A blog about art and the soul
By Joy L. Martin
It must go further still: that soul must become its own betrayer, its own deliverer, the one activity, the mirror turn lamp. (W. B. Yeats)
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3 July 2015. The BE Festival is a gathering of contemporary European performance and takes place at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre; when my mate Nicky and I arrive we are told to go around the back of the building. It’s a strange, deserted alleyway that we walk down at first, and then,…
On Saturday 23 May 2015 the Cambridge Junction presented Watch Out, a day-long festival of contemporary performance which follows in the footsteps of their previous festivals Night Watch and Sampled. I studied the line-up ahead of time, and it was interesting, as always, to consider the different dimensions of theatrical experience: The Before, The During, and The After.…
20 May 2015. The dancers dart and glide between the patterns of falling and rising juggling clubs, gently varying their steady geometry. These airy diamonds hold the dance momentarily in a live force field. Then there is flow and escape. The violins, viola, cello, and double bass make a harmonious landscape…
7 May 2015. Sombre and tender he recounts a tale of woes to a handpicked listener but the story fans outward to us who sit in the dark then in the light. The straggling text of online chats are magnified in their littleness as we watch it all scroll down. …
4 March 2015. I’m always going to love it when I walk into a theatre and hear the howling guitars of AC/DC turned up - right up - on the sound system, as I did when I entered the Cambridge Junction to see Grounded by award-winning playwright George Brant last…
I went to see the Cambridge Junction’s Christmas show Around the World in 80 Days on Thursday night, and my heart is still warm and glowing from it, as if there is a nonchalant heap of red and gold coal behind an iron grate on the front of my chest. …
I went to see Don Quijote, a show by Emma Frankland and Keir Cooper, in association with Ultimo Comboio, which came to the Cambridge Junction on Wednesday 24 September. I have a dear Spanish friend, José, so I invited him to come with me. As we entered J3, the Junction’s…
I am very honoured to say that the Cambridge Junction – our city’s most diverse and serious home for the arts, which sits out on the skirt of the city centre by the train station, inhaling and exhaling the arts and audiences – has made me their Blogger in Residence…
Following my encounter with Beckett last week at the Cambridge Arts Theatre, and the ensuing roaring hunger of my being for more like it (more deep, dark, delicious artistic abstraction), the Cambridge theatre world gave me The Hand That Takes by artists CJ Mahony and Georgie Grace at the Cambridge…
I went to see a trio of short Beckett plays at the Cambridge Arts Theatre a few days ago, and I arrived in the foyer four minutes before the show started with a slightly run-ragged soul – you know, I’m sure, the state of being where you’ve been running (metaphorically)…
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4x4 Adrienne Truscott Ann Liv Young Ballet Bämsemble Company BE Festival Beauty Blanch and Shock Boukje Schweigman Christopher Brett Bailey CJ Mahony Collectif Corps Citoyen Criticism Dan Canham Darragh McLoughlin Don Quixote drone warfare Easy for You to Say Edinburgh Fringe Festival Gandini Juggling Gate Theatre GETINTHEBACKOFTHEVAN Grounded Jon Brittain Kenneth Grahame Lemonade and Laughing Gas Live Art Lucy Ellinson Lucy McCormick Marhsmallows Mark Dean Quinn Murakami Number 1 The Plaza Orphee Project O Royal Court Theatre Sleepwalk Collective Stefanie Mueller Still House Theatre by the Lake Ultimo Comboio Ursula Martinez VerTeDance Virginia Woolf Watch Out Festival