The (Under)Use of Scent in Theatre
Seeing The Woman in Black in theatre is par for the course for anyone studying GCSE or A-level drama, but it wasn’t just my wimpish nature that made me so terrified the first time I saw it. There’s something affecting about being in the same room as the actors, however far removed, especially if
People power in people towers: Castells in Tarragona
Castell: n. (“Cah-stay”) A tower made of people When the music starts, there’s no going down. Standing in a packed stadium filled with cigarette smoke, you watch as the seconds, thirds and fourths amunt, mounting to the refrain of the reed pipes, and the drumbeat which marks the progress
Never Look Back: Free jazz and why it matters
One evening in Vienna, I was part of a thin, bewildered crowd, listening to the Peter Evans Quintet. The shrill whirrs of a laptop synthesiser jarred with Evans’ buzzing trumpet, the double bass and the drums had very little to do with each other, and the keyboard hopelessly attempted to punctua
Screening the Unscreenable: Atrocity on Film
Tracking shots, noted the French director Jean-Luc Godard, are a matter of morality. Jacques Rivette, one of Godard’s contemporaries, used this ruling to dismiss Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1960 film, Kapo. The story of a young girl attempting to escape the concentration camp, it was one of the earliest
Death Café
Death Café began in 2011, in a living room in Hackney. Since then over 800 Death Cafés have cropped up worldwide. ‘At a Death Café people, often strangers, gather to eat cake, drink tea and discuss death,’ their website declares. A waitress led the way to a dingy upper room at Bill’s Café
Acid House: The Bolshoi Ballet
Until recently, Pavel Dmitrichenko was a top dancer in the Bolshoi ballet, Moscow’s most prestigious company. He has now confessed to ordering a man to throw sulphuric acid in the face of the ballet’s artistic director, Sergei Filin, in January 2013. Even more shockingly, 35% of Russians polled
Flesh-Eating and Fetishes: Doing Justice to the Reasonableness of Cannibalism
It sounds like the beginning of a distasteful joke. What do a petty criminal, a Swedish professor, a porn star, and a room full of auctioneers all have in common? The truth, however, is far from humorous: all of them have consumed human flesh. The subject of cannibalism rose to renewed prominence th
Playing Home: How Flatpack Furniture is Changing China
Families sit around dining tables eating out of take-away boxes; a suited businessman taps away at his laptop and rests his feet on a coffee table; an exhausted young mother lies sleeping, tucked into a duvet. Snapshots of everyday Beijing residents getting on with their lives. Except these people a
In a Silent Way
In the Tora Bora of Afghanistan, American soldiers played death metal at the entrances of caves, in a bid to prise out Al-Qaeda fighters. Sometimes they sent F-16s to fly low – earsplittingly so – over enemy camps. Or they used music for interrogation purposes – blitzed prisoners with sound, o