Bite for lunch at the Barbican
Ten years of bite at the Barbican — the arts centre’s ongoing year-round festival of the performing arts — was celebrated at a lunch yesterday hosted by artistic director Graham Sheffield and head of theatre Louise Jeffreys, goaded on briefly from the sidelines by the ever ebullient Barbican supremo Sir Nicholas Kenyon.
Guests at a long table in Searcey’s Restaurant on Level 2 waged war with big lamb portions and arts figures like Alan Davey, new chief exec at the Arts Council, Kerry Michael of Theatre Royal, Stratford East, reps from Michael Clark’s dance company and Complicite, as well as Thelma Holt, magnificent as ever in her inevitable Issey Miyaki.
But why were we there, apart from having a bite to eat? To celebrate the departure of the RSC which allowed bite to expand so spectacularly? To ask why yet more Laurie Anderson and Robert Lepage? To speculate on the future of internationalism and the Edinburgh Festival and to wonder why Sheffield hasn’t been transferred to the Athens of the North?
Merce Cunningham and Mark Morris are both returning to bite this autumn. You wouldn’t want to miss either of them. But I’m not getting much sense of what’s next, what’s new and what’s tomorrow from the programme at the moment.
It’s settled into a complicit “festival” role with other European venues, thougn I’m delighted to learn that the sensational-sounding Divine Comedy of Dante is already booked for next year.
That show was a highlight of the Avignon Festival, which I read about on holiday in Spain last week, along with the latest from Belgian genius Jan Fabre; why no Fabre, I ask Sheffield? Because I don’t like him much he says, wrinkling his nose.
Fair enough. We have to have our our favourites and our betes noires. But Fabre is someone we should know a bit more about — a bite more about, in fact — especially after Lynn Barber’s recent ludicrous excoriation of him in The Observer.
It’s probably a question of money, but we haven’t seen anything of Deborah Warner lately, and I don’t get much buzz of exciting commissions from unexpected quarters, though the names of Enda Walsh and Scott Walker in the new programme are some cause for optimism. But where’s Martin McDonagh, Rose English, Stephen Dillane, Jasmin Vardimon, Richard Jones?
These are some of the really exciting, unaccommodated British artists I would expect to see in bite. Maybe I’m being unreasonable, but why change the habit of a lifetime? And I thought I’d mention it anyway.
The lunch was fun, though Alan Davey didn’t exude much Arts Council passion in my direction. Fiona Hughes from the Standard was her usual delightful self and other colleagues one was glad to catch up with included such well-travelled savants as Donald Hutera. Allen Robertson, James Woodall, Ismene Brown and Kate Bassett.
My editor, Terri Paddock, was also on hand to oil the wheels of a fascinating informal couple of hours of discourse. Ben Dowell chipped in from The Times, and Tim Auld flew the Sunday Telegraph flag.
The whole thing was a bite event in itself, a nibble perhaps, of new things to come, and the guests responded to the Barbican’s welcome in a charming toast from Joseph Seelig, veteran director of the London Mime Festival, in its own way a precursor of bite, a canape, or “physical theatre” taster, with which the main course may be always compared and contrasted.
July 18th, 2008 at 5:56 pm
“That show was a highlight of the Avignon Festival, which I read about on holiday in Spain last week, along with the latest from Belgian genius Jan Fabre; why no Fabre, I ask Sheffield? Because I don’t like him much he says, wrinkling his nose.”
I’m shocked, Michael, that one man’s personal prejudices should be given as a valid reason for preventing the rest of us from experiencing the work of a major artist. How else are the rest of us going to discover such people and make up our own minds about them? We’re self-satisfied enough on these shores as it is, and Bite is one of the few organisations with a remit to look outwards and show us what goes on beyond the English Channel.
I understand that as Artistic Director Graham Sheffield has to make tricky decisions and exercise artistic discretion, but this high-handedness smacks of the cultural fascism with which William Glock so notoriously ruled the Radio 3 airways in less enlightened times. He was a disgraceful man who stifled the careers of many important composers by depriving them of the oxygen of airtime. Mr Sheffield should not lose sight of his duty to represent us as our curator of the best in modern world theatre. The Barbican is not his personal toybox.
Job