Steve_Bamlett_blog

Daily writing prompt

What’s a book, movie, or TV show that you wish you could experience again for the first time?

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It is time for another looking forward period and for some events preparing myself – where appropriate material exists for doing so (a play-script or catalogue already purchase). In those latter cases, I will blog in preparation, Here to announce my schedule (with Geoffee and Baz left behind for one night at home), under this prompt question, for it strikes me that in more than one way these visits are about avoiding magical thinking and wish-fulfillment fantasy (always full of danger as well as moonshine) and realising that all experience that is an experience never merely repeats a thing done at other times and once for the first time, but is itself a first time. Here’s the schedule:

The first show has, a new retrospective of Anish Kapoor’s sculpture (with some works not known to me and recent) has three reasons for feeling a first time experience. First, my major experience of Kapoor has been with book representations of works of huge stature, like Marsyas, shown in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall but by me only in the book about it. Some of these are perhaps not quite so huge but are space-reconfigurers, transforming their current space in look or physical access and making it anew. Second for instance that would require re-assembly or are place specific, like Tenemos, so seeing them ‘in the flesh’ here is a ‘first time’. Second, the space in which they are located changes that space – seen that way then ‘for the first time’. Third, even if seen before, though this applies more to the ‘he spellbinding world of Zurbarán’, as the National Gallery call it. an artwork changes in ways that you see it, or into it, as if ‘for the first time’ seome new vision, senbsation or cognitive-affective interpretation. Here is the Southbank explanation:

One of the most influential artists of our time, Anish Kapoor returns to the Hayward Gallery, where he staged his first major UK survey almost 30 years ago.

Kapoor’s exhibition fills the entire gallery building with a series of immersive works, many of which press against the gallery walls and floors or descend from the ceiling to create an uncanny sensation of awe and wonder.

The exhibition features works from many of Kapoor’s most iconic series: flawless steel mirror sculptures that warp, distort and disorient; mysterious objects coated in Vantablack – the blackest known substance in the world – that mystify us with their extraordinary light-absorbing properties; and seemingly depthless voids opening within the gallery, drawing us in with a thrilling sense of vertigo.

The exhibition also introduces dramatic recent works: visceral paintings and sculptures that confront us with the fragility of human existence.

In addition, the artist presents several new works that appear to turn the world inside out and upside down, including a pair of monumental installations in the artist’s signature red.

Part of our 75th anniversary celebrations, the exhibition is curated by Ralph Rugoff, marking his final show as Director of the Hayward Gallery after 20 years in the role.

After settling into my single room, I will be in the evening at the Bridge theatre for ‘the first time’. seeing theatre I have never seen before is prt of the excitement. i had always intended to go there about this time but for their production of Chekhov’s Ivanov, which was cancelled and replaced by this new production of Aeschylus’ Oresteia but transformed from austere Greek mythical spectacle (yes, seen before in productions of versions like Tony Harrison’s and Zinnie Harris (to name only two), but here by Simon Stone, who makes the Greek content into the nightmare of a modern family. I missed Lorca’s Yerma and Ibsen’s The Man from The Sea (sob) and so this is ‘my first time’ Simon Stone adaption and promised spectacular staging of the kind he is renowned for. But isn’t such a great work, ‘adapted’ or not, always a ‘first time’, not only in production and acting values, but in the way it ttaches to one’s own life and the life of the globe which determines you to re-see, re-feel, re-hear, re-sense, re-think it. Below the Bridge Theatre write up:

A contemporary family wakes up in a Greek myth and can’t seem to find a way out of their hellish destiny.

Writer and director Simon Stone is joined set designer Lizzie Clachan, lighting designer Nick Schlieper, and casting director Jessica Ronane CDG.

“The Oresteia is one of the theatre’s great foundational texts and it hasn’t lost any of its potency to this day. A family haunted by its part in an unjust war, the painful burden of inherited trauma and inter-generational conflict, the descent into an increasingly merciless vortex of violence: as long as humankind wages wars and as long as families tear themselves apart this story will remain painfully, cathartically relevant. It is with great excitement that we embark on bringing this tale into our times at the Bridge Theatre.” Simon Stone

The Oresteia is produced by London Theatre Company and Wouter van Ransbeek.

Waking up the next morning, I was determined to take the day more slowly and so don’t start till mid-day at the National Gallery. In this case I do not think I do get a ‘as for the first time’ view of the institution and its architecture, but here is a painter reviewed and that I know only in part, Zurbarán, and only got to know through The Tribes of Israel paintings stored now in Bishop Auckland’s Bishop’s Palace (two are in this exhibition – so this will be a reunion). But this exhibition promises new paintings, seen by me for the first time, and a chance to see ‘in the flesh’ paintings that respond to that fleshly mutuality of appreciation – the Counter-Reformation reality of the flesh, but hiding and manifesting spirit. I will blog on my excitement about this separately before going, but here is the National Gallery take:

From there to David Hare’s Grace Pervades – a first Hare play in the flesh for me, though I intend to read the play and blog on it before I go. It is a first time too in see the reputation of Sir Henry Irving and Ellen Terry in the flesh, and their talented Craig family children. The whole family is more than a reality and even more than a myth of the shaping of theatre. For me, a first time of thinking about Irving beyond the way he inspired Count Dracula in the mind of his theatre manager, Bram Stoker.

And then home – exhausted no doubt. At least that experience will not be for the first time, And I hope I survive it, because, for some things, there is definitely ‘a first time’. But for these rare things it is because it is ‘the last time’ too.

Bye for now

With love

Steven xxxxxxxxxxxxx