Africa
The Silk Road, BBC FourMonday, 02 May 2016
Terracotta warriors, Bactrian two-humped camels, Heavenly Horses, Buddhist caves, sand dunes, the world’s first printed book, a silk factory and temples galore including one that was the great mosque in Xi’an, were but some of the ingredients in a... Read more... |
BalletBoyz, Life, Sadler's WellsFriday, 22 April 2016
Hearing that both Javier de Frutos and rabbit heads appear in the new BalletBoyz bill might give you pause. A choreographer so unafraid of graphic content that he started his career with naked one-man shows, and later made a piece about the Pope so... Read more... |
Eye in the SkyWednesday, 13 April 2016
Colonel Powell (Helen Mirren) has a problem: she suspects that a British woman who converted to Islam and tops the international terrorism hit list is holed up in a house in a suburb of Nairob controlled by Al-Shabaab. Can her local agent (Barkhad... Read more... |
Les Blancs, National TheatreFriday, 01 April 2016
Lorraine Hansberry’s career as a playwright proved tragically short. A Raisin in the Sun is by some distance her best-known work, a key piece about the African American post-war experience. But she thought Les Blancs (The Whites) was potentially her... Read more... |
The police stopped 'To be or not to be' and asked to see our permitsSaturday, 30 January 2016
Za’atari set a precedent. Our performance in the Syrian refugee camp in Jordan became a template for how to perform Hamlet in every nation in the world – in a world that rendered travel to Syria, Yemen, Libya and Central African Republic out of the... Read more... |
Tony Allen and Jimi Tenor, Café OTOSaturday, 23 January 2016
Questions of what is authentic and what is retro get more complicated the more the information economy matures. Music from decades past that only tens or hundreds of people heard at the time it was made becomes readily available, gets sampled by new... Read more... |
The Rolling Stone, Orange Tree TheatreThursday, 21 January 2016
I’m still pondering the title of Chris Urch’s new play. On the surface it’s clear enough: The Rolling Stone is a weekly newspaper in Uganda that has been notorious for pursuing that country’s anti-gay agenda. In particular, at the beginning of the... Read more... |
theartsdesk Radio Show: Bowie TributeSaturday, 16 January 2016
That purveyor of everything from crazy cosmic jive and plastic soul to epic disco and elegant Berlin ambient gloom made a hell of an exit last week. His last release, his “parting gift” Blackstar, was a dazzling curtain bow unlike any other. He... Read more... |
DVD: The GunmanTuesday, 29 December 2015
The first face seen in The Gunman belongs to Sky News presenter Dermot Murnaghan. In a seemingly real broadcast, he says “the Democratic Republic of Congo is the scene of the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. The conflict is fuelled by the... Read more... |
CD: Senegal 70Tuesday, 24 November 2015
There was a magic moment in West Africa when, shortly after independence, in countries like Mali, Guinea and Senegal, the new leaders financed and encouraged new dance bands – telling them to dig deep into their own traditions and no longer feel... Read more... |
theartsdesk Radio Show 11Saturday, 07 November 2015
Peter Culshaw’s latest global round-up of new music and reissues features the usual spendidly earbending eclectic selection. There’s 1960s Indian lounge, 1970s Senegalese music unearthed by the ever-adventurous Analog Africa label, Arabic Jazz and a... Read more... |
DVD: Black GirlTuesday, 13 October 2015
Ousmane Sembene is one of the pioneers of African cinema. Black Girl, the film that brought him international renown, has been beautifully restored for this DVD release, so that it looks as sparkling as when it was released in 1966.The strength of... Read more... |
