Glasgow Green Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art April 20th-May 7th 5 stars If you’re feeling down in the dumps, there are few things more rejuvenating than jumping up and down like an idiot for a few minutes. If you can do so without bursting out laughing like an even bigger loon, chances are you’re dead. As a child of the Rave age, Jeremy Deller is in a perfect position to tap into such variations on a natural high, repetitive beats and all. By reimagining Stonehenge as a bouncy castle type structure that will later be inflated in London during the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, Deller is also making an explicitly political point, both about the right to assemble and how religious and artistic totems have become untouchable. With the real Stonehenge once a Mecca of the free festival movement and now cordoned off to all but the hardiest of revellers, to witness big daft kids of all ages hurling themselves around and about the structures with touchy-feely abandon on a sunny Sunday afternoon is a subversive delight. Taking your shoes off and joining in is even better in a work that might well be descended from theatre director Joan Littlewood’s original idea to create a fun palace on London’s South Bank where Deller’s magnificent retrospective, ‘Joy in People’, is currently in residence at the Hayward Gallery. Just as rave culture democratised the dance-floor, Sacrilege is a spectacle of people power in action that has the mass appeal of Billy Smart’s Circus and the political and conceptual sophistication of Bakunin. Ultimately, Deller is both enabling and revelling in the creative power of play, and that, rather than fear or stifle that that power as authoritarian regimes tend to do, it should be celebrated in excelsis. If such a living monument was in permanent residence, similarly-minded children of the stones in the park could be jumping for joy forevermore. The List magazine, April 2012 ends
Edinburgh Playhouse Five stars A big National Coal Board sign looms large at the opening of Lee Hall and Elton John's decade-old musical stage version of Hall and director Stephen Daldry's hit turn of the century film. In a tale of one little boy's liberation as a dancer against the backdrop of the 1980s miners strike, however, the Durham Miners banner and the 'Save Our Community' sash held aloft matter more. It is this call to arms that forms the heart of Daldry's production, as Billy becomes a potty-mouthed beacon of hope in a situation where picket line, thin blue line and chorus line rub uneasily up against each other. Given such a context, there is bound to be some pretty grown-up stuff going on here, be it the institutionalised homophobia in Billy's village, the class war going on within it, or Billy's grieving for his dead mother that drives his every move. And, as so magnificently choreographed by Peter Darling, what moves they are. Watch...
Comments