Music Monday: Goldsmith Music Studios (& Thom Yorke at Laban)

Record producer Nigel Godrich, best known for his work with Radiohead, officially launched the new Goldsmiths Music Studios on New Cross Road last Thursday. According to Goldsmiths, it has 'been designed to be a creative space for research, performance and recording where musicians, both Goldsmiths students and members of the public, can make professional-level recordings using state-of-the-art equipment... The Studios, which consist of three live rooms, is available for commercial hire with an engineer or assistant engineer. Significant discounts available for Goldsmiths alumni (up to five years)'. Visit www.gold.ac.uk/music/recording-studios for more details about the facilities, equipment, engineers and how to book a session.

Also in attendance at the launch were Radiohead bassist Colin Greenwood and Travis frontman Fran Healy.

As well as producing all of the Radiohead albums and working with acts like Paul McCartney, U2 and R.E.M, Nigel Godrich is a member of Atoms for Peace along with Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke and Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea. Which reminds me, I never got round to posting about Atoms for Peace's Ingenue video. Released last year, it features Thom Yorke and dancer Fukiko Takase dancing on the stage at the Laban Theatre in Deptford in Feburary 2013, choreographed by Wayne McGregor.

South London's Rite of Spring

This looks great - exactly 100 years after the first performance in London of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, a free show along Deptford Creek  by the Laban Centre: 

'Brian Solomon, a dancer with Trinity Laban's Transitions Dance Company for the past year, will bring together 20 professional dancers, actors and the local community for a new interpretation of Stravinsky's masterpiece, The Rite of Spring.

The cast of South London's Rite of Spring will include dance alumni Charlotte Pook, Ashley Hind, Sarah Golding and Daisy Farris, as well as retired Canadian dance star  Caroline Farquhar and Theatre-Maker Lesley Ewen

Canadian-born Brian is guided by his Native American heritage in his choreography, and he is also particularly interested in engaging with unusual spaces in communities and helping people re-learn forgotten ways of using their bodies.

Brian choreographed The Rite of Spring a few years ago, but has recreated it to mark the anniversary of the first performance of this seminal work in London: "I felt that this primordial piece really demanded a cast of all ages and abilities to create a fuller atmosphere for the brutal story of death and sacrifice," said Brian. "By bringing together professionals and members of the local community with no prior experience to train together, we have been able to generate something much more powerful and strikingly real".

South London's Rite of Spring will be performed at the Laban Building on 12 July at 7pm and 13 July at 4pm - the only event in the city marking the infamous work's performance in London on those dates exactly 100 years ago. Entrance is free'.

Out of the Cage

An interesting free event coming up courtesy of Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance:

Out of the Cage! (26 Oct 13.00h–23.00h, King Charles Court, Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich)

'John Cage (1912-1992) was an American composer, music theorist, writer, and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde. He was also instrumental in the development of modern dance, mostly through his relationship with choreographer Merce Cunningham.

Join us for an extraordinary day of activity featuring a multitude of musicians, dancers, and other performers simultaneously animating a labyrinth of rooms and spaces in the Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich. The audience is ambulatory wandering freely through a myriad of spaces, performances, and installations. Three concerts punctuate the ‘Happening’ as resting points in the 10 hour maze of sight & sound discoveries.The evening concert will include a UK première of Cage’s The City Wears a Slouched Hat for six hats, percussion and ensemble'.

Back in 1980, as mentioned here before, Cage and his partner/collaborator Merce Cunningham took part in a summer school at Laban when it was in New Cross, concluding with a big performance at Goldsmiths.

I went to The Mysterium in 2009, a similar Trinity Laban event at the Old Royal Naval College, and it was one of the most memorable nights out I've had in London - an amazing building with all kinds of beautiful things happening in it.

William Blake Again

For many years William Blake was a somewhat neglected artist and poet, but now scarcely a week goes by without something Blakean going on somewhere in London. Here's a few connected to South London:

- the Blake Society were involved in planting an 'angel oak' on Peckham Rye on September 18th, to mark the supposed scene of Blake's childhood vision of angels in a tree. Here's a report on it from Here Be Angels.

William Blake tree planting minicast by HereBeAngels

The newly planted Angel Oak on Peckham Rye,
(near the entrance opposiste Harris Boys Academy)

- as part of the Woodland Wonders event in Nunhead Cemetery in September there was a performance called 'Day of Angels and Fairies' by The Blake Poets (not sure exactly what this entailed, did anybody see it?).

- CoolTan Arts is having a Blake-themed Largactyl Shuffle guided cultural walk from Tate Modern to Bunhill Fields (where Blake is buried) - Saturday 19th November 2011, 12 noon start.

- dancers from Laban in Deptford are involved in developing a production called The Blake Diptych centred on the boyhood visions of William Blake. The company has a blog documenting their creative process.

I've explained about Blake's South London connections here before (with picture of the mural on Goose Green) - briefly the source for the Peckham visions story is a posthumous biography, but he certainly mentions Brockley and Camberwell in his poems.

In Hercules Road in Lambeth, where Blake once lived, there is now a William Blake Estate with a plaque on one of the buildings.

Sunday Morning at Laban (review)

I spent many happy hours at Laban in Deptford when my daughter was attending the very popular Saturday children's classes there, but until last week I'd never actually been to a performance by adult dancers.

I greatly enjoyed Sunday Morning, a dance piece choreographed by Hagit Yakira. It was a Tuesday night, but in keeping with the Sunday Morning theme free coffee and croissants were provided in the foyer.

The piece explores childhood memories and family relationships, the frozen moment of the posed family picture interspersed with harmony, tension, and sometimes violence.

Here's a short film of the four dancers (Takeshi Matsumoto, Orley Quick, Cornelius Joubert and Hagit Yakira) rehearsing Sunday Morning.



What this film doesn't do justice to is the Laban itself, its main theatre a great performance space with a fantastic sound system. I'd never heard Bob Dylan's Don't Think Twice it's Alright (which features in Sunday Morning) sound so good as it did through their speakers. The piece also featured some beautiful live guitar courtesy of Tom James Scott

Next to Deptford Creek some of the finest dancers in the world are studying and performing in one of the best buildings in London. Try and get along to one of their events if you can and don't be intimidated by the supposed difficulty of some contemporary dance. As Suzanne Moore wrote yesterday of an event elsewhere 'With dance I start off making narratives and then I relax and just see sculpture and bodies and relationships and sex and joy and fear. Nothing is more exciting' (Guardian, 16 July 2011). What's not to like?

For information on forthcoming events check the Trinity Laban website. Next up from the 26 to 29 July is the end of year showcase from the post-graduate students.

(for some earlier history, see this previous post on John Cage and Merce Cunningham at Laban)

Update: here's some more news on the graduate shows at Laban: 'Trinity Laban’s graduate shows will feature MA dancers and choreographers performing daring and risk-taking new work at Laban Theatre from 26-29 July. Some of the finest dance pioneers will perform across four evenings, including choreography and performances by multitalented dance artists Parisian Emma Zangs and Argentinean Mariana Marquez... Each night will present an individual showcase of inspirational, thought-provoking and cutting-edge performance confirming Trinity Laban’s presence at the forefront of contemporary dance. Although performances at Laban Theatre start at 19.30h, events, installations and showings will arise around the dance buildings from 18.30h releasing dance performance from the often restrictive nature of traditional venues. Tickets are £6 (£3) and can be booked by calling 020 8463 0100 or by visiting www.trinitylaban.ac.uk/labantheatre'. Some of the performances are for over-18s only.

That was Deptford X

I managed to take in some of the recent Deptford X festival, including the Babylon showing reviewed previously. Other highlights included Patrick Hackett's Scape Boat, a boat made out of copies of the Financial Times, inviting various metaphors about the economic crisis (sinking ship of capitalism etc). For the duration of Deptford X it was parked on the grass in front of Laban. Not sure what happened to it in the end, I was hoping for some viking burial action with a blazing boat floating in the Creek but I suspect that the artist may have become quite attached to it. After all he won the Deptford X prize so might not have wanted to follow the commendable auto destructive art example of Gustav Metzger.

On Saturday 3rd October, there was the Deptford Marbles' Tea and Dance event, a collaboration between Artmongers and Laban students. There was tea and cake...


... and dancing. The dancers were remarkably unphased by their interaction with some of the interesting 'characters' who frequent that patch of Deptford Broadway and who occasionally joined in by wandering into the action.

Fred Aylward had two exhibitions. Before and After at the Albany included information about lost entertainment venues alongside photos of what has replaced them. Meanwhile at the Dog and Bell he showed a series of his watercolours depicting similar buildings in their prime. Places featured in the exhibitions include the Deptford Odeon, the New Cross Empire, the Albany Empire (in its original Creek Road location), the New Cross Kinema (most of which is still standing as the Venue) and the Electric Palace at 197 Deptford High Street - one of the earliest local cinemas, now Shades snooker hall. I was impressed that he had discovered a last trace of the Broadway Theatre behind the chemist on Deptford Broadway (the one featured in the picture above) - a sign saying 'Way Out'.

Cycle powered cinema in Deptford

Oxfam and Magnificent Revolution show the climate action film, Age of Stupid, to 150 people at the Laban in Deptford last week - all powered by pedals:



Thanks to Green Ladywell's twitter feed for the link.

Merce Cunningham in New Cross

Merce Cunningham, the famous American dancer/choreographer, died this week aged 90.

Once upon a time he walked and danced in New Cross, thanks to his connection with Bonnie Bird (1914-1995). Bird was in the original Martha Graham Dance Company, and while teaching at the Cornish School in Seattle in the 1930s met Cunningham (as her student) and the composer John Cage (as her accompanist). Equally importantly, via Bird, Cunningham met Cage, his long term partner and collaborator.

In 1974 Bird became the director of the Dance Theatre Department at the Laban Centre Centre for Movement and Dance which moved to Goldsmiths College, New Cross, in 1976. It took over the former St James Primary School buildings at the back of the college, and then later, in 1981, expanded into the former St James Church (shortly after it severed its institutional links with Goldsmiths, and later still moved to its current building in Deptford)

And so it came to pass at Laban that 'In July, 1980 the annual summer school welcomed Merce Cunningham who taught technique, composition and repertory classes, and John Cage. One of the course’s high points was a showing of Imaginary Landscape No ???, a complicated compilation of the joint work of 12 visual artists and 30 dancers, performed to 21 sound scores all played at once by Cage’s students. It was a veritable musical circus, a far more complex version that first created by Bonnie and John at Cornish more than half century before! For the concluding performance, Cunningham and Cage presented Dialogue to an audience of 500 in the Great Hall at Goldsmiths’ College’.

If you're one of those people who get your John Cale and John Cage mixed up, never mind, they can both be claimed for SE14.

(If anybody out there has any memories of Cunningham and Cage in New Cross, bring it on)

Source: Frontiers – The Life and Times of Bonnie Bird, American Modern Dancer and Dance Educator - Karen Bell-Kanner, 1998)

The Mysterium in Greenwich

Last month's Moving Gallery -The Mysterium - a collaboration between Deptford's Laban dancers and Greenwich's Trinity musicians - more than lived up to its promise, in fact it was one of the best Transpontine nights out for some time. The grand buildings of the Old Royal Naval College (now home to Trinity College of Music) were transformed for the night into a space for numerous music and dance performances.

Review at History is Made at Night

The Mysterium

Whether moden dance is your thing or not, this event tonight at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich sounds very intriguing - the building itself is interesting enough. I've just bought tickets and there's still a few left from Greenwich Theatre Box Office on 020 8469 9500 (£10, £8 concessions):

Moving Gallery – The Mysterium
7:00 pm Trinity College of Music, King Charles Court, Old Royal Naval College

Using all the spaces of Sir Christopher Wren’s great baroque building, TrinityLaban and guest artists create an interpretation of Alexander Scriabin’s strange artistic prophecy The Mysterium: ‘All will be participants…with visual effects, dancers, a procession, incense, and rhythmic textural articulation… mists and lights will modify the architectural contours…which will continually change with the atmosphere and motion of the Mysterium.’ Audience will freely move through the continuous simultaneous performances and installations - corridors, crevices, rooms, roofs, windows, staircases will all be used. Some will be areas just to peep into, others for interactive exploration.

There will be a chill-out room where listeners can lounge on pillows and be wafted away by sensuous colours and sounds, a construction of hoses and tubas, an Oracle, a Horror Chamber, an Aviary of interactive technology with music and birds, an homage to Rebecca Horn’s suspended grand piano (Concert for Anarchy, Tate Modern) where a corridor of practise rooms periodically erupts in pandemonium, a final denouement with the entire Trinity String Faculty creating Stephen Montague’s Snowscape, and many other surprises.The host of performers and creators include Daryl Runswick, Linda Hirst, Dominic Murcott, Oren Marshall, Kathy Crick, Gill Clarke, Martin Hargreaves, Nicholas Quinn, Rosemary Brandt, GéNIA, Philip Colman, Robert Coleridge, John Drever, Ian Mitchell, Charlotte Darbyshire, Susan Sentler, Alice Sara, GiGi Grady, Heni Hale, Jonathan Chadwick (AZ Theatre) and students and alumni from TrinityLaban.

Conceived and directed by Douglas Finch and Lizzi Kew-Ross. As the experience of this production doesn’t involve a precise beginning, audience are invited to enter the show any time between 7:00 and 7:30. The final performance with ‘Snowscape’ will happen in the courtyard at approximately 9:15. (Butler’s Bar will be open from 6:30 to 9:30)