Coffee-Table Notes

Anke Kempkes was unaware of Robert Anton before she was approached by gallerist Bette Stoler, one of the late American artist’s closest friends in New York. This was despite the fact that the Warsaw-based independent curator and author had spent much of her working life focusing on performance art and experimental theatre in the 1970s and 1980s. This was the time when Anton was creating his unique table-top styled performances using elaborately carved figurines drawn from observations of the street as well as more magical, Felliniesque creations. Once Stoler showed Kempkes Anton’s long-forgotten archive of figurines and drawings, Kempkes became captivated by the artist’s singular vision, which saw him feted by New York bohemian society. His insistence that none of his work should be documented, but should be experienced in the flesh by audiences of no more than eighteen at a time, meant that few records of his creations exist. Neither are there any scripts, with Anton conjuring up

Kolbrun Bjort Sigfusdottir is going through security check at Edinburgh Airport when she’s supposed to be talking about her very personal show, (Can This Be) Home, which she performs in Edinburgh tonight alongside musician Tom Oakes on what was supposed to be the night before the UK left Europe. It turns out the Icelandic theatre director, whose tireless Brite Theatre company is at the forefront of the capital’s grassroots theatre scene, is flying to London to take part in last weekend’s People’s March against Brexit. Whether Sigfusdottir’s experience on the march will be fed into her tellingly named show remains to be seen, but her presence there after living and working in the UK for five years is significant in terms of how much her future personal and professional future might be affected by Brexit. “The thinking behind the show,” she says from airside, “is grounded in the original question of whether or not you’re going home for Christmas, and this idea of going back to y