Latest news with #Festen
Chicago Tribune
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Bee, butterfly and globe sculptures to decorate the Elgin area for Habitat for Humanity
Buzzing bumblebee birdbaths, butterfly benches and big globes will be on display in and around Elgin this summer to promote Habitat for Humanity of Northern Fox Valley's Carter Crossing project in Carpentersville and to raise funds to build affordable housing. The display is made up of more than 30 fiberglass sculptures decorated by area artists in the theme of 'Home Planet Earth.' They were unveiled Thursday evening at The Haight in downtown Elgin. One of them is named 'Buzzin' Springs,' which was painted by Katey Mundorf, a Bartlett resident. 'I found out about the project through a group I belong to, Arts in Bartlett. I wanted to take part because Habitat is such a good cause,' she said. In keeping with the environmental theme of the project, Mundorf said she was inspired by pollinators. She hopes her work illustrates how humans share the planet with nature. Mundorf said her piece will be placed in downtown East Dundee. It was sponsored by the Festen Family of Elgin. Kathryn Festen, who chaired the project, said so far it's netted $179,000 for the organization through sponsorships. Even more money will be generated when the sculptures are auctioned off on Sept. 6. Crews from Elgin, Carpentersville, East Dundee, West Dundee and Barrington will be placing the sculptures in various areas after Memorial Day. They will be on display until after Labor Day, Festen said. The Elgin Area Convention & Visitors Bureau is putting together a promotion that will explain more about the sculptures and where to locate them. Festen said she was delighted with the success of the 'Home Planet Earth' project, for which nearly 160 artists, sponsors and Habitat board members were invited to to celebrate its unveiling. Steve Kroiss, tech businessman and Downtown Neighborhood Association of Elgin board member, was at the event in two capacities. 'I have been involved with Habitat,' he said. 'When I found out about the project, I asked if I could be both a sponsor and an artist.' Kroiss calls his piece 'Earthly Highlights,' and it will be displayed somewhere in Elgin. The globe he painted is stark black and white, not for any thematic reason but because he prefers to create monochromatic artwork, he said. On the brighter side is a butterfly bench called 'A Place to Land.' Artist Jennifer Wambach wasn't at the kickoff, but representatives for the work's sponsor, First American Bank branch in Carpentersville, did attend. Senior branch manager Michelle Charron described the piece as bright and cheery and inspired by the monarch, which is the state butterfly of Illinois. It will spend the summer in Carpenter Park. 'We're happy to help in any way we can,' Charron said. 'Working with Habitat is part of our community reinvestment, and the homes being built will help Carpentersville and those in need of housing.' Carter Crossing is a $12 million project that will have seven new Net Zero homes, according to the Habitat website. For 13 others, Habitat for Humanity of Northern Fox Valley has partnered with Nicor Gas and Southern Company to build single-family homes equipped with a combination of renewable, electric and natural gas technologies, the site says. For more information, go to
The Guardian
13-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid just needed Trump
I first saw the Danish Dogme 95 film Festen in 1998 when I was 30. You had to go to the cinema to see films in those days, when small boys ran barefoot on a conveyor belt to turn the reels, and it's possible I watched its depiction of a family torn apart by violence, resentment, alcoholism and sexual abuse in horror while crunching popcorn, eating hotdogs and drinking a big bucket of Fanta ™ ®. No wonder I was sick on the old Danish woman next to me. Luckily, in Denmark, being vomited on by a stranger is considered good luck, and we began a torrid affair. But I watched Festen again in my 50s and found it hilarious, laughing out loud at its grim affirmation of bleak inevitability. But the film hadn't changed. So what had the world done to me in the intervening years to make my sense of humour so black? Or had all that bacon and pastry I ate in the 00s somehow made me more sensitive to the Danish sensibility? Similarly, once I drank only Yorkshire Tea for a week and briefly became both resentful and ingenious. On Monday night, I made my once-a-decade attempt to enjoy Sam Peckinpah's flawed 1973 revisionist western Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, in which all the women are semi-naked prostitutes or ex-prostitutes in clothes, and yet it's the morals of all the respectable and fully clothed men that are really up for sale. Get it? Screenwriter Rudolph Wurlitzer is asking, who are the real prostitutes? Meanwhile, Bob Dylan wanders about as a character called Alias, who doesn't seem to know where he is, who he is, or what he ought to do. The teenage me found this frustrating, but to this 57-year-old man Alias's blank-faced acceptance of fate seems like a rational response to 2025. Is it possible to get post-traumatic stress disorder by looking at a succession of internet memes of penguins complaining about tariffs? Indeed, this time around Peckinpah's mangled masterpiece made the most sense to date. Billy the Kid represents American freedoms under attack from big business, namely the cattle barons to whom people's rights and lands are dispensable. And the lawman Pat Garrett has to decide whether to do the right thing, or bend the knee to tyranny to survive, like Keir Starmer, and to get rich, like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Snoop Doggy Dogg. (Now there are no ideals or ethics in American politics, if there ever were, and everything is nakedly transactional, where once geopolitical powerplays were disguised as altruism. Here. Have these Jackson Pollock paintings. They will invalidate socialist realism. Here. Have these blankets. They contain smallpox spores and it's cold on the reservation. Sleep well.) And if, like Billy the Kid, you stand up to avaricious authoritarians, you end up dead on the porch in just some brown trousers while Rita Coolidge weeps, or detained at customs like a French intellectual. Peckinpah's once reviled film is now almost too on the nose for 2025! But The Handmaid's Tale seemed like science fiction back in the 80s, when you had to read it if you wanted to get a date with an attractive feminist. But given that Donald Trump's domestic and foreign policies seem based on the same narcissistic notions of manifest destiny that forged the old west, maybe it isn't surprising that Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid suddenly speaks volumes. There's a new sheriff in town and he's working for the modern-day cattle barons, who are farming engagement on vast digital plains with great globs of porn and racism, and pushing out the people who went west to post pictures of cats and sad things about Palestine. Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid at least has the edge musically on the Trump administration because it gave us Dylan's three-chord classic Knockin' On Heaven's Door, as opposed to a degraded version of YMCA, sung by an inauthentic manifestation of the Village People, still dressed as gay-friendly archetypes of the American collective subconscious, but stomping on a human ear – for ever! The central conceit of my current tour show, Stewart Lee vs the Man-Wulf, is that the bullies are taking over politics and comedy and we're somehow seduced by their cruelty. World events currently approach the show head-on at such velocity that the jokes in it buffet around like ball-bearings in a pinball machine and bash into different news stories daily, while I flap the flippers like a blind idiot Brexiter. Some throwaway yuks in last week's column, and last week's live show, about Russell Brand, another of the comic flatulists currently flourishing in the court of King Donald, underwent hasty last-minute rewrites as allegations coalesced into criminal charges, inconveniencing me enormously. Playwrights write their plays only once and then walk away from the scenes of their crimes, even as their storylines are overtaken by world events. I, however, am required to retool my work nightly, while losers like William Shakespeare, Samuel Beckett or Alan Ayckbourn benefit from the notion that their hastily tossed-off and then simply abandoned works are somehow 'timeless', when in fact they are just the products of lazy and careless minds. When I wrote the current standup show last autumn it seemed pessimistic. Now it seems prescient. By the time it closes next year I am worried it will seem nostalgic. Will the newly enslaved Indigenous people of Greenland look back fondly on the 2025 tariffs and the Signal scandal as they mine mobile phone parts from rapidly thawing permafrost, while YMCA booms endlessly out of a subterranean speaker system? We're doomed. Feels like I'm knocking on heaven's door. Stewart Lee vs the Man-Wulf until spring 2026 with a Royal Festival Hall run in July. Sign up here to be kept up with future developments for ever
The Guardian
15-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The week in classical: Festen; Das Rheingold review – a dark, jubilant, five-star Turnage triumph
In the feverish build up to Festen, Mark-Anthony Turnage's new opera to a libretto by Lee Hall, one question has dominated. Why make an opera based on Thomas Vinterberg's cult 1998 film, in which a son accuses his father of child abuse? The implication: why not think of something new. Since nearly the entire operatic repertoire, from Monteverdi's L'Orfeo (1607) to Puccini's Tosca onward, is based on extant sources – myth, plays, novels and, now it exists, cinema – the question should hardly detain us, beyond initial acknowledgment. Opera needs stories that can be sung. Festen, as well as being a dark exploration of human frailty, offers the potential for arias, choruses, crowd scenes, intimate duets, orchestral interludes: the stuff of opera. The result, which finds Turnage (b.1960) at the peak of his powers, is a dazzling and jubilantly entertaining work. It was premiered last Tuesday by the Royal Opera, conducted by Edward Gardner, directed by Richard Jones and designed by Miriam Buether, with a flawless cast, orchestra and chorus. Turnage's first opera was Greek (1988), a prodigious early work based (via Sophocles, and Steven Berkoff's play) on Oedipus Rex updated to the Thatcher era, as aggressive and affecting now as when new. The Silver Tassie (2000), Anna Nicole (2011) and Coraline (2018) followed. A composer loyal to his collaborators, he is back working with some of the same team. Richard Jones directed Anna Nicole, about the American Playboy model, in a production memorable for pneumatic breasts and much pink. Gerald Finley sang the lead in The Silver Tassie, adapted from Sean O'Casey's anti-war play. Now Finley is Helge, the father celebrating his 60th birthday with friends and family. The large cast consists of many singers who, directly or not, have accompanied Turnage throughout his working life. Centre stage was John Tomlinson. As the baffled grandfather he sings only a line or two, but with his years of experience became the paternal linchpin of a collective enterprise. Star singers took their bows together, as part of the company: Allan Clayton as Christian, raped by his father in childhood and still blank with trauma; Stéphane Degout as the younger son, Michael, who moves through life with the grace of a demolition ball; Natalya Romaniw as Helena, the daughter attempting to make family peace through a haze of drug addiction. Among the long list of names to mention: Susan Bickley, Philippa Boyle, Clare Presland, Peter Brathwaite. Set in a 1980s-style hotel that switched between reception, bedroom, kitchen and dining room, helped by Lucy Carter's lighting effects, Buether's sets are stylish and efficient. Action is swift-moving. This makes the impact all the more devastating. Festen, in the hands of Turnage, Hall (credits include the screenplay for Billy Elliot) and Jones, is often funny. Comedy whets the tragedy. Hall's nimble, demotic text bristles with internal rhyme. An opening 'hello' chorus, a hideous, racist rendition of Baa Baa, Black Sheep and, as a centrepiece, a conga support a strong dramatic structure. Above all, Turnage's score, confidently played by the Royal Opera orchestra under Gardner, has assurance, noisy ebullience and lyrical intensity. An army of percussion instruments – whip, ratchet, castanets, maracas, edgy and scratchy in mood – is softened by marimba, harp, piano and celesta. Rumbles of bass clarinets and contrabassoons lurk beneath sparky top lines. Characters are given definition by instrumental colour: Helmut (Thomas Oliemans), the unlucky master of ceremonies, is accompanied by strident high brass; Helge by a torpid sludge of tuba and trombones. Silence, the white space between sounds, is employed to arrest and shock. Turnage has always owed much to jazz, but here the echoes of Britten (the choruses of Peter Grimes) and Tippett (the dances from The Midsummer Marriage), as well as the precision and transparency of his teacher, the composer Oliver Knussen, show Turnage embracing, rather than shying away from, a vital lineage. Opera can be more palpably avant garde, no doubt. In the myriad alliances the art form requires, of music, words, staging, every decision is an extreme experiment. Failure is a norm. This one works. Daring and brilliantly achieved, Festen is the composer's best work yet. The lure of Wagner's Ring, especially in the UK, remains irrevocable if not mysterious. Devotees flocked to Gloucestershire last summer for Longborough Opera's cycle. One couple, dressed as the god Wotan and his Valkyrie daughter Brünnhilde (unless horned helmets are their normal attire), had travelled from the US. Last Sunday, identifiable Wagnerians – you learn to recognise the markings – wandered up and down in freezing rain, waiting for the doors of York Hall in Bethnal Green, east London, to open. Famous as a boxing venue, this is the new home for Regents Opera's in-the-round Ring cycle, built up, with minimal budget, over the past five years. The conductor Ben Woodward has arranged the score for 22 instruments, including electric organ. Initially it sounded underpowered, with rough edges, but my ears grew accustomed. Caroline Staunton's production, with designs by Isabella Van Braeckel, takes place on a small stage. Costumes are eclectic, from folkloric tunic-tabard (Ralf Lukas as the conflicted Wotan) to rocker tight trousers (James Schouten, a wily, hip-swivelling Loge). The set is a group of different sized plinths, prone to thudding to the ground when the action speeds up. The graft needed to bring off two complete cycles in this way (the first ends tomorrow; the second starts next Sunday) is incalculable. Das Rheingold, first of the four operas, had some admirable performers: the Rhinemaidens (Jillian Finnamore, Justine Viani and, also singing Erda, Mae Heydorn), Ingeborg Novrup Børch as an incensed Fricka, Charlotte Richardson's gleaming Freia. As her brother Froh, god of spring and the only half-decent character in the whole of the Ring, Calvin Lee perilously cartwheeled on stage and sang his high phrases with exuberant charm. Then he summoned up the rainbow bridge and it was all over. I doubt the cheers when Tyson Fury beat Rich Power at York Hall were much louder than those that erupted once those rotten, gold-greedy gods had crossed to Valhalla. Star ratings (out of five) Festen ★★★★★ Das Rheingold ★★★★ Festen is at the Royal Opera House, London, until 27 February and will be broadcast on Radio 3/BBC Sounds on 22 March Regents Opera's Ring (cycle 1) at York Hall, London, ends with Götterdämmerung, Sunday 16 February, 3pm; cycle 2 dates: Das Rheingold (23 February); Die Walküre, (25 February); Siegfried (27 February); Götterdämmerung (2 March)
The Guardian
12-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Festen review – Turnage's taut new opera grips, appals and moves
First the film, then the stage play and now an immensely impressive opera. Mark-Anthony Turnage's Festen (Celebration) is the latest incarnation of Thomas Vinterberg's 1998 movie, which is regarded as the starting point of the Dogme 95 movement in Danish cinema. With a libretto by Lee Hall based upon the English stage adaptation, Festen is the fourth opera to be derived from a Dogme film, following Poul Ruders' Dancer in the Dark, Missy Mazzoli's Breaking the Waves and Mikael Karlsson's Melancholia (all based on screenplays by Lars von Trier). It's Turnage's fourth full-length opera for adults, and the benefit of that experience shines through every bar, and is reflected in its immaculate dramatic and musical pacing. Hall has supplied him with a taut, unfussy text in which not a word is wasted, so that the awful story that unravels at the 60th birthday dinner for hotel owner Helge, of a family deeply scarred by child abuse and haunted by a suicide, is presented in a single 95-minute span that grips, moves and appals from first moment to last. Conducted by Edward Gardner, the orchestral score drives this tragedy inexorably, with Turnage showing an infallible sense of when to allow the quiet power of the words to speak for themselves and when to allow his music to take charge, as the action flips from black comedy to bleak horror, or has its course punctuated by authentically operatic choruses, a Danish birthday song, a savagely ironic version of Baa Baa Black Sheep and a deeply sinister conga. There are some devastating silences, alongside the briefest snatches of serene lyrical beauty, and rather more of Turnage's trademark bluesy inflections, which are only one element in a wonderfully varied musical palette. The opera has 25 named roles, as well as a chorus and acting extras, but the way in which the main characters are sharply defined within these teeming stage pictures is remarkable. In settings by designer Miriam Buether that switch between the neutral, bland bedrooms and anonymous function room of a large hotel, Richard Jones's disciplined production handles the sometimes frenzied action adroitly, keeping things entirely naturalistic, and adding a final twist of horror in the closing scene, when after the previous evening's revelations the mood of affected normality among the departing guests mirrors the close of Britten's Peter Grimes. It helps enormously that the cast for this ensemble piece is so uniformly superb, projecting the words with such clarity and vehemence that surtitles are all but redundant. Helge, around whom all the tragedy revolves, has relatively little to say, though he is portrayed with brooding intensity by Gerald Finley, while the children, led by Christian, passionately, heart-breakingly portrayed by Allan Clayton and followed by his sister Helena, sung with contained yet devastating intensity by Natalya Romaniw, and finally their dead sister Linda (Marta Fontanals-Simmons) destroy any pretence of this being a 'normal' family occasion. Stéphane Degout is the unpredictable, unhinged brother Michael, and Rosie Aldridge their unbelieving mother Else, while John Tomlinson and Susan Bickley contribute cameos as the Grandpa and Grandma. If Turnage's score never puts a foot wrong, neither does any aspect of its performance. In repertory until 27 February. The opera will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 22 March and then available on BBC Sounds
New York Times
10-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
In ‘Festen,' a Nightmare Birthday Becomes an Opera
Mark-Anthony Turnage has a habit of provoking stuffy opera fans. The revered British composer's 1988 debut, 'Greek,' appalled some audiences by transposing Sophocles's 'Oedipus Rex' into to a cursing, brawling working-class London family. And some critics hated the pole dancers onstage in 'Anna Nicole,' his opera about the tragic life of the Playboy model Anna Nicole Smith. Now, Turnage is preparing to present 'Festen,' in which a patriarch's 60th birthday party descends into chaos after a speech exposes a family's deepest secrets. When 'Festen' premieres on Tuesday at the Royal Ballet and Opera in London, the show's dark subject matter looks set to upset traditionalists, too. Based on Thomas Vinterberg's cult Danish-language movie of the same name, 'Festen' includes descriptions of child abuse and suicide. The opera's 35-strong cast will fight, engage in simulated sex and hurl racist abuse at the show's only Black character. Yet Turnage insisted in a recent interview that he hadn't set out to challenge anyone — except himself. 'Part of me thinks, 'Why don't I just do a nice fluffy story that will be performed a lot?'' Turnage said. 'But I know if I did, it wouldn't be any good.' 'I need to be provoked,' Turnage added. 'I need an extreme or strong subject to write good music.' This 'Festen' premiere comes just over 25 years after Vinterberg's movie won the jury prize at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival. Released as 'The Celebration' in the United States, 'Festen' was created under the banner of the Dogme95 movement, which required movie directors to follow 10 strict rules. Those included only using hand-held cameras and a ban on music, unless it occurs naturally in a scene. Vinterberg said by phone that he was curious to see how the operatic adaptation would work, given that his movie was mainly about characters concealing their emotions. In opera, by contrast, 'You've got to sing out everything — there's no hiding,' Vinterberg said. Turnage said he came to 'Festen' by accident. He first watched the movie in the mid-2000s, and loved its dark humor, he said, but its operatic potential didn't occur to him straight away. Then, during a binge-watch of Vinterberg films in 2019, Turnage said he realized: 'Wow! This has got all the elements for a grand opera.' The dinner party's guests could be the opera chorus, Turnage recalled thinking, while the movie's speeches — including one in which Christian, the movie's middle-aged lead, accuses his father, Helge, of abuse — would make great arias. 'I could see the people singing onstage,' Turnage said. 'I could see music in it.' The movie also spoke to him personally, Turnage added. While his own family gatherings had none of the horrors of 'Festen,' he said he identified with Christian confronting his father. Turnage said his own father, who died last year, had spanked him as a child, and was 'quite brutal' when he did. The composer said he was still angry about that. 'I wanted my dad to say, Sorry,' Turnage said. 'I knew he never regretted it.' For the 'Festen' libretto, Turnage turned to Lee Hall, a lyricist best known for 'Billy Elliot.' It was a relatively easy task, Hall said, because Vinterberg's screenplay was so dramatic and concise — all he had to do was 'lift the movie gently into a new medium.' Turnage said the music features some jazzy moments, like in his recent guitar concerto 'Sco,' as well as lush strings reminiscent of old movie soundtracks. The opera's set pieces, he added, include a grotesque arrangement of 'Baa Baa Black Sheep' and a 'drunken conga' in which the dinner party guests dance tipsily across the stage. Because the music and libretto came easily, Turnage said, the hardest parts of making 'Festen' work had fallen on Richard Jones, the director, who had to choreograph dozens of singers dancing, eating and arguing their way through the troubled evening. Jones, who also directed 'Anna Nicole,' said in an interview that 10 singers, portraying chefs and waiters, will serve the birthday party's guests a real three-course banquet during the opera, and the singers would eat it onstage. The cast, led by Allan Clayton as Christian and Gerald Finley as Helge, will appear to drink continually, Jones said, and act progressively drunker. The creative team and the Royal Ballet and Opera had tried to protect the performers as they dealt with the opera's dark subject matter, Jones added. During rehearsals, Turnage and Hall replaced a song featuring racist epithets that appears in the movie after some chorus members said they were uncomfortable with singing those words. (The chorus now sings 'Baa Baa Black Sheep' instead.). The company had also employed two drama therapists to counsel singers if they found the subject of child abuse troubling, Jones added. To appreciate the broader message of 'Festen,' the audience would have to look past the abuse, Hall said, and see that 'the leitmotif of the whole project was our collective collusion in denial.' 'Festen' is a broadside against pretending that problems don't exist, rather than tackling them, he added — and that goes for subjects like climate change, as well as child abuse. To highlight that, Turnage and Hall have tinkered with the ending. In the movie, the abusive father arrives at breakfast the next day, and gives a speech of his own, in which he tells his children he loves them, even if they now hate him. But one of his sons ushers the patriarch away. In the opera, Hall said, the father's comeuppance won't be so clear. If all the evening's provocations weren't quite enough, for movie buffs, that could be a sacrilege too far. Though not for Vinterberg. The director said he couldn't remember whether Turnage had asked permission for the change. 'But, whatever,' he added. 'It's hereby granted.'
