It is often said that some of the best things in life improve with age, and at Polari Literary Salon’s Tenth Birthday Party, we are informed that 10 years is a long time in gay years, making Polari precisely 40 years old!
It is often said that some of the best things in life improve with age, and at Polari Literary Salon’s Tenth Birthday Party, we are informed that 10 years is a long time in gay years, making Polari precisely 40 years old!
Many of us find ourselves working to pay off the looming student debt accumulated from our studies. The concept of the ‘dream job’, seemingly impossible. A job you’ve spent years training for, hard to grasp due to the ever growing competitive job market. Cue Jeremy Tiang’s Fulfillment, a meditation on the rite of passage of life after studies.
Bad Roads is not really a play. Rather, it is a sequence of scenes sewn together into one fragmentary meditation on the brutalities of war. The text’s background is the Donbass region of Ukraine, following the 2014 revolutionary movement that ousted President Yanukovych; its foreground, the effect of war on the female subject, in all its complex, brutalising, all-consuming force.
For over a decade, choreographer Trajal Harrell has taken dance to new and exciting levels. His breakthrough was the series Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Jackson Church, fusing the early postmodern dance of 1960s New York with the traditions of the Harlem voguing balls. Lately Harrell has been inspired by the works of Tatsumi Hijikata, the founder of the Japanese Butoh dance. Trajal Harrell’s work has been shown in theatres in the U. S. and worldwide as well as in museums such as the MOMA in New York. After a grand-scale exposition of his work at the Barbican Centre in August, Harrell presents his first work at a German municipal theatre. This is also the first time that Harrell works with actors.
Addiction, the fact or condition of being addicted to a particular substance or activity. Emma was having the time of her life. Now she’s in rehab. Clinical isolation fronted with an existential crisis, People, Places and Things sits you down in therapy and asks ‘How do you think this story ends?’.
Gripping from the start til the end, Ballet Boyz: Fourteen Days is truly a piece of art that shows the balance and imbalance of all aspects of modern culture. With five pieces that have been created over just fourteen days, it is gripping from start to finish.
I am still unsure whether I like or loathe this play. I am unsure whether it liberates women, or entraps them. I am unsure whether the play is a genius meditation on motherhood, knowingly referencing Ancient Greek tragedy, or merely an over-laboured attempt to do so. I am certain that I hate moments of Magali Mougel’s new script (translated by Chris Campbell), which is turgid and over-written at points, but that Jean-Pierre Baro’s direction combined with Caoilfhionn Dunne’s performance to create moments of theatrical brilliance. I guess everything comes full-circle, as the play itself illuminates.
I’ve loved the story of The Little Mermaid ever since I was a little girl, and it’s still one of my favourites today. I was so excited to see Northern Ballet’s new adaptation of the original classic by Hans Christian Anderson.
The first rule of news: you do not become the news. This is easier said than done, as UBS TV Anchorman Howard Beale proves, when he announces his planned suicide on his evening news slot to many a bewildered audience. In a moment of madness that should have ruined his career, it actually propels Beale to stardom, making him the most watched broadcaster on the TV circuit.
This is a timely play, but not a timeless one. It is dated, and overlong, and some dialogue is too clever by half and therefore anachronistic onstage. But it’s also timely: its revival is another commemorative nod to the 1967 Sexual Offences Act, and, somewhat more sinisterly, it explores the uncomfortable dynamics of sexual power between queer schoolboys of differing ages.