Skip to main content

Nocturne review – a promenade through London's night song

Deptford, London
This tour of the capital’s streets at nightfall catches some beautiful unorchestrated moments from other people’s lives

Tethered together with a rope, we are taking a night-time guided tour of Deptford, south-east London. We start in the library, drop our bags and leave our phones behind. The landscape outside makes a beautiful stage, with boat under brick under crane under star. The leash between us garners some unusual looks, but Krista Burāne and Andy Field’s quiet promenade performance is about seeing, not being seen.

Running for three hours as the sun melts away, Nocturne is slow, at first gloriously so. The group stops to observe a swarm of insects, a fox, a blackbird bobbing across a fence. Animals and humans sharpen under the soft scrutiny Nocturne encourages. Unorchestrated moments drop us in on people’s daily lives: someone practising the piano; friends dancing behind half-drawn curtains; a boy playing basketball. Other than our guides, this piece contains no actors or stooges. The city simply performs its night song. We walk away from the boy but turn back to look. He scores.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2tEj900
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One giant leap: meet the new generation of male ballet stars

Beauty, strength and bags of energy: BBC Four’s Men at the Barre documentary gets up close and personal with the Royal Ballet dancers on the rise ‘It’s a golden era of male ballet dancers.” So says Emma Cahusac, the commissioning editor behind a new documentary, Men at the Barre, part of BBC Four’s dance season. It’s not just hyperbole. The young men rising up at the Royal Ballet are some of the most exciting in dance right now: principals Matthew Ball and Marcelino Sambé, first soloists Cesar Corrales and William Bracewell, and first artist Joseph Sissens all feature in Men at the Barre. With the majority of them British or UK-trained, it’s a giant leap from the grumblings of a decade ago about the lack of local dancers making it to the top. I spoke to Ball, Corrales and Sambé by phone, all staying resolutely positive during this enforced break from their intensive dancing lives, but all desperate to get back to work with colleagues they’re certain are something special. “I see so m...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dita Von Teese: ‘Even when I was a bondage model, I had big-time boundaries’

As the star dives into a giant glass of fizz for her first online extravaganza, she talks about this new golden age for burlesque, why the French Strictly gives her costume problems – and how #MeToo has changed her Dita Von Teese is looking divine. Her lips are that signature red, she’s wearing 1950s cat eye glasses, and her black hair falls in a thick wave across a Snow White skin – and all this on the unglamorous stage of a glitchy Zoom call. Only knowing Von Teese from her femme fatale image, her teasingly aloof burlesque performances, and her time in the tabloids as former wife of goth rocker Marilyn Manson , you might expect an icy demeanour, an impermeable mystique. So it’s surprising to discover quite how normal she is: chatty, self-deprecating, not very vampish. It’s easy to see traces of Heather Sweet, the “super shy” girl from small-town Michigan who transformed into Von Teese. The reason for our conversation is a new film, Night of the Teese, made with director Quinn Wils...
Post a Comment
Read more