Hanging gardens of Barbican
Oct. 23rd, 2009 10:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusPerforming at The Barbican last night felt like a bit of a homecoming; ten years ago I was living (on the last of my Japanese publishing royalties) in a penthouse flat just next to the vast and bewildering arts bunker. From the orange plastic-themed kitchen of my flat, which topped a 1970s office block, I looked out over the Barbican's towers, its raised concrete walkways, its ziggurat apartments cascading with plants.
The Barbican is, itself, all orange plastic and paint now, after a bit of a redesign inside. Once upon a time I'd routinely deplore this place, comparing it unfavourably with the light, airy, accessible, ingenious, flexible and futuristic Pompidou Centre in Paris. For a major, massively expensive arts centre, The Barbican is in the wrong place (they should have put it bang in the middle of Trafalgar Square), designed by the wrong people (most people know Piano and Rogers, but who recalls the faceless construction company that, between 1962 and 1982, put The Barbican together, painful piece by piece, on a site consisting of leftover rubble from WWII?) and has entirely the wrong attitude.
It's almost impossible to find the entrance. You go up some concrete steps, down some others, and -- unless you follow the painted thread -- get quickly lost in a warren of ramps and lifts leading to areas called "minus one" and "minus two", or to a glass walkway leading to a cul-de-sac with a view of a pond and some flats. You half expect to confront a minotaur.
But The Barbican has grown on me. It has its own charm. With age, it's becoming more weird, eccentric and unique. Yesterday, before running through the Brel show in the big theatre, I had a good rummage through the building. There's a fantastic installation in The Curve gallery just now by an artist with a Polish name, who's transformed the entire gallery into a musty warren of rooms in a 1941 military bunker.
The conservatory upstairs is -- like a lot of the complex -- evocative of one of those 1970s sci- fi movies set on an orbiting ecosystem; under graph-paper glass lush bamboo, orchids and koi ponds create a secret, empty world of paths, ladders, fecund plants, hidden upper walkways. It must be one of my favourite places in London.
Even the gents toilet at the back of the cafe is amazing. The big, solid quirky-yet-quality 70s fittings so typical of The Barbican (a chunky oblong tap that juts out of the wall) greet you, then a long curved, tiled corridor leads you to the urinal. Instead of sharp corners everything has rounded edges; ceiling panels, concrete detailing, it's all organic in the way they found futuristic back in the 70s, and yet also discreetly luxurious. Never has a building boasted more bowel-shaped "bowels".
The artists' quarters backstage are as warren-like and confusing as the rest of the complex -- it's as if the whole place is expecting an imminent visit from Ghengis Khan, and intends to fox, split, entrap and slaughter his army. To get backstage you have to come down a ramp, go through the artists' entrance, descend a confusing set of brass-handrailed stairs, go along a gallery past a "choir room" used, incongruously, for catering, descend another staircase...
Everything is curved, split-level, windowless. You aren't sure whether you're above ground or below it, on earth or up in space, in 1980 or 2009.
And then you're ushered to a side door by someone wearing headphones, down some steps in the dark, up some more, and suddenly you're standing in a vast room, singing an intimate, hesitant song from the stage, and behind the dazzling follow-spot two thousand people are sitting, listening intently. Some, you later learn, are weeping.
The Barbican is, itself, all orange plastic and paint now, after a bit of a redesign inside. Once upon a time I'd routinely deplore this place, comparing it unfavourably with the light, airy, accessible, ingenious, flexible and futuristic Pompidou Centre in Paris. For a major, massively expensive arts centre, The Barbican is in the wrong place (they should have put it bang in the middle of Trafalgar Square), designed by the wrong people (most people know Piano and Rogers, but who recalls the faceless construction company that, between 1962 and 1982, put The Barbican together, painful piece by piece, on a site consisting of leftover rubble from WWII?) and has entirely the wrong attitude.
It's almost impossible to find the entrance. You go up some concrete steps, down some others, and -- unless you follow the painted thread -- get quickly lost in a warren of ramps and lifts leading to areas called "minus one" and "minus two", or to a glass walkway leading to a cul-de-sac with a view of a pond and some flats. You half expect to confront a minotaur.
But The Barbican has grown on me. It has its own charm. With age, it's becoming more weird, eccentric and unique. Yesterday, before running through the Brel show in the big theatre, I had a good rummage through the building. There's a fantastic installation in The Curve gallery just now by an artist with a Polish name, who's transformed the entire gallery into a musty warren of rooms in a 1941 military bunker.
The conservatory upstairs is -- like a lot of the complex -- evocative of one of those 1970s sci- fi movies set on an orbiting ecosystem; under graph-paper glass lush bamboo, orchids and koi ponds create a secret, empty world of paths, ladders, fecund plants, hidden upper walkways. It must be one of my favourite places in London.
Even the gents toilet at the back of the cafe is amazing. The big, solid quirky-yet-quality 70s fittings so typical of The Barbican (a chunky oblong tap that juts out of the wall) greet you, then a long curved, tiled corridor leads you to the urinal. Instead of sharp corners everything has rounded edges; ceiling panels, concrete detailing, it's all organic in the way they found futuristic back in the 70s, and yet also discreetly luxurious. Never has a building boasted more bowel-shaped "bowels".
The artists' quarters backstage are as warren-like and confusing as the rest of the complex -- it's as if the whole place is expecting an imminent visit from Ghengis Khan, and intends to fox, split, entrap and slaughter his army. To get backstage you have to come down a ramp, go through the artists' entrance, descend a confusing set of brass-handrailed stairs, go along a gallery past a "choir room" used, incongruously, for catering, descend another staircase...
Everything is curved, split-level, windowless. You aren't sure whether you're above ground or below it, on earth or up in space, in 1980 or 2009.
And then you're ushered to a side door by someone wearing headphones, down some steps in the dark, up some more, and suddenly you're standing in a vast room, singing an intimate, hesitant song from the stage, and behind the dazzling follow-spot two thousand people are sitting, listening intently. Some, you later learn, are weeping.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-10-23 09:42 am (UTC)A concert performance of songs by Jacques Brel was a right old dog’s dinner last night, with some hefty, well justified booing for Diamanda Galas, the Greek Anatolian Goth, and an anaemic opening set by oddball Scottish rocker Momus in an eye-patch that drained Brel of all drama, rhythm and poetry.
The excuse for the shindig was Brel’s eightieth birthday (he died, aged 49 in 1978) and a Francophone season at the Barbican that was launched by Nick Kenyon and Graham Sheffield at a pleasant reception beforehand.
One of the guests was Peter Straker, someone who really can sing Brel, and I tried to drum up a petition in the interval for him to take over the second half of the show.
The second half, as it turned out, was infinitely better than the first, with the Irish (half French) cabaret singer Camille O’Sullivan laying down an a capello version of “Marieke” in Flemish with perfect enunciation and vocal vibrato.
Things flopped a bit with the arrival of a washed out looking Belgian rocker called Arno who sat on a chair and waggled his legs about, but Marc Almond did a fair, if too tidy trio of songs ending with a “Carousel” that caught the speed and the hurdygurdy of the song without really its dark heart and bitterness.
All of these singers, apart from Camille, were getting off on their own empathy with the great troubadour, as if their expression of that was a sufficient qualification to perform his songs.
It was the 1968 Greenwich Village show — Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris — that popularised the singer in the theatre community at least, and the original cast recording wore out several needles on my old gramophone.
Devoted Brellians are sniffy about that cabaret, and Mort Schuman’s translations, but very little in the Barbican evening rivalled the energy and passion of that recording.
There was something infinitely absurd about the French singer Arthur H declaring “Je Suis Un Soir D’Ete” as if possessed by the broken spirit of Tom Waits’s old grandad.
But nothing matched the sheer horror of Diamanda Galas — part Valkyrie, part Addams family — swallowing her own voice and misreading her own piano music as she thumped and screamed her way through the port of Amsterdam.
David Coulter, the concert organiser and musical director, thanked the Barbican for “letting us do this event.”
Which gave the impression that it was a sort of room for hire arrangement.
Jacques Brel is far too important an artist to be thrown at this lot. Where was the quality control? Why hadn’t Diamanda Galas been asked to leave the building? Why was the onstage orchestra so poor and the amplification system so dreadful?
The Barbican should make amends by announcing, and planning properly, a season of French chansonniers in appropriate musical settings: Juliette Greco, Brel, Serge Gainsborough and Charles Trenet would be a good start…
(no subject)
Date: 2009-10-23 10:47 am (UTC)Might I suggest you get a new eye-patch for the Warwick show?
(no subject)
Date: 2009-10-23 10:58 am (UTC)