Detail from Just in Time by Wilhemina Barns-Graham. Courtesy of Leyden Gallery
Prints by one of the central figures in the story of British modern art are to be displayed alongside an exhibition of rich and luxuriant watercolours by London-based artist Roxy Walsh at the Leyden Gallery this month.
Wilhemina Barns-Graham, who died in 2004, produced significant work in her eighties during the last decade of her life. Having built a reputation as an abstract painter, from 1991 until her death started producing screen prints at a prolific rate. It was a creatively liberating period of her artistic life, and capturing her own brush marks on acetate led her to make prints that were an embodiment of her painting style.
In Roxy Walsh’s Two Tongues Tied exhibition, shown alongside the Barns-Graham prints, watercolours on various surfaces feature women who are intensely and sensuously coloured yet frozen in their attempts to make meaning, described by the artist as being “present yet inchoate”.
Roxy Walsh Two Tongues Tied and Wilhemina Barns-Graham Prints is at Leyden Gallery 9/9a Leyden Street, E1 7LE until 8 March.
Horse Power: The Blackhorse Workshop wants us to get practical. Photograph: Jim Stephenson
Relying on Youtube videos to do jobs around the house such as putting up curtains or fixing a chair is not unusual, though it’s ironic how these newly-established technologies are being used to learn practical skills that have seemingly been around since the dawn of time.
Blackhorse Workshop in Walthamstow is out to address the problem. The newly opened building seeks to channel the spirit of public libraries by becoming a place for shared knowledge, with tools, machinery and skilled technicians on hand to offer advice and assistance to members of the public.
Housed in a former industrial building specially converted by architecture and design collective Assemble, the workshop has been running talks, classes and events since last November, but officially launched last month at an event that saw Waltham Forest Council Leader Chris Robbins ceremoniously cut a ‘ribbon’ made of wood using a saw.
At the launch, workshop volunteers busied themselves making individual letters for the workshop’s sign. Zakiyma, 19, an architecture student, is busy fashioning the letter ‘R’ using rope lighting backed on to wood. “The best thing is that you get to see what other people are doing,” she said. Aaron, 24, is a prop-maker, but doesn’t have the space or resources to experiment at home. He said: “There are some really good teachers here and you can learn metal work, gilding and lighting.”
Given Walthamstow’s arts and crafts and manufacturing heritage, the workshop is well-situated, and the two-storey space will lend resources, including wood and metal working equipment, as well as offer space for assembly and construction.
Maria Lisogorskaya, director of Assemble, claims the workshop is about making resources available to more people. “We want the public workshop to integrate the knowledge of tactile processes into everyday city life,” she says.
Members of the public are welcome to visit the workshop, including the café and bar run by Hornbeam Bakers Collective. Using the bench space does come at a cost, however. A one-off day membership is 18 per day, though regular membership works out cheaper and discounts are available for those on a low income, recently graduated or out of work.
Bloody revenge and stage violence are par for the course in Jacobean tragedies, but a new version of Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi intends to balance the macabre with a nuanced exploration of gender.
The play, in which the marriage of the Duchess to someone beneath her social class leads to her brothers exacting revenge, has been reinterpreted as a ‘transgender fable’, with a new title, Cover Her Face, and third gender performer La JohnJoseph playing the lead.
The adaptation, to be staged this month at Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club, moves the play from the court of Amalfi some 500 years ago to London’s east end at the tail end of the 1950s.
“We’re setting it in this gay gangster socialite criminal underworld,” explains La JohnJoseph, a performance artist and writer who divides his time between East London and Berlin.
“We’re exploring the same power dynamics but with a new aesthetic. It’s all fifties – the music, the costumes, everything. We’ve been studying dialects and accents; half the cast will be speaking with Cockney accents, which are very different from contemporary ones, and the rest will have this Mayfair-type accent. We’re hoping to dislocate people’s understanding of the play when they come and see it like this.”
Jacobean drama has always lent itself to gender discourse. Women, in the 17th century, were not permitted to act on stage, so plays were written with men playing female characters in mind.
Taking its lead from this, La JohnJoseph will be the only non-male member of the cast. “I’m in the middle, in that shimmering grey area,” he quips. “There are no straight female roles at all, so all of the interactions have become very queered.
“There are some incestuous undertones, bisexual undertones and transgender ones – it’s quite a free for all and I think it’s very timely actually that we’re doing the piece like this.”
La JohnJoseph cites Australian supermodel Andrej Pejic as an example of how transgender people are coming to the forefront of public consciousness. “People are aware not only of the right of transsexual people who change their gender but also that the gender spectrum is wider than previously acknowledged,” he says.
In the original play, the Duchess suffers for marrying someone from the lower classes. In Cover Her Face (the new title is from a line in the play) the emphasis is on the Duchess trying to live as a woman against the wishes of her conservative brothers.
“Gender is a cornerstone of how we understand ourselves and in this play everyone is trying to shut the Duchess up and lock her away,” La JohnJoseph says.
“I’ve most definitely channelled my experiences, both pleasant and unpleasant, of being a gender non-conformist into this role.”
Cover Her Face is at Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club, 42 Pollard Street, E2 6NB from 10-15 February.
Adrian Richards and Alix Ross star in Advice for the Young at Heart. Photograph: Sarah London
Much has been said and written about the riots which swept London in 2011. Everyone from politicians to social workers have voiced their opinions on the state of our youth and their future.
Attempting to get to grips with these issues, Advice for the Young at Heart sets out to examine both contemporaneous teenage experiences and young struggles from a previous era.
Award-winning playwright Roy Williams sets the scene with simultaneous plots relating the 1958 Notting Hill race riots and the events of 2011, telling its story through the eyes of 17 to 21-year-old characters.
The play, commissioned by the Shoreditch based Theatre Centre, features a cast of four relatively undiscovered emerging talents and specifically targets young audiences aged 14 and over.
This need to appeal to a current audience is reflected in segments of dialogue such as this from the sole female part, Candice: “Join a crew, you get family. You get brers who will die for you. Stand up for you. You get respect.”
Given the widespread frustration and disillusionment that large sections of inner city youth have recently expressed combined with the perception they are being ostracised, the goal of catering a play towards them is particularly ambitious.
With the direction and target of Roy Williams’ writing in mind, the acid test for the production will be the response of young people.
So far the play is doing well, with its autumn tour of schools and public venues across the country being extended to the spring.
A promotional YouTube video features a teacher of Year 11 drama students, who said: “It’s a piece of theatre which genuinely appeals to a young audience, which they didn’t find patronising or boring.”
The same clip also features pupils describing the production with words such as ‘amazing, brilliant, real, educational, moving, refreshing and emotional.’
While any such public airing will clearly highlight the most positive views, the fact that so many teenagers seem to relate to the play is notable.
Beyond the theatre, the need for young people to find their place in the world remains as strong as ever, especially after the London riots, and any attempt to encourage this is worthy of some attention.
Despite opening in only 2011, Oval Space is already one of London’s hottest night spots. Its industrial setting in Bethnal Green, overlooking a disused gasworks, rivals Hackney Wick for gritty urban chic, and the 6,000 square foot warehouse-style space affords mesmeric views over East London.
It’s not the views, however, that make Oval Space regularly full to capacity. Jordan Gross, 29, is co-director of the venue alongside his business partner Daniel Sylvester, 28. It was their vision to transform a warehouse once used to stock pharmaceutical supplies into a top class music and arts venue.
“We felt London needed more good entertainment spaces and that this could be one of those places,” says Gross. “But as with all of these things, what you end up with is a lot different to what you think it’s going to be in the first place.”
A successful 2013 saw Thom Yorke, Bookashade, Cutcopy and Giorgio Moroder perform. Oval Space also has monthly cinema screenings from independent filmmakers and hosts one-off events such as this month’s TED event. Incongruously enough, you can also get married there.
At 29, Gross is intimidatingly successful. He used to own a telecoms company and started his first business as a teenager. With Oval Space, however, he’s looking to embrace a slightly older and wiser crowd.
“You’ve got to try and elevate the conversation a bit in terms of this nightlife thing,” he says. “We make sure that when you come here you’re having a really great experience, so the toilets are nice, the food and drinks are good and everything’s reasonably priced.”
Drawing on his experience in other international cities such as Berlin, Gross calls London “a world class city without world class night life”, and has made it Oval Space’s mission to redress the balance.
This is not merely a case of attracting the biggest names – although they are doing that – or hosting shows by outside promoters. These days Gross and his team want to develop their own events in-house, taking advantage of the fact that nobody knows the space like they do.
For Gross this is part of a wider philosophy. “In my view we’ve got to get back to having venues and clubs and places where you trust their curation and you’ll go along no matter what,” he says.
In February begins Oval Space Music – Chapter 1, a grand title matching Gross’s ambition. Detroit techno pioneers Robert Hood and Jerome Sydenham will be part of a line-up that includes sets from the Oval Space’s new resident DJs, jozif and Fritz Zander.
Gross adds: “We’d like to bring more interesting things to the audience and stuff that’s really very good but you just haven’t heard of it yet. That’s essential I think.”
Authenticity is difficult to de fine and express “but you know it when you experience it”, writes Tony Haynes, composer and artistic director of Grand Union Orchestra.
This and the concept of ‘artistic truth’ are clearly important to the 71-year old, who founded the world jazz orchestra, known for its spectacular large-scale shows, in 1982.
Anyone who has seen the orchestra perform may agree, the variety of cultures and styles represented through its members giving it an incredibly broad emotional range, which is borne out of individual musicians’ experiences as well as the freedom Haynes gives them to
improvise.
“I don’t believe in that autocratic notion of composer,” he says. “ If I have a steel band, an Indian ensemble, some African drummers and a community choir then I have to treat them as material. Improvisation of all kinds is absolutely essential to that process.”
Haynes, who is classically trained and has experience working in theatre, is infl uenced by Brecht in his belief that an audience needs to feel that performers have actually lived what they are playing.
Considering the genuinely internationalist nature of the orchestra (it’s no overstatement to suggest few nationalities or world musics have not at some stage been involved) this seems a powerful philosophy.
“When you have people who quite clearly have come out of the coup in Chile” he explains, “when they sing about those things it has an immense immediacy.”
But there’s no better place, says Haynes, to base the orchestra than in East London and its current Bethnal Green home.
“ The history of East London feeds into the work, particularly as the concerns we all pick up on are about migration, exile and the movements of people and mixtures of cultures.”
In a series of events called On The Edge at Wilton’s Music Hall this month, the orchestra will be celebrating the ‘musical melting pot’
of East London by bringing together musicians and singers from every major musical culture worldwide, including virtuoso players and great improvisers.
For four days audiences will have the chance to listen, dance and play music with them. Explaining the title, he says: “ There’s a literal edge because we’re on the edge of the city and there is a sense of precariousness in that economically.
“But also as musicians we are living on the edge because we put ourselves out to express things that are unfashionable or unspoken, and especially because we are prepared to improvise.
“It appeals to me because there’s this sense of danger – and we do court danger. We don’t play safe really.”
Grand Union Orchestra play at Wilton’s Music Hall, 1 Graces Alley, E1 8JB from 21-24 November
If you’re still mourning the end of the summer festival season then fear not, as this month Oxjam, the UK’s largest charity festival, has put together impressive line-ups for its Shoreditch and Dalston Takeover events.
The two mini-festivals take place over the weekend of 19/20 October and are the culmination of over a month of one-off events and launch gigs organised by volunteers with the aim of raising money for Oxfam.
Nearly 100 bands and DJs are poised with their instruments and equipment to play across a total of 12 venues. The line-up includes local acts such as Tâches, Ligers, Sophie Jamieson, Milk Teeth and Zoe LDN.
Mohammed Yahya, one half of Afrobeat hip-hop duo Native Sun, who headline Bedroom Bar on Sunday 20 October, told the Oxjam website why he wanted to get involved. He said:
“I feel that it’s a great way to use our music for a positive cause. We often see musicians on TV promoting a very negative lifestyle, often glamorising sex, drugs, alcohol etc., and like many underground artists we understand the responsibility that we have as musicians and role models as well as the blessing and opportunity to have this platform that can touch people universally.”
Last month’s Oxjam launch gigs and events included speed dating and gin tasting, which the organisers hope will put East Londoners in the mood for this month’s Oxjamming festivities.
Wristbands for the day cost £8-10, and allow you free access to all of the venues.
