The other night I went to see a Hawk and a Hacksaw at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. My friend Fliss had a spare ticket at the last moment. I had seen them a few times before, the picture above is one I took at ATP around 6 years ago. She had booked the tickets so long ago she had forgotten the details of the show. It turned out to be a collaboration between A Hawk and a Hacksaw and the BBC Orchestra. The orchestra played pieces by Bartok and Ligeti, a Hawk and a Hacksaw played folk songs from Hungary, Romania and Ukraine, and the two joined together for some songs at the end. It felt very civilised to sit watching an orchestra in plush padded seats. It’s not something I do that often. I had an ice cream in the interval too.
Tag: south bank
Forkbeard Fantasy
I went to see this exhibition at the Festival Hall a little while ago. Forkbeard Fantasy are a group who create stage costumes and props, and make films and peepshow art installations. (I misspelled it as “Folkbeard Fantasy” when I was labelling the Flickr set, which kind of makes sense). There’s a strong theme of fantasy, humour and surrealism in all the work, and most of the things in the exhibition were for touching and using rather than being locked away in glass cabinets.
These are the cheap seats, not Mount Sinai.
At the end of the summer I went to an exhibition by stage set design students at the National Theatre. It’s strange, I’ve never had much interest in dollshouses, but I love toy theatres and set design models.
Museum of 51
I went to see the Museum of 51 exhibition at the Royal Festival Hall a while back, which is about the Festival of Britain. Basically it was a festival in 1951 to celebrate 100 years since the Great Exhibition and cheer people up in grey, rationed post-war London. As well as films, shows, fairs and so on, there were shows of housing and interiors, to show people what they could look forward to after rebuilding and the end of rationing (everything available for sale in WWII was simple and utilitarian and rationed). My dad went to pretty much all the events, seeing as they were mostly around the corner from him in Battersea.