A Hawk and a Hack­saw

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.

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Categorised as Music

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.

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