Latest news with #RawMaterial
The Herald Scotland
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
Review, Lear, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh: 'a mesmerising depiction'
Shakespeare's Lear is a man at war in Ramesh Meyyappan's radical reworking of one of the bard's mightiest plays. Standing shell-shocked in a mini arena circled by sandbags, Meyyappan's Lear is cast adrift from both his faculties and family, in conflict with himself as much as the three daughters who tend to him. Possessed with the overbearing anger of a parent whose children have learnt to stand up to him, Lear's own increasingly infantile nature comes to the fore as his psychic wounds get the better of him. All this is brought to life, not with soliloquies and verse, but with barely a word spoken over the show's hour-long duration. As Lear shelters from the blast, Orla O'Loughlin's exquisite production wraps an already moving depiction of a family at war inside David Paul Jones' score. Read more reviews from Neil Cooper: This moves between propulsive piano patterns and string based brooding to give the performance its emotional pulse. Derek Anderson's lighting design adds even more drama to the action played out on Anna Orton's dirt-laden set. Nicole Cooper as Goneril, Amy Kennedy as Regan and Draya Maria as Lear's much loved Cordelia navigate their way around it as casualties of the fallout. In execution, Meyyappan and O'Loughlin's construction recalls the wave of underground East European theatre that came up throughout the late 1980s and 1990s. Its lack of dialogue lends it a similar global appeal by way of an international language of human empathy in response to extreme political adversity. There is a richness and depth as well to its depiction of sanity, madness and the family and the scars of battle that wound all. O'Loughlin's production is presented by producers Raw Material in association with the National Theatre of Scotland and the Singapore International Festival of Arts, where it premiered prior to its all too brief Scottish run. The moving silences left in the play's wake should see it go a whole lot further in a mesmerising depiction of one of the world's great tragedies that is both intimate and epic.
The Guardian
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Koyo Kouoh obituary
At a conference held at London's Somerset House as part of the 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair in 2015, the name of the organiser came up again and again. 'Koyo Kouoh' hooted an Iranian participant to her eager audience. 'We need to have her cloned.' Over the decade that followed, it seemed as thought this might actually have happened. Kouoh, who has died aged 57 after being diagnosed with cancer, was impossibly ubiquitous. In 2015, she was living and working in Dakar, Senegal, where in 2008 she had set up an artists' residency called Raw Material. Seven years later, Raw Material had come to include a gallery, exhibition space and a mentoring programme for young Senegalese artists. Four years after that, in 2019, Kouoh was made director of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art (MOCAA) in Cape Town, South Africa – the largest institution of its kind in the world, but at the time on the point of closing down. 'I was convinced that the failure of Zeitz would have been the failure of all of us African art professionals,' Kouoh recalled in a podcast in 2024. 'For me, it became a duty to save it.' Among other groundbreaking exhibitions curated by Kouoh during her tenure at Zeitz MOCAA was When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting, in 2022. This was still running at the time of her death, having moved to Brussels' Bozar centre earlier this year. (It closes on 10 August.) The New York Times praised the 'sophisticated breadth … aesthetic and art historical, painterly and political' of the show, and the curatorial thinking behind it – in particular, its exploration of what Kouoh called Black self-representation from across Africa and the Afro-diaspora. Kouoh described herself as a pan-Africanist, embracing the term 'Black geographies' to include all those parts of the world in which Africans had, for the most part involuntarily, found themselves. 'Their cultures have evolved, transformed and taken root,' she said. 'Their territories become extensions of the continent. So, from my point of view, Brazil is an African country, Cuba is an African country, even the United States.' As well as her formal posts, Zeitz's director had twice been on the curating board of Documenta in Kassel, Germany, organised Ireland's EVA International biennial in 2016 and a keynote exhibition at the Carnegie International in Philadelphia in 2018. At the end of 2024, Kouoh was named as commissioner for the 61st Venice Biennale, only the second African to be chosen for the job, and the first African woman. She died the week before she was due to announce the biennale's programme and theme. There was little in her past to suggest a stellar career in the international arts. Born in Douala, the economic capital of Cameroon, Kouoh described her background as 'very modest'. Her great-grandmother had been forced into a polygamous marriage as a teenager; her grandmother was a seamstress; her mother, Agnes, left Cameroon in the 1970s to look for work in Switzerland. 'This is the family I come from,' Kouoh told ARTnews. 'That is the essence of my feminism.' At 13, Kouoh joined her mother in Zurich. Like many children of aspirational immigrant parents, she was nudged towards a career in finance, studying economics and becoming an investment baker at Credit Suisse. Her heart was not in it. As she told the New York Times in 2023, she was 'fundamentally uninterested in profit'. It was while working in Zurich that she met a pair of Swiss-German artists, Dominique Rust and Clarissa Herbst. The world they introduced her to was captivating. In October 1995, Kouoh left for Senegal as cultural correspondent for a Swiss magazine. There were other reasons for her departure. Shortly before, she had given birth to a son, Djibril. True to her matriarchal roots, she would bring him up by herself: 'I couldn't imagine raising a Black boy in Europe,' she said. The discovery, in Senegal, of her own, non-European identity had come as a surprise to the young, Swiss-educated banker. 'I realised I was African and Black,' she told Le Monde in 2015. 'It was then that I first felt a hunger for Africa.' Her early studies in economics helped clarify her later thinking. 'Money is a fundamental component of our existence,' she said. 'Every sphere has its own economy, and art is no exception.' In this, too, she saw an African exceptionalism. The western model has been to measure artistic success by success in the saleroom. 'In Africa, it's a completely different story,' Kouoh said. 'I'm happy for artists who are successful in the market, but that is not synonymous with worth.' Her own philosophy, central to her curating and directing, was collaborative rather than competitive. One of the more surprising things about her appointment as commissioner for the Venice Biennale was that it was made by Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, the one-time leader of the youth wing of the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement party and an ally of Italy's far-right prime minister, Giorgia Meloni. What form Kouoh's biennale might have taken – indeed, whether the biennale will now take place – remains for the moment unknown. 'I will, of course, be bringing my intellectual and aesthetic baggage to Venice,' she said recently, in an interview on the website Next Is Africa. 'It will be true to my obsessions and my values.' Punning in French – one of a number of languages she spoke fluently – she laughingly said: 'Venice has given me carte blanche, and I am going to play my carte noire (black card).' Educated by Jesuits as a child in Douala, she came to embrace broader beliefs. After a merry interview in the Financial Times earlier this month, in which the brightly dressed curator confessed to a shoe obsession and shared the view that 'champagne is the only thing you can drink at any time of the day,' Kouoh grew more thoughtful. 'I do believe in life after death, because I come from an ancestral Black education where we believe in parallel lives and realities,' she said. 'There is no 'after death', 'before death' or 'during life'. It doesn't matter that much.' She is survived by her husband, Philippe Mall, by Djibril, and by her mother, Agnes, and stepfather, Anton. Marie-Noëlle Koyo Kouoh, art curator and director, born 24 December 1967; died 10 May 2025
The Guardian
09-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Death of a Salesman review – Arthur Miller's timeless tale of a small man crushed by big dreams
He lies to gain status. His every deal is transactional. He exaggerates for effect. He is seduced by money, deluded about his importance and clearly going to leave his sons with a father complex. Yet Willy Loman is no president. The ordinary guy at the centre of Arthur Miller's 1949 classic might have fallen for a Trumpian myth about the self-made man – crushing competition, fighting for family, privileging the individual – but he is at the losing end of the equation. 'The only thing you've got in this world is what you can sell,' his old neighbour admonishes, knowing this exhausted salesman has sold his last. It is the exhaustion David Hayman plays best. In Andy Arnold's no-nonsense touring production for Raw Material and Trafalgar, with its live music and open staging, the actor starts out crumpled and broken. That someone has called him a 'little squirt' seems cruel, but you can see why. He is drained of colour in a sepia world, deflated and beat. The optimism that sustained him over long years of pushing product to the buyers of New England has become all empty promise. His old lines no longer resonate. He tries them out anyway. So desolate is he that it is hard to see the charismatic huckster he once was. Behind the hyperbole, we can suppose he used to have at least some charm and skill, but here it is too distant a memory. Was he ever well liked? All that remains is the damage, not only to himself but to the family who have bought into the illusion. In an especially powerful performance by Dan Cahill, his son Biff is waking up to the lie. Well matched in stocky physicality with Michael Wallace as brother Happy, he gives every impression of the sportsman gone to seed, a dropout searching for meaning when he can no longer measure success in trophies and sales targets. He carries a brute, inarticulate anger. Offsetting their angst, Beth Marshall gives a fine, subtle performance as mother Linda, showing her as the rock that holds the family together, balanced, forgiving and wiser than anyone in an economic system that is cruel and dehumanising. Touring until 3 May
