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
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...
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