition of an indie rock band – that blurry curtain-opening moment of emotional nakedness when all the horrors of the drunken night before hit you square in the stomach, combined with the ability to face that moment with a musical dignity that makes it all worthwhile.

There was, perhaps inevitably, some of that simple, instinctive emotion missing from the live show. Pedestrian Verse as an album has more of a balance between the brutally personal and the universally contemplative – similarly, the band seem to have a more detached live presence than when I saw them at 2000 Trees festival two years ago. But with that detachment comes musical tightness and an overall coherent eloquence to the set. There is nothing humdrum or prosaic about Frightened Rabbit’s foray into the ‘pedestrian’. Quite the contrary: they have a sinewy power and subtle originality that is thoroughly deserving of the new disciples they will acquire from this landmark tour. The very fact that they deal in ‘not heroic acts of man’ is what paradoxically makes them great – not heroic perhaps, but better for that: discerning, elemental and refreshingly emotionally honest.

Follow me on twitter @BetweentheReeds

Book launch: protecting the primates at Barbican's conservatory

King Bruno by Paul Glynn

Barbican Conservatory, Wednesday 6^th February

In aid of the Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary, Sierra Leone

Walking into the Barbican’s conservatory, atmospherically lit to illuminate palm tree fronds and enliven birds of paradise, I could almost convince myself I was in Sierra Leone’s heady, breathing forests, a chimpanzee watching me from the camouflaging shadows. If you’ve been to the conservatory in the daytime, you’ll know that the plants don’t quite succeed in disguising the building’s brutalist concrete architecture – the place is an uncomfortable juxtaposition of organic oasis and urban asceticism. But at night, the ugly linear austerity recedes and the flora flourishes.

A perfect setting, then, for an evening celebrating the work of Sierra Leone’s Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary, founded twenty years ago by the then-accountant Bala Amarasekaran. Bala’s adoption of one orphaned chimpanzee lead inexorably to his rescuing myriad more and working tirelessly against the chimpanzee pet and meat trades. King Bruno is Paul Glynn's gentle, honest account of that first adopted chimp. Through Bruno’s eyes, we witness his happy but conflicted life with Bala, his endurance through the terrors of the Sierra Leonean civil war and his flight from the sanctuary into the wild (which has now become the potent stuff of local legend).

A particularly brilliant passage was read at the launch by Aminatta Forna, one of Sierra Leone’s most celebrated writers (her exquisite novel The Memory of Love is an intricate, elegiac lament on the catastrophic trauma wreaked in her country by the civil war). Forna's astute reading brought out all the elements of humour, bemusement and poignancy in the young Bruno’s accidental poo on Bala’s carpet:

He wanted to be human, clean and dainty. And so, when he turned around one day and saw the neat, perfect poo he had left on the carpet, Bruno grunted anxiously.

In the forest, no-one would have minded. In the forest, you went to the toilet anywhere, as long as it wasn’t in your own nest. You could even pick your poo up and throw it around.

Bruno had lived in Bala and Sharmila’s house for nearly a year now, and he had never once seen Bala throw his own poo around. […] Bruno fidgeted. He had to do something about it before Bala returned home. Then he remembered. Upstairs, in a small room, stood a bowl with a puddle of water and a roll of paper beside it. He panted in excitement, dashed up the stairs and grabbed the paper. […]

It was harder than it looked. The roll of toilet paper was big and Bruno’s hands were small. When he wiped at his poo, it just seemed to spread everywhere. But in the end it was gone. The carpet was brown and sticky and piles of brown paper lay everywhere. Bruno clapped and jumped up and down. Bala would be happy.

Bala wasn’t happy.

The book is written for children but it holds just as much appeal for adults - I was captivated by its subtle, elegant, wonderfully humane tone that reminds us just how similar chimps and people really are. Bruno’s view of the world is at once faithfully animalistic and engagingly anthropomorphic – the narrative naturally elicits our empathy but simultaneously divorces us from our blinkered human outlook, reminding us just how contrary our baffling species must seem. This is a hugely important book for raising our awareness of the plight of these animals, with an authentic, sincere appeal to the heart that is more effective than any list of facts about the threats to chimpanzee populations (which are horrifying). King Bruno brings to life a chimpanzee whose voice is as unique and believable as the horse narrating Michael Morpurgo's War Horse. We can only hope Handspring Puppet Company pick it up, marvel at the writing and the beautiful illustrations (also done by the author) and turn it into their next theatrical masterpiece.

Follow me on twitter @BetweentheReeds

Post script:

Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary’s work has now extended beyond its own boundaries, and the High Commissioner to Sierra Leone announced at the launch that, thanks to Bala’s indefatigable efforts, the forests around Tacugama are to become protected National Park. So hopefully Tacugama will soon be able to release more chimps to join their King Bruno in the knowledge that the wild is a safe place for them to thrive. And in the meantime, thank god that there are self-sacrificing souls like Bala among our truly baffling species.

For more information about Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary, see here.
Also, there's a great little Q&A with author Paul Glynn here.