Our final days in London passed quickly.
Wednesday morning we headed off by bus to Islington to visit the Victoria Miro Museum in Wharf Road, a contemporary art venue with a fairly minimalist style. The gallery was presenting an exhibition of Paintings and mirror installations by Yayoi Kusama. The installations were all quite breathtaking, but required the suspension of intellect to allow the imaginative force of the visual spectacles created by mirrors and light to emerge and suffuse experience. I found this harder than one might imagine, but once you let go, the visual panorama created by Kusama has the appearance of infinite presence. In once case, she created an immense world of lit cityscapes, quite amazing. another installation involved scores of floating silver balls slightly smaller than basketballs, al mirroring each other and the gardens and us the observers. Her paintings were very similar to western desert acrylic dot paintings, swirls of abstract shapes and colours.
From there, we walked to Ottolenghi's Islington café for lunch, which was superb.
Then into the city on foot, eventually arriving, almost serendipitously, at the Sloane Museum, a rather idiosyncratic, indeed one might say eccentric or bizarre, collection of statues and objects from ancient Rome and Greece, filling this small three story house near the city to overflowing. Sir John Sloane, who lived and collected in the late 1700s, was an architect, and had a clear passion for classical sculpture and architecture. When I suggested to a young attendant that he must have been quite eccentric, she courageously disagreed with me, quite politely, and suggested instead that as the collection was designed to be a teaching aide for classics students who might not easily get to Rome or Greece, he was clearly very public spirited and not eccentric at all.
That was enough for the day, and we headed home arriving around five pm. The evening was largely spent packing up.
Thursday was quiet. We checked out, dropped our luggage at a storage facility in St Pancras, and then walked to St Martin in the Fields in Trafalgar Square to hear a short choral concert on sacred opera music. It was very enjoyable.
Afterwards, Boronia went shopping for fabric while I paid a short visit to the National Gallery. From thence, we headed back to St Pancras, picked up ur luggage and headed to Heathrow.
Our flight home was unexceptional, albeit very long.
We departed Thursday evening at nine thirty pm, stopped in Dubai for an hour, and then onwards to a very wet Sydney and thence to Canberra. We arrived around nine am Saturday, thirty four hours after we took the train to Heathrow. Despite the wet cold weather, it is great to be home!
Saturday, June 4, 2016
Wednesday, June 1, 2016
Betroffenheit
Tuesday 31 May. We split up for the morning, Boronia heading into the city, I went to St Pancras station to sort out a place to leave our bags on Thursday, and then walked through the rain into Trafalgar Square, through a lovely burial ground whose name i can't recall, but which contains the grave of Oliver Cromwells daughter.
After I spent some time perusing in some antiquarian bookshops, we met up late morning at Dover Street markets (no longer located in Dover Street, but in Haymarket), an incredibly upmarket store selling clothes and accessories, many with four figure prices. We had lunch at the cafe, light and enjoyable.
We spent an hour and a bit in the National Portrait Gallery, which was very enjoyable. I enjoyed the section on the Tudors and their times, admired a replica of the Chandon portrait of Shakespeare, the original being on loan elsewhere, and spotted good portraits of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, both seventeenth century diarists.
After an hour back in Shoreditch, we headed out to dinner with Elisabetta and her partner Richard at a lovely Tapas Bar called Moritos in Exmouth Market. Then on to Sadlers Well for a performance of Betroffenheit. The word refers to a state of shock, or deep consternation.
And what an extraordinary performance it was. Directed by Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite and theatre director and actor Jonathan Young, the performance was a dazzling combination of confronting sounds, searching lighting, constraining spaces (at times actually compressing the physical shapes of the actors/dancers into miniatures of themselves. Above all, it combined dramatic intensity and brilliant choreography (including puppetry) to bring the audience into the mind of a person confronted with an overwhelming shock or crisis. All this was delivered with technical sophistication and precision and masterfully mixed to achieve a level of psychic symbiosis or empathy between the audience and the actors, and in particular, the plight of the main character whose mind is being shredded and reassembled before our eyes. After three standing ovations, we emerged with a sense of having experienced something quite special, having been granted access to the experience of deep shock without the associated pain. Strangely, it left me at least uplifted, as its ultimate message appeared to be optimistic and positive without in any way erasing the existence or meaning of the pain that inevitably accompanies any (or more appropriately) every life.
So after the previous days workmanlike performance of Romeo and Juliet, we both felt extremely privileged to have had the opportunity to be part of a performance which soars, and is truly extra- ordinary. Our thanks to Lisabetta for encouraging us to book tickets!
After I spent some time perusing in some antiquarian bookshops, we met up late morning at Dover Street markets (no longer located in Dover Street, but in Haymarket), an incredibly upmarket store selling clothes and accessories, many with four figure prices. We had lunch at the cafe, light and enjoyable.
We spent an hour and a bit in the National Portrait Gallery, which was very enjoyable. I enjoyed the section on the Tudors and their times, admired a replica of the Chandon portrait of Shakespeare, the original being on loan elsewhere, and spotted good portraits of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, both seventeenth century diarists.
After an hour back in Shoreditch, we headed out to dinner with Elisabetta and her partner Richard at a lovely Tapas Bar called Moritos in Exmouth Market. Then on to Sadlers Well for a performance of Betroffenheit. The word refers to a state of shock, or deep consternation.
And what an extraordinary performance it was. Directed by Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite and theatre director and actor Jonathan Young, the performance was a dazzling combination of confronting sounds, searching lighting, constraining spaces (at times actually compressing the physical shapes of the actors/dancers into miniatures of themselves. Above all, it combined dramatic intensity and brilliant choreography (including puppetry) to bring the audience into the mind of a person confronted with an overwhelming shock or crisis. All this was delivered with technical sophistication and precision and masterfully mixed to achieve a level of psychic symbiosis or empathy between the audience and the actors, and in particular, the plight of the main character whose mind is being shredded and reassembled before our eyes. After three standing ovations, we emerged with a sense of having experienced something quite special, having been granted access to the experience of deep shock without the associated pain. Strangely, it left me at least uplifted, as its ultimate message appeared to be optimistic and positive without in any way erasing the existence or meaning of the pain that inevitably accompanies any (or more appropriately) every life.
So after the previous days workmanlike performance of Romeo and Juliet, we both felt extremely privileged to have had the opportunity to be part of a performance which soars, and is truly extra- ordinary. Our thanks to Lisabetta for encouraging us to book tickets!
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