This is an actual newsletter

Your eleventh dose of cultural vignettes: Dreamachine, Punchdrunk, animatronic trees

Hello!

One every six months isn’t bad. Let’s do it!

A crisply re-pointed warehouse in Woolwich. Punchdrunk have a new permanent home and a lumo-noir Troy spin off. The building is skirted by a queue of disposable income. A drag queen super fan effervescently inducts a middle-aged couple into the Punchdrunk way. This anarchic, unbounded theatre gives me anxiety sweats and at every doorway or set piece I find myself stroking the walls, wondering how the 1,400 speakers are synchronised and generally trying to deconstruct the magic trick. My partner has done her homework and is completely engrossed. I follow her through the clever cyclical structure, catching repeated crescendos from new perspectives. In spite of myself, I loved it - such scale, drama, choreography! - and the only “but” is that the story felt impenetrable. A clever content strategy, perhaps? Whisper it and they’ll listen harder.

A carpark in Peckham. Percussion instruments litter the bare concrete. A clutch of bashful teenagers sidle in, then four adults and finally a flock - a herd! - of kids file into raked rows facing the audience, tugging at shirt hems, posing, nudging each other along. One lad saunters up to the mic, makes a few casual introductions and then the Volcano is in session. Awkward huddles pour water from one glass to another, the calm before the storm. Gentle Philip Glass-inspired melodies float from glockenspiels. The kids do hand gestures, volcanic gases swirling, then break into staggered arpeggios, the conductor cueing their notes with furious precision. A single timpani thunders with strikes from all sides. The hairs stand up on the back of my neck. The crowd are rapturous, the kids beam uncontrollably. This performance, perhaps their first ever, could be the start of a hundred musical careers thanks to Multi-Story Orchestra. Visit a show. Nice views of London. Get pasta and tiramisu at Oi Spaghetti beforehand. And make a donation.

Multi-Story Orchestra, Peckham

What is Somerset House, Part 1? This curious chunk of central-London real estate is tricky to decode. A grand courtyard and almost-riverside terrace, a series of confounding corridors dotted with occasional cafes and expensive wine bars, a community of media innovators, an edgy newsletter and the austere Courtauld gallery. Picasso’s Self-portraits is a tiny show that costs a lot. The crowd wear cashmere and Stella McCartney. The best thing here is a young girl sketching Picasso’s chair, over and over, into her lined diary. 

What is Somerset House, Part 2? After Picasso, we culture-warped across the courtyard to Now Play This, where children ran and adults hopped. That both shows sit side by side on a Saturday in April is a boon. The best game under this year’s theme of democracy was Ling Tan’s augmented Pong - showing smartly that not everyone plays by the same rules. Overall, there are a few too many single player, sit-and-think games that don’t make the most of the communal environment. So the terrace beckons, the lowest hanging fruit of any cultural venue, where the sun is stretching its spring rays. Nearby, a strange vending machine is befuddling a line of families until a nine-year-old presses buttons at such speed the machine relents. A flap opens; a pool-ball of coloured water wobbles on the shelf; it is placed on the tongue; it pops; people dribble with shock and rejoin the queue to buy another. Welcome to the future!

“Playing Democracy” at Now Play This © Ling Tan

---

A caravan in Wiltshire. I realise this is totally unfair given the sold-out run*, but heck. Jerusalem, by Jez Butterworth with Mark Rylance, is earth shatteringly good. Sharing space with humans at the absolute peak of their craft is truly a privilege.

* Apparently, new tickets released 4th July.

That field in Somerset. The three-year hiatus was gone in an instant. Home again. The second biggest (temporary) city in the southwest hummed with music-hungry, sunburned hordes; dare-devils rode motorcycles in metal cages; the Sugarbabes caused a stampede; hot cider with brandy won best festi-drink (again); and Paul McCartney was very chatty. You’ll be wanting tickets for next year. And a COVID booster. This angry old man take on Glasto made me laugh.

A view from the top during site set up

---

Somewhere in LA. Immersive [Picasso/Kahlo/Monet/Klimpt] is so passé. What you want is an animatronic tree, the latest in the ever-buoyant paid-for immersive scene. Or closer to home the lasers and smoke of a “pretentious nightclub where no-one is dancing.” Future Shock is an expensive trip through 17 good and bad ‘immersive’ installations. I asked the hive mind how a cultural organisation would go about commissioning something ‘immersive’. Summary: it’s complicated and Europe’s largest engineering project is a good case in point. But oh my! Now she’s finally running, isn’t the Liz Line brilliant?

A Forest for the Trees // Glenn Kaino, The Atlantic

A library in Texas. All adverts ever should channel the energy of Curbside Larry. I also read about the Human Library in Denmark - publishing people as open books. All volunteer ‘books’ can be rented for safe, open dialogue that challenges stereotypes. And then there’s the Library of Things, if you just need a pasta maker.

In the cloud. Join me in confounding Craiyon (the AI-powered image making tool -see what they did with the name?) by throwing it philosophical conundrums. And if your fridge has no space left for masterpieces from the little people in your life, you can animate them with this tool.

A perplexing interpretation of ‘good and bad’

---

Back in Woolwich. Lying comfortably, eyes shut, tripping balls. Dreamachine is a pleasingly low tech, high impact visual journey powered by strobe lighting, a Jon Hopkins score and the mysteries of your own grey matter. Originally misconceived as the ‘Festival of Brexit’, Unboxed 2022 is serving up various dishes of British creativity throughout the year. Yes, there are a few apps. But also: a decommissioned oil rig, a moon convoy and Dreamachine. Lumping this into the ‘immersive’ bucket feels clumsy; it’s more like an ayahuascan vision ceremony, but in an old market building on a busy street in Woolwich. The facilitation is delicate, bean bags abound and we even enjoyed the art club followup to try and capture the kaleidoscopes we saw, each person’s experience so pleasingly different.

And finally, a workshop in Japan. This is a beautifully gnarly and musical way to reinvent old tech. Presenting: Electronicos Fantasticos.

Hopefully see you before 2023! How are you doing? What are you up to?

B.

PS - If you’re looking for image-based inspiration, Flim.ai pulls images from movies and is very handy for your more obscure, feeling-based mood board searches.