Out & About July 2017

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March dates for your diary
Arts editor Trish Lee picks four of the best of what’s coming up on the
arts scene in March. Reviews of all of these events – and for more
arts news – see N2 in the Newbury Weekly News each week
Lust… sacrifice… regret… all hit
The Watermill in a world premiere on
March 2.
Faust x2 is a thrilling, atmospheric and
moving reinvention of a timeless tale.
Inspired by Philip Wayne’s translation
of Goethe’s dramatic poem, British
screen and stage star Ian McDiarmid
presents his own adaptation with
humour and a sense of danger.
Famed for his role as Emperor Palpatine
in Star Wars, the Tony and Olivier
award-winning actor plays the titular role of
Faust, a disillusioned academic who makes a deal with
the devil, selling his soul for a chance of a different life.
Two young people – a teenage girl and a former
student – both encourage and frustrate his newly
awakened sensual desires and emotional needs.
For Faust, to be young again is ‘very heaven’ – but only
hell awaits.
Ideally suited to The Watermill’s intimate space, the
production includes music and features projection by
acclaimed animation and video designer Zsolt Balogh.
The production runs to March 25.
Since winning the inaugural New Adventures Choreographer
Award in 2011, Old Parkonian James Cousins has quickly
made his mark on the dance world; recognised by
Time Out magazine as one of the future faces of
dance, with a string of high-profile international
commissions already to his name and described by
the great Matthew Bourne as ‘one of the UK’s most
promising choreographic talents’.
Last summer, over a period of seven weeks in
South Korea, he created a new dance piece – in
collaboration with four dancers, three local to Seoul.
Four hundred years after Shakespeare wrote As
You like It, Cousins has taken inspiration from the
headstrong and independent heroine Rosalind to
develop a contemporary work.
On Wednesday, March 29 (7.45pm), following its UK
premiere he returns with his company to the Corn Exchange
to perform his modern dance that asks if women need to
emulate masculinity to find equality; Rosalind .
If Chicago blues is your bag,
catch Mud Morganfield, eldest
son of undisputed king of the
blues Muddy Waters, at
Arlington Arts on Thursday,
March 16 (8pm).
Only after Muddy Waters’ death in 1983 did Mud
consider a career in music and he soon made up for
lost time, cutting his teeth in the southside Chicago
clubs, where he fast became a popular draw on the
circuit; mixing original songs and Muddy Waters
classics into his live sets.
He possesses the same quality baritone voice and
stage presence that made Muddy such an icon of
the blues.
His 2014 album For Pops: A Tribute to Muddy Waters
won a Blues Blast Award for Best Traditional Album.
He’s performed on Later Live with Jools Holland
on the BBC and performed at some of the world’s
leading festivals, from the North Sea Jazz Festival
and the Cambridge Folk Festival to the Chicago
Blues Festival, taking blues music to almost every
continent on the globe.
A fabulous new exhibition, Degas to Picasso –
Creating Modernism in France , has just opened
at the Ashmolean, Oxford.
The rise of Modernism is a compelling story,
played out in France from the early 19th century
to the middle of the 20th, where international
artists were drawn to Paris by salons and dealers,
the creative exchange between poets and
painters, and the bohemian atmosphere of
places like Montparnasse and Montmartre.
The exhibition plots a course from the Romantics
through Impressionists and Post-Impressionists
to the groundbreaking experimentation of
Picasso, Braque and Léger, but it shows
there was no straight line leading from
tradition to the shock of abstraction.
The story is more fascinating – as
academic artists and members of the
avant-garde exchanged ideas and rivalries
developed between the different schools and
powerful characters.
The exhibition, which runs to May, explores the
artists who created Modernism and how they did
it, through works by Manet, Pisarro, Cézanne,
Degas and Picasso.
Visit
Don’t mess with the devil
Blast of the blues
A fair and
thoroughly-modern
Rosalind
The story of Modernism
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