In a wildcard addition to our ‘classics reinvented’ series we visit the Mill Co Project in N1, where an alt-drag homage to 80s supersoap Dallas is playing until Sunday.

I have to declare an interest in reimaginings of the 80s Ewing saga, ever since appearing in a school production that shunned the traditional nativity play in favour of a Dallas-set retelling of Noah and his Ark. So it was with great anticipation I made my first visit to the Mill Co Project, in De Beauvoir Town, N1. Closer - in every way - to Dalston Kingsland than Dallas, Texas, this venue, a new creative social enterprise has nevertheless attracted big-hitting partners such as the Royal Court and the Barbican.

Stark Dallas Reloaded is a “Texas-sized glamour drama” created by self-styled tranny superstar Jonny Woo and bearded lady Timberlina, who also play warring Mrs Ewings while David Mills fills JR’s boots with aplomb.

Downing more liquor than you can hide under a ten gallon hat, Jonny Woo as the dipsomaniac Sue Ellen battles it out with Timberlina’s disingenuously wholesome Pam to become the pre-eminent Mrs Ewing. One clad in an armour of metallic blousons, the other in day-glo bodystockings, both come armed with swivel-eyed death stares. The wigs get wilder, the outfits gradually more dishevelled as the characters totter towards their booze-addled climax.

Part Southfork BBQ, part barn dance, part drag-fabulous anarchy, on the surface it appears a chaotically homespun production where on the surface nothing appears slicker than Sue Ellen’s lip gloss. But this is a well-observed pastiche, down to its authentic disregard for credible plotlines – the original being hard to out-do with its year-long dream sequences that stretched credulity to the Mexican border. For all its 14 long-running seasons and tales of Machiavellian millionaires, Dallas is revealed as a simple tale, spun – hilariously and repeatedly - around a dysfunctional family and fuelled by sexual frustration, the whisky tumbler and the telephonic non sequitur.

Seated on hay bales and tucking into beer and Big Apple hotdogs, the enthusiastic audience (comprising fans of Woo and co as much as of Dallas) enjoyed the show. As did the cast who occasionally could barely supress their giggling - in a candid acknowledgement at the absurdity of it all that was entirely lacking from the original TV cast’s performance.

Like all great and glorious parodies, you’ll come away with a host of new catchphrases and, if not an oil baron, at least perhaps a check-shirted dance partner from the post-show hoedown hosted by Rednecks DJ Hey Baylen.

STARK DALLAS RELOADED is at The Mill Co Project in Haggerston, N1, until Saturday 17^th June.

Posted by Mark

“Inside all of us there is an animal… and a human. Tonight we will dance between the two”

London Wonderground lets you step effortlessly out of the travails of city life into a fantastical festival environment and Circa’s Beyond brings immense release. Not quite the surreal, curious exploration of beastliness and animal instinct that I was led to expect, Beyond delivers on other levels: the originality, astronomical physical bravado and charm of the performers is all human and that is all good with me.

Though the whole production was far more benign than I wanted it to be, the intelligent balance between the jaw-dropping beauty of some of the aerial work and the cartoonish lunacy of the clowning (which comes with oversized bunny heads and bear suits) made for a delicate and playful show. Mood shifts seamlessly from an angst ridden ribbons session set to Rage Against The Machine’s Killing In The Name Of, through to melancholy humour of a performer attempting to grapple with climbing a Chinese poll whilst fully suited up as a fluffy brown bear.

Hats firmly off to Rowan Heydon-White, who quite literally carries the show, inverting gender expectations by doing much of the base work. Oscillating between unparalleled elegance and self-deprecating humour, her seemingly super human strength is coupled with an infectiously playful onstage persona. Ultimately it is her wit and sexuality that make the audience putty in her hands – her appeal exemplified in a hilarious scene where she squeezes herself through a tennis racket, impeded by her own boobs! 

Posted by Kate.

Image © Tristram Kenton.

Our quest for theatrical experiences that reinvent the genre makes a surprise detour into the West End, in hot pursuit of Stephen Sondheim’s musical Merrily We Roll Along as it transfers from the Menier Chocolate Factory to the Harold Pinter Theatre prior to a national tour.

 In the broad church of musical theatre, Sondheim occupies a niche all of his own. Invoke his name and it will be greeted with cultish, shiny-eyed reverie in some quarters, a wincing nails-on-a-blackboard grimace in others. As a recent convert, I understand what it might be that leaves some people cold. Perhaps it’s the notorious lack of easily hummable tunes that make him difficult to sing along to in the car, and even harder to listen to. Sondheim certainly makes you work harder than most, but make the effort to stick with the highly complex music, and to keep up with the scintillatingly quicksmart lyrics and he will repay you tenfold when the tumbling, clashing dissonances resolve themselves into sublime heart-rending elegies or show-stopping comedy.

With its reverse narrative, the plot revolves – backwards – around Franklin Shepard (in a mesmerising performance by Mark Umbers) and his two old (but getting younger scene-by-scene) friends Mary and Charley (superb Jenna Russell and Damian Humbley). We follow the downs and ups of their relationships over the preceding twenty years, all the way back to the starlit New York rooftop where, as student writers, they first met and made their pact to reach for the moon.

The dilemma with reverse narrative is whether to cast older actors who are the right age for the beginning of the show, and end up playing younger than themselves, or vice versa. There are inherent advantages and disadvantages to each - Friedman opts for the former which is perhaps easier on the audience than starting from the outset with precocious young actors playing far above their own age (as in the case of the doomed Broadway original) in a piece about choices that backfire and careers that career off course and the irony of pining for a past that, maybe, never was.

Image © Tristram Kenton.

Designer Soutra Gimour delivers a visually ravishing aesthetic throughout, finding its best expression in The Blob, a high-camp number about the New York in-crowd in a brilliantly cartoonish cocktail party set in 1962 which references - and equals - a number of classic ingénus-amongst-the-sophisticates scenes.

 Perhaps the polish of the production puts a gloss on the untidy ragged edges of the friendships which form the core of the of the piece, and while the pain of Mary’s unrequited love for Frank is subtly conveyed, Charley’s frustration with his writing partner’s working practices are given full comedic expression in a live television interview – five pivotal minutes of madness that bring the house down, as well as their partnership.

 Darker, scrappier raw emotion is better served up by the supporting cast. I defy anyone not to be floored by Clare Foster’s bitter rendition of Not A Day Goes By outside the courtroom where first wife Beth’s marriage to Frank ends, a song which we (later) see her (previously) singing optimistically on her wedding day. A neat reminder that the same thing that attracts you to someone at the very beginning of a relationship could be the thing that drives you apart in the end? One truly shocking moment comes in the first scene - thanks to Josefina Gabrielle channelling a young Priscilla Presley to play queen bitch and Frank’s second wife, Gussie Carnegie.

 Anger, bitterness and the fear of being left behind are never far below the shiny surface of the American dream that Frank – and many a cheesier musical - so ruthlessly pursues. Sondheim’s reputation as musicals marmite may be put under threat by this outstanding production of Merrily We Roll Along.

 Posted by Mark.

In her second guest post for Imaginadium, Hannah Young gives us her impressions of two contemporary freak shows.

This summer, the freak show is back. And just as the freak shows of the late 1800′s depended on the skill of the showman to draw in the punters, so this summer’s shows rely on the skill of the curator to render them even greater than the sum of their undoubtably un-ordinary parts.

At Beastly Hall (Hall Place, Bexley, until 1st September), Hirst’s Schizophrenogenesis sets the scene: Beastly Hall takes death and decay and inverts it, plays with it, brings it full circle.

Tessa Farmer’s A Wounded Herring Gull is a taxidermy gull being attacked and brought down by a tiny skeletal army of insect-like fairies brandishing hedgehog quills and bones – a dead bird, brought back to life, and in the process again of losing life at the hands of the already-undead, wielding products of the dead.

Nina Saunders, Fox with Issues. Photo © Bexley Heritage Trust/A.Purkiss

Nina Saunders’ Fox With Issues is a taxidermy fox, with furniture legs, reclining on a therapist’s couch, pouring forth his problems – a dead fox, brought back to vibrant physical life, given the power of emotion and speech, even, but emotionally damaged, mentally unstable. 

Carina Weidle’s Olympic Chickens goes even further – not just dead, but plucked and oven-ready, they pole-vault, dive, lift weights; the most obviously, palpably dead of all the creatures in the exhibition, but the most vital and visceral, at the pinnacle of sporting prowess, self-basting Olympians.

Curiosity: Art and the Pleasures of Knowing (Turner Contemporary, Margate until 15th September) is the thinking man’s freak show. Curated by Brian Dillon, UK editor of Cabinet Magazine, it takes as its theme the 17th century “wunderkammer”, bringing together objects which have never been exhibited alongside each other before.

It is rooted very firmly in curiosity itself, that slightly nefarious, manifestly human impulse to inquire into things which really are outside of our legitimate concern. Curiosity: we all know what it did to the cat.

It pays tribute to its location, above Margate’s beach, with many aquatic references, the most spectacular being a staggeringly beautiful series of glass models of sea creatures, made in the 1890′s. At the epicentre – the hulking mass with a gravitational pull all of its own - is the famously overstuffed Horniman Walrus – larger in death than in life thanks to being stuffed by taxidermists who had never seen a live specimen and stuffed all the folds and creases out of him (top image).

There are Angolan fertility dolls, juxtaposed against the (creepy) series of clandestine photos of women and girls taken with a homemade camera; there are photographs of miniature crime scenes, each with its own corpse, created by Frances Glessner Lee, forensic scientist; the forensic theme then referenced in real human hairs, split along their length, used to create a series of miniature pictures.

Examine too hard the relentless connections offered up and you make yourself dizzy.

There is punctuation though, to both exhibitions. Thomas Gründfeld is the only “artist” with creations in both, and it’s no co-incidence that, in both cases, they are pieces from his “misfits” series. Beastly Hall ends with three of them; Curiosity begins with one and ends with one.

And what are the misfits? They are modern mythical beasts, taxidermy splices of two animals to make a new species. They are the re-creation of the already created, a double-take curation of exhibit plus artist, greater than the sum of their parts, a visual representation of the art of the curator. What could be more mis-fitting?

It is hard to write about my impressions of an event that insists on secrecy in its very name – don’t worry you will find no spoilers of Secret Cinema’s latest offering here!

In a previous post on Ring at BAC we started thinking about what it means to be immersed. Secret Cinema has created a remarkable phenomenon with their astronomical ticket prices promising to transport you hook, line and sinker into the world of the film they are showing. Their last show saw punters paying top dollar to be put behind bars for The Shawskank Redemption.

For me there seemed a slight desperation in the faces of those attending; an air of office workers intent at letting their hair down and escaping urban monotony, whether it came naturally or not. The sprawling size of the (utterly awe-inspiring) venue means that you have to hunt for your kicks and work hard to immerse yourself. At crunch there is little urgency. Whilst my own adventure was punctuated with moments of hilarity and quirky unexpectedness, the swathes of time spent eking eccentricity out of the actors and looking for the next spectacle, meant no tension, no narrative and thus little escape from the knowledge that I was very much acting a part myself. The part of a cynic trying to dispel my own cynicism perhaps?  For me, everyone was just way too conscious of what they were doing to make for a truly immersive experience. The audience were acting more than the performers.

Posted by Kate.

Rob Drummond’s one man performance is much more than a magic show. It explores notions of free-will, systems of belief and ‘why you get up in the morning’. In an intimate setting the audience questions not only everything they are seeing, but what they want from it. We felt that the performance hinged around a moment when, after one of the slightly cheaper tricks, Drummond asks if we want to know how he did it. After a show of hands for and against, he instructs those who want to remain in the dark to cover their eyes whilst he lays the illusion bare…

Mark and I think about how we responded to this moment as well as our answer to the quandary - KILL, SAVE or LOVE…

Mark: SAVE

For me, the wonder of a magic trick is that the magician appears to have done the impossible. Unless I am going to learn the trick to do it myself, and despite the natural curiosity to know how it’s done, the revelation is usually so mundane and anti-climactic that I’d prefer the illusion to remain intact. The very fact that it looks like they can do it, can be enough. I recently attended a post show discussion about  Ring at the BAC – a show which takes place entirely in the dark while wearing headphones - and I was intrigued by the number of people who had taken their headphones off during the performance. It simply didn’t occur to me, as a willing audience member, to undermine my own experience in this way. All theatre is based on a collective suspension of disbelief, and to try and outwit the production by taking the headphones off seemed the equivalent of sitting with my back to the stage.

Kate: KILL

 I do want to believe in magic. Like Mark when I step into a theatre I fully devote myself to the suspension of belief that the performer demands. Why else would I be there? However there is something about a ‘magic’ show – the intensification and blatant nature of that illusion intrinsic in all theatre – that made my curiosity work against my will. I peeked and felt instantly sad that the spell was broken.  Drummond’s natural charm, the dynamic with his audience member assistant and the complex layering of the piece will haunt me long after I’ve grown bored of trying the figure out how the f**k he worked his Jedi mind tricks! However on stepping into the bar, my friends and I instantly began trying to decipher and dissect the trickery. I’d like focus on the piece itself but couldn’t help trying to rip of the facing to see the whirring cogs.  I question my freewill and I question whether I would have actually chosen ‘KILL’ if I was onstage.

With £12 day seats available for the last remaining performances, you won’t have to kill for a ticket. But will you choose to love, save or kill once you’ve got it?

Sometimes we simply don’t want a performance that transforms our vision of the world… we want fun and lots of it… we want party games!

Miss Behave’s Social Club and Pleasure Aid

Pure unadulterated hilarity is on the cards at this cabaret variety show- gameshow-knees up. Comedy and cabaret rarely come so immersive and with Miss Behave as master of ceremonies you are certain to get caught up in the chaos.

London Wonderground, 1st of June.

Amy Lame’s Unhappy Birthday

Staggering along that fine line between pop fandom and unhinged obsession, this collaboration between Amy Lame and Scottee is part party, part unproarious performance. Interactive and high-energy, expect unmeasured lunacy, pass the parcel. And cake. Get there this week before the party’s over on Saturday.

Now until the 1st of June, Camden People’s Theatre.

Posted By Kate.

Imagine seeing 1927’s The Animals and Children Took to the Streets (above) or Kate Tempest’s Brand New Ancients, in their kernel forms?

For twelve years now, Battersea Arts Centre has been opening the doors on works in progress, or scratch as it has come to be known. Not only is the scratch festival at the heart of the BAC’s audience-centric approach to innovating theatre, but scratch has become a model used internationally. It allows theatre makers to try out their ideas in a supportive environment as well as giving audiences an exhilarating insight into the creative process.

If you’re new to scratch and not sure whose new work you want to see, we’d recommend the Freshly Scratched nights (there are 3 a week until the 8th of June). A whole host of emerging artists will try out their ideas for just ten minutes each - meaning you get to see five performances each night.

Posted by Kate. 

We’ve all had Gatsby fever for months. It seems eons since another film has been so highly anticipated, making the news that Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby may not be so great all the more disappointing. Adapting a novel so dearly loved by so many is a dangerous sport. Walter Salles’ recent rendition of another American classic, On The Road, crashed and burned for similar reasons – summoning the style and spirit of an age but capturing none of the depth and substance of the novel. “It wasn’t as good as the book” seems to be such a common cry, that we thought we’d give filmmakers their dues and highlight some utterly compelling cinematic adaptations.

Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now, masterfully handles its original material: Heart of Darkness. Written by Joseph Conrad in 1899 the novel is set in the colonised Congo as it is torn apart by the white man’s lust for ivory. Coppola’s film explores the pithy concepts at the core of the novel – humanity’s corruption, the philosophy of morality, an aesthetic based on light and dark and the powerfully evoked atmosphere of a world gone mad – without being a slave to the original narrative and characters. Heart of Darkness is reimagined, not replicated, and the new Vietnam-War context (all the more authentic for Coppola’s use of anecdotes from war correspondent Michael Herr’s Dispatches) serves to highlight the timelessness of Heart of Darkness.

Anthony Minghella was lauded for the powerful performances he extracted from his actors and the epic, impressive nature of his feature films. I would also argue that he was the master of getting the most from a book adaptation. Take The Talented Mr Ripley for example. Patricia Highsmith‘s novel is certainly a tight and high suspense thriller, but to my mind the film is something more. The intensely unnerving tale of stolen identity digs deeper into the psychology of the characters, revealing something dark and unpleasant about human nature, that the book skims over. Cold Mountain and The English Patient are other outstanding examples of relatively dry prose, used to create nuanced and dramatic cinema.

For sheer faithfulness to an author’s vision, we have to tip our cap to Granada’s serialised adaptation of Brideshead Revisited. There is nothing more irritating than a director putting words into your favourite character’s mouth, for reasons you find inexplicable. Granada had the sense (and time, the luxury of a television series being 659 mins long) to stick with Evelyn Waugh’s lyrical use of language for the dialogue, as well as the first person narration, which we hear intoned by Jeremy Iron’s pitch perfect voice. I feel that Waugh himself would have marvelled at the opulent costumes and locations. If you belong to the ‘if it ain’t broke don’t mend it’ school, then I can think of no finer example of an adaptation done well.

We complain when films cut our favourite episodes from novels and Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, thankfully does entirely the opposite of this. He took Annie Proulx’s  64 page short story and created an 134 minute feat of epic cinematography. Proulx was overjoyed on seeing the movie, saying “I may be the first writer in America to have a piece of writing make its way to the screen whole and entire”, as the story’s dialogue and narrative is retained down to a tee. Lee added scenes of the stunning landscape and tender domesticity to expand on our understanding of the freedom the men find on their trips and the complexity of their unhappy marriages. The result feels expansive and weighty – the desolate and tragic ending made all the more poignant for the fact that we have inhabited the characters’ worlds. Lee struck again with The Life Of Pi. I haven’t seen it but am told by many that it is the first example of a 3-D film where the technology felt like more than a gimmick and actually added something to the action and, assumingly, Yann Martel’s story.

Adapting a novel is a delicate challenge that directors accept at their own peril. This list proves that in the hands of some, cinema is thoroughly capable of reinvigorating literature.

Posted by Kate.

Live theatre and opera screenings are hugely successful in bringing productions to wider audiences, and our initial scepticism was totally overturned by Danny Boyle’s Frankenstein. But this summer the Royal Academy and the British Museum are getting in on the act, taking blockbuster exhibitions about Manet and Pompeii to cinema audiences. In our first look at this new use of the format Stephen Little, author of Isms: Understanding Art, takes a front row seat for a fresh look at Manet.

A long time ago, before the internet existed, I remember a journalist arguing that pornography is a necessary evil for those living in isolated or rural communities who can’t find sex… That journalist had obviously never lived in a rural community. Possibly working on the same principle – that a substitute pleasure is better than no pleasure at all – the Royal Academy of Arts has decided to screen its Manet exhibition in cinemas across the country. It did remind me of how much, and just why, I love Manet, and just how conscious Manet was of the viewer and after visiting the cinema I visited the Royal Academy.

Manet is less well known than Monet, Cezanne and Picasso, who all rated Manet as one of the great painters, and justifiably so. Luckily, I was able to attend a screening at the Phoenix Picture House in Oxford, though for a moment I thought I was trapped in a Paul Auster novel. My ticket said seat D12 but the seat numbering skipped 12 and went straight from D11 to D13. Apparently, 13 is the new 12.

Most of the (older) audience in Oxford had equipped themselves with drinks and, judging by the snoring, some had brought pillows too. I was expecting a virtual tour of the gallery, with close up shots of the paintings, in which the camera would effectively behave like me – but without the inconvenience of other people getting in the way. Instead, we were treated to a rather slow-paced but well-thought out documentary and, unfortunately, the close-up shots of the paintings, when they came, were difficult to focus on from row D.

The documentary did a fantastic job of bringing out the enigmatic quality of the paintings. In The Luncheon, Manet shows a young man leaning against a table laid with items normally found in still life painting, such as a lemon and a knife. (Is the knife perfectly poised on the edge of the table or just about to fall to the floor? You decide.) A bearded man in a hat sits at the table behind the young man, and woman stands in the background.

The Luncheon refuses to tell a clear story about the relationship between the young man in the foreground and the man and woman in the background. Manet was expecting his audience to try to ‘read’ his painting, and turn it into narrative or storytelling, but by creating such cool detachment between the figures he provokes endless questions instead of providing a clear story. It could be that he was simply arranging these figures as though they were elements of still life so there might not be any storytelling going on at all. Coolness and ambiguity characterise the very worthwhile pleasure that Manet’s painting offers, all the more noticeable because the Phoenix cinema was horribly over-heated.

I was relieved to get outside – and I was left with a few questions about the motive for screening the exhibition. Obviously, the RA wants to make some cash and promote its brand to a younger audience, all of which are reasonable motives for a gallery that receives no public funding. However, documentaries like this sit better on television (and arguably ought to be on television, given the BBC’s remit of public service and education) if for no other reason than it’s possible to open a window.

Screening documentaries about art is a great way to increase our understanding, but if you really love art, nothing replaces seeing it with your own eyes rather than through a camera lens. Art and sex really are better enjoyed in the flesh…

Hannah Young was a bona fide culture vulture and then something happened. She had children. She will be writing for us, as she attempts to rediscover her ‘cultural mojo’. For more of her highly considered and often side splittingly funny writing head to her new blog. In her first post for us she reflects on what it is that draws her to theatre and performance….

Catharis, Jose Clemente Orozco, 1934.

Theatre. Done well, it’s intoxicating, isn’t it? 

I go to the theatre to get high.

Or, as Aristotle (by way of Professor L J Potts) said, “by means of pity and fear, effectuating its purgation of these emotions” I’m talking about the catharsis of theatre. The trouble is, ever since Aristotle used the word “catharsis”, scholars have been arguing about what he meant. He was sensible enough not to have offered a definition.

For me, it goes much further than pity and fear. And - conversely - much less far than purgation. There’s a special bargain entered into between actors and audience in the theatre. There’s an unspoken complicity between the two. The audience gains entry to this special “club”, becomes a “member” of the audience, by agreeing to suspend disbelief, ignore confined space, the passage of “real” time, the finite number of players. In exchange, the actors lead their members in a trance-like state, captive, through the experience of their play. Everyone is in it together.  And, moreover, it’s a one shot, one take, slice of life, no edit, no “cut” and “take two”, no post-production, no painting over. For something so deliberately and obviously unreal, this is as real as real gets.  And the actors have their reward: as actor and director Michael Paloma puts it “the smell of the greasepaint, the roar of the crowd - nothing else in life even comes close”. One might add, in “real” life.

For, in the end, it’s all about emotion. Not just pity and fear, but ALL emotion. In its most juvenile form, we boo the baddies and cheer the goodies at the Christmas panto. Complicit with other members of the audience, we allow ourselves to feel things that no sentient being would allow themselves to feel outside of this special “bargain”. The rave reviews for The Book Of Mormon alone demonstrate that, but no-one really thinks female genital mutilation is funny. I haven’t seen it, but I admit I cried with laughter at “We’re all a little bit racist, sometimes” in Avenue Q. Shock engenders laughter as often as it does tears, emotions become blurred. We cry with laughter, or laugh until we cry; we laugh through our tears, a fundamental human reaction, an uncontrollable reflex, and contagious, the “members” complicit with one another in their reactions. We talk of black humour, gallows humour, tragi-comedy, we have a “good” cry. We allow ourselves to be disorientated, dispossessed of our own reality, transported out of the everyday.

But those feelings are not purged.  If anything, they are intensified until they reach critical mass, then given an outlet. Catharsis, in Greek, can also mean “purification”. New ways to experience old feelings. But in a rarefied, purified, elevated state, leading to an emotional climax, a release of emotional tension, as after an overwhelming experience that refreshes, revitalises and restores the spirit.

And who hasn’t left the theatre, that tension, that bond, suddenly broken by curtain fall and lights up, to go blinking into the outside world, suddenly disoriented and debased by crowds of shoppers, by drinkers lurking outside pubs, by the very prosaic “worldliness” of everyone outside, and stumbled among them feeling still other-worldly and elevated above them?

I go to the theatre to get high?

No.

I go to the theatre to get high-er.

Little fascinates me more than theories of photography: its deceptiveness as documentation, its complexity as an art form and its monumental effect on the way we think and what we think we know. This year’s Deutsche Borse Prize shortlist represents both the profound and the playful power of contemporary photography and is subsequently my favourite exhibition of the year so far. Here are my impressions of the shortlist:

Christina De Middel’s self published Afronauts (already out of print and selling for big bucks on the collectors market) is a charming and humorous nod to photography’s ability to rewrite and warp the past, inflecting history with a ostentatiously subjective twist. It ‘documents’ a newly independent Zambia’s botched space programme mixing the artist’s invented mythology with doctored documents and letters. It is witty, silly and colourful and I defy you not to love it!

Set against the digital shenanigans and self-conscious twenty first century irony of the other work on display, it is a marvel that Chris Killip’s What Happened – Great Britain 1970-1990retains its freshness and originality. The series of black and white narratives of downtrodden, ‘de-industrialised’ communities are not only immaculately and imaginatively composed but also highly intimate and almost poetic – the word honest seems particularly apt. These are pictures with the power to elucidate and humanise history, rather than f**k with our perception and confuse reality. I have to agree with Adrian Searle’s dry remark – “It’s 30 years since he took these photographs, and Killip probably doesn’t need a prize… He should win because his work is still valuable. Much of the other work here won’t be, in 30 years’ time.”

Mishka Henner’s No Man’s Land is a bleak and unnerving expression of the horror of our image saturated planet where surveillance and voyeurism are the norm. Sourcing the location of roadside sex workers from seedy internet forums, Henner then trawled Google Maps for the images of scantily clad girls on dirt tracks and under underpasses that we see exhibited. Whilst I appreciate the thinking behind this series, its visual representation of a social problem left me more or less cold. Paolo Patrizi’s Migrant Sex Workers series on the same topic packs far harder a punch. Perhaps this is the point Henner is driving at? We are all desensitised visual consumers in the digital age.

War Primer 2 is Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanaran’s riff on Bertold Brecht’s 1955 photo essay of the same name. Conceptually brilliant and simply executed, they have superimposed Google Search images of recent atrocity over original copies of the work, leaving Brecht’s prophetic verses to speak about new violence. The original was an exploration of Brecht’s distrust of photography as a tool for reporting on conflict and this new work continues that questioning of all that is latent within an image. The effect is startlingly original and visually ambiguous. The book is available to download for free here.

The judging panel will be selecting the winner of the £30,000 prize on the 10th of June and the exhibition at The Photographers Gallery runs up to the 30th with Artist Talks from all the shortlisted artists.

Posted by Kate.

Popular culture is obsessed with youth and beauty and as such society can tend to relegate the undignified processes of getting old to a taboo topic. When it comes to performance, as Anne in What Happens In Winter questions - who wants to see ‘ageing flesh’ exhibiting onstage? We reflect on three incredibly moving, bold and flamboyant acts that explore what it means to be a performer past your prime.

Ivo Dimchev’s Lili Handel

Bulgarian drag, performance artist Ivo Dimchev’s persona Lili is an aging diva, loathe to admit that her body no longer has the allure to hold her audience, resorting to ever more and more extreme methods of holding our attention (including drawing a vial of his/her own blood and auctioning it to the crowd!) The performance is horrifyingly captivating, by turns repulsive and obscene and at times heartrendingly beautiful. Throughout we feel great empathy for this beast-like speechless, operatic character, so degraded by corporeality, at times totally vulnerable and at others seemingly powerful. Trapped by physicality and the commodification of the body, the performer signals the tragedy of a society which will not let us grow old with grace.

Dimchev is currently touring Europe but we urge you to make a space in your diary to see Lili Handel in October at Dance Umbrella.

Upswing’s What Happens The In Winter:

What Happens In The Winter is the autobiographical recollections of two ‘older’ female performers - Anne who wants ‘Dancer’ inscribed on her grave stone and Lindsey the aerialist who wonders whether she is too old to continue “making a prat of (herself) onstage”. Recollections of their lives and loves are intermingled with performance in their retrospective forms -we understand how their art is inextricably linked to their lives . The melancholy realisation that they will not be able to continue doing what they love forever, is tempered by the sweetness of memories of richly lived lives. The dialogue and relationship between the two women felt somewhat stilted, forced and incohesive.  This perhaps perfectly illustrates the point of the piece - they are losing the ability to express themselves through their art and words are not enough.

Upswing are now touring two outdoor shows - Red Shoes and Loved Up.

Dickie Beau’s Blackouts: Twilight of the Idols

BLACKOUTS: Twilight of the Idols is a huge personal achievement for  cabaret performer Dickie Beau who spent years tracking down and gaining access to the last recorded interview with Marilyn Monroe. Beau - decked out in the garb of his idols Monroe and Judy Garland - mimes along to the recorded voices of these lost icons of Hollywood bringing new life to personas enshrined in the public consciousness. The effect is exceedingly haunting in a way that needs to be seen to be believed. We see these women who are normally so synonymous with glamour and fame hiding behind their stage personas, vulnerable and exposed. We get the sense that the identities behind these voices are being dissected for our entertainment. Utterly original, Blackout’s is as unsettling as it is funny.

You can catch Dickie Beau at the last of Forest Fringe until Saturday at The Gate Theatre.

Posted by Kate.

Franco Milazzo - founding editor of This Is Cabaret - told us about his March cabaret highlights and it went down a storm. Here are his picks of the naughtiest, rudest cabaret shows in the capital during the month of May…

Better than the real thing, Time Out Live’s Alternative Eurovision  touches down for the fourth year on May 17th. With one of the finest lineups of adult musical comedy of the year, each act will take to the London Wonderground stage and sing for the audience’s votes. Last year saw Des O’Connor represent Spain with his ditty on the Dirty Sanchez (the sex move, not the TV show) before East End Cabaret walked off after their rendition of Danger Wank. 

Sisters are renowned for doing it for themselves and Mzz Kimberley and Son Of A Tutu are no exception here. Both are exceptional examples of modern drag – Son Of A Tutu won Drag Idol 2011 and Kimberley starred in the Royal Vauxhall Tavern’s 2012 panto. On three evenings in May, the pair will joined at the RVT by a special guest as they explore the bonds and burdens of sisterhood. 

Ventriloquism schmiloquism: try saying that without moving your lips. Nina Conti and a cast of the rudest puppets around will be at the Soho Theatre from 6-25 May in her latest show Dolly Mixtures. This is not one for the kids or those with something stuck up their backside (other than Nina’s hand, naturally).

Posted by Kate.