Dundee Contemporary Arts until August 26th 2012 4 stars With a title taken from David Foster Wallace’s footnote-friendly novel, going round in circles is the preserve of all three artists in DCA’s fun-packed summer special of a show. Where the videos of Brazilian interventionist Cinthia Marcelle subvert noisy city-scapes with meticulously orchestrated real-time arrangements, Rob Pruitt is all high-class paddling pools, monster-size cookies and down-time denim. London-born William Mackrell continues the party theme with birthday cake-sized illuminations that may burn fast, but which leave a lunar-etched after-glow to bask in. There’s fire from the off via Marcelle’s video piece,’ Confronto’, setting out its store on a monitor that wilfully obstructs the gallery entrance. Onscreen, a group of fire jugglers stop the traffic, increasing in number as their routine moves from red-light entertainment to green-light environmental alchemy. Marcelle’s similarly-inclined ‘Volta ae Mondo (Round the World)’ goes even further, as increasing numbers of white vans circumnavigate a roundabout ad nauseum. Such an elaborately choreographed urban merry-go-round resembles the staging of a carefully planned heist; The Brazilian Job, if you will. Mackrell too explores the performative, the playful and the political, from ‘90 Minutes’, in which a concrete football sits at the centre of the gallery waiting for kick-off, to the glorious ‘1000 Candles’, in which 1000 tea candles are captured as a photograph, on film and, health-and-safety permitting, from flame-on mode to last-gasp flickers. Onscreen especially, the effect is of some orbiting planet moving from dawn to dusk. If Pruitt’s ‘Evian Fountain’ is a very expensive splash-about, his oversize and indisputably toothsome biscuits in’ Pop-Pop’s Chocolate-Chip Cookie’s suggests Roald Dahl reconfiguring Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in Lilliput. Pruitt’s two takes on ‘Esprit de Corps’, meanwhile, fills classic blue jeans with concrete and cotton, then sews them together in a body-melding mirror-image which, as with Marcelle and Mackrell’s work, contorts reality enough to drive it round the bend. The List, July 2012 ends
Myra McFadyen – Actress Born January 12th 1956; died October 18th 2024 Myra McFadyen, who has died aged 68, was an actress who brought a mercurial mix of lightness and depth to her work on stage and screen. Playwright and artistic director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, David Greig, called McFadyen “an utterly transformative, shamanic actor who could change a room and command an audience with a blink”. Citizens’ Theatre artistic director Dominic Hill described McFadyen’s portrayal of Puck in his 2019 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in London as “funny, mischievous and ultimately heartbreaking.” For many, McFadyen will be most recognisable from Mamma Mia!, the smash hit musical based around ABBA songs. McFadyen spent two years on the West End in Phyllida Lloyd’s original 1999 stage production, and was in both film offshoots. Other big screen turns included Rob Roy (1995) and Our Ladies (2019), both directed by Mi...
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