Choreographer Merce Cunningham remembered. He died Sunday.

Transcript of the John Tusa BBC interview
Interviewed on TV by Charlie Rose last year.
PBS interview from last year
Selected Drawings and Dance Notations until Friday 31 July at Margarete Roeder Gallery in New York. They hoped that the show would tour Europe in the future.

^^@>>

For those New Yawkers, final 2 days of Shane Meadows' Somers Town at Film Forum. (my blog review)
Meadows' Five Days Features manifesto
His recent film This is England included in Optimum's box DVD set This is Shane Meadows tackled the thorny taboos of rascism in the England. Voters in European polls recently delivered a damning verdict on Labour, with the party suffering its worst post-war election result and getting beaten into third place by UKIP. The poll also saw the BNP gain two MEPs - the first time the anti-immigration party has won seats at national elections.
Audience with a racist: Peter Victor meets the recently elected MEP Nick Griffin – and asks why the British National Party wants to throw him out of the country. Other subject links on page.
Profile of Nick Griffin in The Sunday Times
The Observer's Philip French suggested in his review of Kisses that it should be shown in a double bill with Somers Town. High praise.


British film-goers don't like British films and UK distributors can't get them into cinemas
Eight new London boroughs eligible for Film London’s film fund
Rebirth of the British art film: From Zidane to Hunger, British arthouse movies are coming thick and fast. Are we on the verge of a new new wave?
Pick up some smart art: Six young British artists to watch
Steve Lazarides: Graffiti's über-dealer
He launched Banksy’s career, made millions from celebrity clients, and founded three chic galleries. He tells Luke Leitch how, despite grumbling critics, the subversive spirit of street art has taken the establishment by storm
The next generation of YBAs: what does the future hold? "It is the college that gave the world Damien Hirst. Are today's Goldsmiths graduates aiming to shake up the world?"
On the trail of London’s buried river, the Fleet
Keats's London home reopens after major refurbishment
To the auction house: Virginia Woolf beach is sold for £80,000


The Contemporary Art Society and The Economist Group show Martin Sexton's Blow-Up (Sex with Karl Marx) in the Economist Plaza. "An oversize blown-up camera is sited on the plaza so that the lens reveals within snippets from Michelangelo Antonioni’s iconic 1960s film. This is watched over by a bust of Karl Marx reminiscent of the monumental bust at Chemnitz in former East Germany – a city that was until 2006 named Karl-Marx-Stadt. The interior of the camera is viewed as if in a peep show."
The Observer spotlit Joseph Losey
The Joseph Losey Collection from Optimum DVD sometime ago(a must see and some single discs available) and the BFI re-released, restored Accident on tour through August.
Sophia Loren and Richard Burton in Noel Coward’s Brief Encounter (the one from 1974) with a Richard Burton retro at the BFI Southbank in August.
Losey special issue of Sight and Sound
Tate Britain has been filled with the largest ever work of art to grace its galleries – a 250ft-long sculpture described by the organisation as being like a "scribble in space". Duveen Galleries - the central space in Tate Britain, The Independent article

Extraordinary artist and not that known outside Danish Euro circles Per Kirkeby is at Tate Modern. The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam held a awesome retrospective as long ago as 1996! He also created the only second ever visual film overture (Star Trek being the first) for Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark)
The American artist Jeff Koons discusses copyright and using images of Popeye in his first major UK show at the Serpentine Gallery - Dali influences and the power of personal iconography - BBC Radio 4's Front Row, The Times,
Jeff Koons: Not just the king of kitsch
The ever erudite Rachel Campbell-Johnston of The Times gives a 2 min video tour of the show.
Drawing up battle lines – art gallery takes on Wikipedia


In the Loop (is currently on release through IFC Films in New York) (my blog review)
Podcast with Peter Capaldi on Greencine
The London Box-Set (5 short films-no DVD extras) is another valuable Optimum re-release.
BBC Radio 4's The Film Programme has a discussion about Pool of London. Over the next six weeks on the same programme, the writer, actor and League Of Gentlemen member picks neglected classics from six decades of British cinema.
Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding, the principal members of the British comedy group the Mighty Boosh, kept their cool for the first 24 hours of their inaugural American tour this week
The Mighty Boosh Explains How British Comedy Is Created
Tears of a clown who will have to pay to entertain children
The day live music died: a new layer of government bureaucracy is threatening to pull the plug on pub rock.
Lost Peter Sellers films on screen after 50-year intermission- missing British comedies found in a movie mogul’s garage cinema are being restored for a new generation.

A very quiet coup for America with the DVD release by Athena of Playing Shakespeare by the Royal Shakespeare Company and its director John Barton.
A career interview with the late British Actor Leo McKern, "which happens to give a great many details and observations about the wonderful (and still underexposed) science fiction film The Day the Earth Caught Fire." (info thanks to DVD Savant)
The petit Brit label Bluebell Films just released British independent films Innocent Sleep and The Scarlet Tunic on DVD (not listed on their site but loads of other great stuff is.
Laurence Olivier's Richard III (1955) is out on Criterion DVD with commentary by playwright and stage director Russell Lees, joined by John Wilders, former Governor of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre.

Torchwood has just aired on BBC America (New York Times review)and an interview with its Doctor Who creator, writer Russell T Davies - you can never not get excited about writing for TV listening to him.
Facets DVD in the States have just released a 2-pack of their Patrick Keiller Robinson in Space (1997) and London (1994). "Architect-turned-director Patrick Keiller crafted a pair of unique documentaries in which two fictional characters – the Narrator and Robinson – explore the good, the bad, and the ugly of England."
BFI DVD editions

Charles LeDray's Mens Suits: Savile Row meets the Borrowers at The Fire Station
The White Cube is wearing Gilbert & George with the Jack Freak Pictures (Mason's Yard and Hoxton galleries) and comprise the single largest series of work ever made by the illustrious British duo. The dominant pictorial element is the Union Jack
BBC Proms 2009: are the Proms too nice? Has British institution the BBC Proms mislaid its founding spirit? For the couch l'oeiloreille-auralists BBC Four broadcasts many of the concerts.

more Brit DVD's next time...

Fingers on the buzzers: the anniversary of Apollo 11's historic mission is marked with a space auction at Bonhams in New York starting at 1pm today. more in The Daily Telegraph
Also commemorating the moonwalk is an iPhone app and a finally released NASA film.
Cosmos & Culture: How Astronomy has Shaped Our World is at the Science Museum and features Thomas Harriot's 400-hundred-year-old lunar maps. Front Row discussion.
The town that put the men on the Moon on the box
The US space agency Nasa successfully launched the space shuttle Endeavour - at the sixth attempt.

This week's BBC Radio 3 Composer of the Week series highlights experimental sometime electronic British composer Jonathan Harvey. Some of the most fascinating new music you're ever likely to hear. Moving Trees in this ep: a short piece for chamber ensemble written in response to a commission from Belgian choreographer Anna Teresa de Keersmaeker.
Jeanette Winterson's The Inconstant Moon Omnibus (15 min x 10 eps) of artistic reflections on the moon.

and more lunacy in last week's posting below...

Dame Helen Mirren was recorded live and in HD as National Theatre's Phèdre is beamed into cinemas worldwide. Great f***ing play for a long dead Frenchman!
Another chance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) tonight (July 9).
And how the audience in Kettering, England responded to a cinema screening and an interview with RNT artistic director Nicholas Hytner about the NT Live project.
Theatre Live! Starts on Sky Arts 1 and Sky Arts 1 HD (Front Row, Nightwaves,The Guardian)

[Addition: The BAFTA (x2) and Emmy (2007) award-winning drama The Street (BBC One) is back for a third series: 6 'Plays for Today' ("a focussed intense emotional experience") on modern issues. The drama, which explores the lives behind different closed doors on the same street somewhere in the North West of England, was conceived by Jimmy McGovern who bemoans the fact that ITV closed down the series making this the very last one.

Everybody's doin' it- including U.S. soprano Renee Fleming for the Royal Opera House.
Her performance in Verdi's opera La Traviata was beamed live into 178 cinemas across Britain and the rest of Europe, as well as to 15 giant screens in England, Scotland and Wales, in the company's biggest foray yet into real-time cinema tie-ins.

But unlike New York and the many free events there such as HBO's Bryant Park screenings, the UK charges for it's outings: Film4 Summer Screen at Somerset House(30 July - 8 August 2009) will set you back £5
30 July sees the UK premiere of Pedro Almodovar's Broken Embraces.
Notting Hill Film Festival opens with Bananaz on July 10
Tilda Swinton and Mark Cousins plan mobile film festival

[Addition: As the British Museum publishes its Annual Review 2008/2009, the museum's Director, Neil MacGregor, discusses the importance of free entry to museums on BBC Radio 4's Front Row (last 5 min)]

For lovers of the celestial, BBC Four's Space season that includes Apollo Wives-all in their seventies, come to Arizona for a very special reunion. They are very different from one another, but all have one thing in common - each was married to an Apollo astronaut.

Lunacy at the BFI Southbank landmark films and live events celebrating the 40th anniversary of the first Apollo moon landing. Music for Astronauts and Cosmonauts is the UK premiere of this visual album poem of the same name created by producer and artist Howie B and Icelandic artist Húbert Nói.
This high-definition experimental film work with real-time soundtrack is organised into four tracks - Morning, Day, Evening, Night - and running for 90 minutes. This is the time it takes to experience a full Earth orbit. Filmmaker Jake Martin has carefully crafted sequences from NASA's amazing film archive to mirror Howie and Húbert 's pulsing, mesmerising electronica.
This special late-night screening will follow a 70mm presentation of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey
And in the gallery space is Simon Faithfull's Gravity Sucks: "Escape Vehicles, seven quixotic artworks that utilise an assortment of balloons, insects and rockets to offer the viewer the idea of freeing themselves from the constraints of gravity."
Original Moonwalker: How Neil Armstrong kept his feet on the ground despite becoming the most famous man on Earth
The Guardian's July 2 edition has an entire section on the Apollo anniversary
In a special Archive on 4 programme (11 July), we will hear the story of what has been described as ‘the greatest event in all the history of the human race’ as told by the man who stood on the Moon, Buzz Aldrin.
An Astronaut Goes From Walking on the Moon to Painting It

Basil Dearden's Man in the Moon reaches DVD from Network Releasing.

Al Reinert's 1990 Oscar nominated doco For All Mankind out in new Criterion Blu-ray and DVD editions telling the story of the twenty-four men who traveled to the moon, told in their words, in their voices, using the images of their experiences. Great extras as always including an audio commentary featuring Reinert and Apollo 17 commander Eugene A. Cernan, the last man to set foot on the moon.
Ancient Light: A Portrait of the Universe by David Malin is published by Phaidon
American artist Bill Viola has been asked to create two permanent works of video art for St Paul's Cathedral.
And for those in Oz, Waldemar Januszczak's The Sculpture Diaries (originally broadcast on Channel Four) is being screened on ABC TV. The sight of the intrepid artiped Januszczak - shorts striding to seventh heaven as he finds Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty in the middle of saltlake nowhere - can only but inspire one to quiet greatness.

And as the Royal Geographical Society's new head, Michael Palin is a man with the world in his hands. Makes a change from the Monty Python sketches of real life.
Fraud inquiry into new government jobs scheme
So who won the duck house?
Philosophical Tannoy at train station
A commuter’s first-class philosophical journey to hell
Tube too hot for cattle as station shops cash in
Commuters face “cattle truck” overcrowding for years after the Government renationalised a flagship train service.
Train firms want to reopen lines axed by Richard Beeching 40 years ago
National Express East Coast bail out to cost taxpayer £700m, The Independent
Leak reveals transport funding crisis as east coast mainline nationalised
An atmosphere of confrontation is brewing between the government and train operators
Fare rises threat as Tube faces a £1.7bn shortfall

MPs condemn police tactics at G20 protest: Keep untrained officers off frontline at demos, says highly critical Commons committee report
Admissions from senior Metropolitan police officers that some inexperienced officers, who were clearly quite scared, used "inappropriate force".
whatever next...Family of Ian Tomlinson were told by a senior investigator he may have been assaulted by a police impersonator shortly before he collapsed and died
Met slow to change after death of Jean Charles de Menezes, says report
Innocent people are branded as criminals: DNA pioneer is outraged by government's policy
Taking The Flak is a caustic TV comedy-drama about what happens when a small African war suddenly becomes the centre of global attention, and a team of BBC journalists arrives to cover the conflict. Co-written and co-produced by news journalists and comedy writers. Front Row spot

29 years on, Glasgow lifts ruling on Life of Brian
Monty Python stars to stage reunion
Can artists save the world?
Echoes of Home is a doco all about the music form of yodelling (ICA) (The Sunday Times even liked this one..:) Trivia question: does Thomas Mann even mention the noun or verb 'yodel'?

[Addition: Cut & Splice: Living Rooms festival from Wilton's Music Hall (Britain's oldest-left virtually derelict, propped up by European funding and gorgeously restored a few years ago.) This festival of electronic music and sound art, co-promoted by BBC Radio 3's Hear and Now and the Sound and Music organisation, features work inspired by and utilising the domestic environment.
Graeme Miller opens a major sound and video installation in the Barbican Centre's Car Park on from 9 July using a series of projections that reveal the landscape of the City with recorded testimonies of an hour-long walk made by the 15 participants and underscored by a solo bass line mapping out the territory, based on a piece by Henry Purcell (marking the 350th anniversary of the London-born composer).

English National Opera's new production of Kaija Saariaho's L'amour de loin (BBC Radio 3's Music Matters). Saariaho's publisher.
Manchester-based Beating Wing Orchestra (BWO) - made up of equal numbers of asylum seekers and refugees and local musicians - preparing for their appearance in the Manchester International Festival.
PoetryFilm: Strangers & Strangeness (Curzon Renoir Cinema ,July 14th, 6.15pm). Includes an important film by Beat poet Michael McClure, a BAFTA award winning film about levitation, and an photographic art film by Marco Sanges. Q&A after the screening.]

Il faut être léger comme l'oiseau et non comme la plume.
Paul Valéry

To meet Pina Bausch (who died yesterday) was to understand why her choreography was so transcendent for the C20th dance world. She would fix you with her gaze, looking deep into your eyes as she listened to what your body was speaking. Most importantly when it was at rest. For Bausch the question was always why does one move at all not how do we make dance? What is that impetus within us? And often the urge was painfully and absurdly funny.

Anne Linsel's 44min 2006 doco is on the web in its entirety.
Dominique Mercy-the dancer who was at her side since she formed her company in 1973 interviewed
Val Lawson's article
and other interviews on this site (though many of the links have expired)
A Stage for Social Ego to Battle Anguished Id (New York Times) and a good piece in the LA Times by Mark Swed.
Wim Wenders was to direct the first 3D dance feature with Bausch [Producers of the German company Neue Road Movies say that work on the film will resume work after a period of mourning.]
the Pina Bausch company website
BBC Radio 4's Front Row (15min in)

Siobhan Davies has just announced that she is creating Britain's first digital archive for dance
Grand Magasin perform The Resurfacing Problem- the culmination of a residency at Toynbee Studios in which three performers find their repeated attempts to speak disrupted, distorted and sometimes completely destroyed by the very tools designed to improve communication.

Swedish artist Johanna Billing has been commissioned to make a new film I'm Lost Without Your Rhythm which is the second project in the 3 Series; a collaboration between Camden Arts Centre, Modern Art Oxford and Arnolfini. Her new work is based around the recording of a live performance of dance ‘learned’ or performed by amateur Romanian dancers in Iasi (pronounced ‘yash’). Magical World (2005) is showing as part of As Long as it Lasts at Marian Goodman in New York.
Her MySpace website

[Addition:
Channel 4' Life Class: Today's Nude is encouraging ordinary people to try their hand under the tutelage of John Berger, Gary Hume and Maggi Hambling. It's part of a project by Artangel which has also seen free life classes taking place in cities across Britain.]