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Showing posts with label St Pancras Church Crypt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label St Pancras Church Crypt. Show all posts
Sunday, March 3, 2019
Sunday, March 3, 2019
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Catharsis Theatre's 'Ashurbanipal: The Last Great King of Assyria ticks a lot of my boxes. As a history nerd it's nice to see a play that deals with non-British history, and as I don't know much about the Neo-Assyrian Empire it's a good opportunity to learn. Plus, I am always up for spending time in crypts - and the one under St Pancras Church is a long-term fave. Plus plus, I love immersive theatre.
So on paper, this is the show for me. I tend not to go and see shows on the weekend because it's nice to have a couple of nights off reviewing: but for something as promising looking as this I made an exception. Sadly, I wish I hadn't.
Let's get one thing out of the way for starters: despite billing itself as "an immersive theatre event", Ashurbanipal is not immersive theatre. Immersive theatre is pretty fuzzily defined, but the core concept is that it allows audiences to interact with the show and influence its progression. For example, For King And Country at CoLab Factory turned its audience into politicians and generals repelling a Nazi invasion, while Punchdrunk's The Drowned Man largely ditched structured drama in favour of audiences exploring a space and forming their own narratives.
By comparison, Ashurbanipal is a tightly scripted play that requires the audience to simply move between performance spaces to follow the action. As soon as I realised this some of the enthusiasm drained out of me: shows falsely billing themselves as immersive really annoys me. This is very clearly a promenade piece and Catharsis should bill it as such.
But enough about what this play isn't - what is it? We spend the majority of the two hour run time in the court of King Ashurbanipal (Laurence Varda), who is preoccupied with putting down a rebellion from his estranged brother Shammash-skum-ukin (John Lutula). As his military campaign wobbles he senses treachery in his court, with his wife Queen Libball-sharrat (Michal Banai) and his chief scholar Balasi (Wayne Wilson) potentially plotting against him.
It's interesting history, but that doesn't necessarily make it dramatically interesting. Much of the action feels sub-Shakespearian, with the court betrayals and power corrupting stuff feeling like bits of Macbeth and Hamlet have been mashed up together. There's nothing objectively wrong about that (after all, Shakespeare himself was notorious for it), but the writing here lacks the lyricism and poetry needed to bring this story to life.
In addition, setting this within a subterranean crypt doesn't particularly fit with the story. On one hand, I like the metatextual aspect of setting a play about ancient history underground in the foundations of a site of Christian worship, but the claustrophobic tunnels are at odds with the scope of the story and the sparse sets simply don't conjure up images of an opulent palace.
That said, I do very much like subterranean spaces, so when the show became less than engaging I could at least occupy myself by admiring the elegant Victorian brickwork and reading the stacks of grave markers piled against the corners of the tunnels.
But, y'know, when your mind is wandering so far from the show you're watching that you're trying to work out how the masons managed to construct these perfect arches, something has gone very wrong. If you recently saw the British Museum's I Am Ashurbanipal exhibition and really wanted to see a play about it then go, but if you want an emotionally compelling narrative or an immersive experience then it's a hard avoid.
Ashurbanipal: The Last Great King of Assyria is at the Crypt Gallery until March 3rd. Tickets here.
Thursday, February 27, 2014
Thursday, February 27, 2014
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When someone asks you if you want to wear a mask made of human hair and stalk around a crypt distributing pomegranate seeds to people there's really only one answer - YES! This is how I wound up spending my Wednesday night; sequestered in a brick-line, corpse-vacated vault, spookily tip-toeing about, shoving a plate piled high with sticky chunks of redness under innocent noses and demanding they have a gobble. All this was in service of Live In Your Dreams!, an exhibition that aims to reimagine this crypt as a "collective dream", an underworld where subconscious symbols can frolic in the moody subterranean halflight.
This is a mini-labyrinth, a tangle of curved corridors and dusty alcoves. This space once contained the coffins of those notable enough to be bunged underneath a central London church. They've all gone now, dispatched to wherever it is they send the dead when those in charge want to get rid of a load of dusty bones. Tonight they've been replaced with an art pic n' mix; every nook and cranny home to work covering a vast amount of mediums. This was a high quality exhibition, but though I liked damn near everything on display I don't have time to write about every little thing - so here's my personal highlights.
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| Susan Beattie - Loop Curtain |
First up a big pile of guts. Susan Beattie's Loop Curtain lurks just inside the entrance. Composed of sheep's intestine, ox bung and raw sheep's fleece it lies in an organic, slightly nauseating, tangle. The whole thing looks maggotty to me; especially the large ox bung (which I think is a cow's rectum/anus) sitting in the middle. A big old heap of maggots isn't exactly a pleasant sight to come across, but then we're in a place expressly designed to accommodate the process of decomposition. As gross as maggots are they're a direct manifestation of new life from death. It's interesting to look at this place as the home of the evicted dead tenants - and what would the dead have bouncing around their skulls if not maggots?
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| Susie Calvert - Microcosm |
Though a morbid shroud hangs over the crypt there's pinpoints of brightness glimmering in the gloom. Susie Calvert's Microcosm consists of pop-inflected urban environments drawn in crayon on plywood. Using a chunk of masonry as a stage they're a shattered kaleidoscope; an individual's snatched memories of a city able to be assembled in infinite configurations. When we dream of a physical place we assemble it from a jigsaw puzzle of subconscious details. A half-glance at a lamp-post, a broken window that catches our eye, the way the sunlight casts shadows across the frontage of buildings - all of these become recombined in our dreams to form a shade: our individual impression of a location. Purely on an aesthetic level it's a breath of fresh air nestled deep in the dank grey and browns of the crypt.
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| Boris Raux - the space divider - mushrooms version |
Similarly lightening things up is Boris Raux' the space divider - mushrooms version. I met Boris before at the Experimentations show last November; there he had condensed seawater into thousands of squishy spheres, here he's created a smell dispersal device: two tubs of coloured liquid with a fan blowing across the top. A sweet smell wafts around the entire gallery, apparently the smell of cave and psilocybin mushrooms. Boris has just a touch of the mad scientist to him, marrying an idiosyncratic personal alchemy onto new kinds of technology. The piece looks vaguely like a satellite, the two pools of liquid solar panels between them. Physically it's no great shakes; though the liquids glitter and swirl in enjoyable random fractal swirls. But this art doesn't stop at the borders of the installation, it hangs in the atmosphere - tiny molecules of vaguely hallucinogenic liquids suspended in the air, embedding themselves within the noses of all who enter. So Boris has literally succeeded in getting inside his audience's head; impregnating us with his ideas and philosophies.
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| Andy Flett - Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me |
In terms of work that creates an immediate physical impression, there's few things in the gallery that stood out as much as Andy Flett's Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me. Dreamland can be understood as an infinite land where anything is possible, where all the impulses, fears and desires that lurk within us come out to play without supervision. His piece, a roll of paper containing descriptions of his dreams in ever-decreasing type, is an unfiltered gate between his mind and the paper. His dreams, ranging from the banal to the bizarre, are thrown into one long stream of thought. The dreaming mind has no real concern over whether what it's putting out is fun, normal or pleasant - just spewing the disconnected detritus of what's rolling around in our brains back at us.
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| Mona Choo - Stuck |
The final piece I particularly dug was Mona Choo's Stuck. Here the passages of the crypt become home to small, tangled up doodles of people on twisted up acrylic. They cling to the walls, wrapped around each other with a childlike vulnerability - the plastic rolling up like one of those fortune-telling fish you find inside a Christmas cracker. The figures sway in the drafts that breeze through the tunnels, giving them a strangely quivering sort of life. One pair of tangled up people twirls in the breeze, intertwining in a vaguely Picasso-y way. This felt like the dream of the crypt itself; the spirits of the dead remaining in its memories even though their physical remains have long departed.
If you like exploring subterranean secrets and touching the fabric of the subconscious, then Live in Your Dreams! is easily worth checking out. The work on display complements the space fantastically, breathing some life and imagination into these dusty old bricks. Aside from what I've mentioned there's a tonne of other great stuff there, so pay a visit - you won't regret it!
Live in Your Dreams finishes on the 3rd of March - opening times 12-6pm.
Monday, July 30, 2012
Monday, July 30, 2012
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One of the nicer London experiences it's possible to have is happening upon a sign with 'Gallery' and an arrow pointing somewhere on it. You can end up in the strangest places, often places so interesting that the art can take a bit of a back foot to the location. 'Points of Contact' is art exhibited in such an atmospheric space that the gallery itself can seem like the most interesting piece of all. This isn't to say that I didn't enjoy the art at 'Points of Contact', more that heading into a dark, old and cobwebby space underground in central London is one of my favourite things.
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| Entrance to the crypt. |
I mean, look at that entrance! Who wouldn't want to head for a look around down there? Hosting art exhibitions in a crypt gives proceedings a rather solemn affair, the air is cool and still, and as it was fairly empty when I attended, it was also very quiet. The walls and floor were unadorned brick, and corridors lead to small, dark and slightly claustrophobic rooms. In a space like this you begin to wonder where all the bodies are, there is the occasional tomb marker here and there, but on the whole the place seems to have been stripped of much mention of its inhabitants. There is a pile of tombstones in the centre, which I assume would have once occupied the walls of the space.
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| Tombstone Blues |
Fortunately, the art exhibited within tended to complement the atmosphere of its surroundings rather than be overpowered by it. The artists exhibited here all studied at the Working Men's College in Camden for a Foundation Degree in fine art, presumably they have learnt at the same rate therefore meaning that the art on show has some familial relationship to each other. The pieces might be from a variety of different artists with widely varying things to say, but they all spring from approximately the same source. The work is multi-disciplinary, encompassing sculpture, found objects, paintings and audio-visual work.
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| Halo of Eggshells |
Among the highlights that I particularly enjoyed was Phoebe Smiths's 'Place of Safety', a halo of crushed eggshells on the floor of the gallery. It's a neat little visual joke that rewards you for 'getting it'. I like the fact that it's laid out in a kind of halo, I suppose if you're exhibiting under a church then it feels quite appropriate. It made me wonder if the church puts any restrictions on what can be shown in its gallery or not. The sometimes uneasy relationship between religion and art could neatly be described as walking on eggshells - and visitors to the gallery literally get to do that here. As we are directly underneath the church, the congregation walking above also gets to do it, albeit unwittingly.
Another piece I liked was Jane Musgrove's 'The Timbre of Your Voice' a collection of books sealed in wax. They belonged to the artist's father, who took possession of them after he died. The books were in another language, and unreadable to the artist so they've were sealed in wax. It's a quite striking effect, effectively freezing the text written inside them. This, like the eggshells above is nicely tactile - we're invited to pick up and handle them. I generally enjoy art like this that seeks to stimulate more senses than just sight. Here, being able to hold the book seems to create a paradox - if I really wanted to it would have been possible for me to crack the wax shell open, but the text within themselves would still have been impenetrable to me. The only really valid way for me to interact with them is as objects, and them being sealed in wax underlines that fact.
Walking further down the corridors of the crypt we come to Andy Charalambous' ultraviolet starburst creation. This is accessible from a two different places in the gallery, one close to the epicentre of the 'burst', and one at the outer ends of it. Both are interesting viewpoints, although I preferred getting up closer to the centre. The taut strings that compromise the bursts of light look like laser beams from a distance, and it is only upon getting closer that you notice them gently swaying in the light breeze. This is a piece that can only work properly in a lightless area - without the ultraviolet glow it would be pretty dull. Even in the dark of the crypt some light intrudes upon it at the far end, ever so slightly spoiling the effect. Even so, the scale of the piece is great, and as an effort to physically capture the action of light in motion in a static object it succeeds.
In this exhibition, more than many I've seen in London lately, the art seems to live or die by how well it fit into the aesthetic of the crypt. I'm not sure I would have enjoyed Celine Samson's piece, 'The Ghost Diner' (the white, plaster pieces in the picture above) if they didn't bring to mind a row of gravestones and complement the slightly morbid surroundings. Having a space like this to display in allows you to be dramatic with your lighting, the artist has almost complete control of how things look without having to be concerned with daylight or street light pollution. The whiteness of the material above gets picked out by the light, looking clean and fresh against the grimy Victorian walls of the crypt. It serves them well - in a modern gallery where the walls are invariably pure white they would run the risk of 'melting' into the background.
Jane Musgrove's collection of hanging feet - 'Still' - are another example of the location complementing the art. The positioning of these casts of feet, using clingfilm and sticky tape injects an element of humanity into a place notable by its absence of representations of people. There were numerous casts hanging in front of the one pictured above, but this one in particular stood out due to its position. We can presume that directly below them are a collection mouldering Victorian skeletons, the last physical remnants of individuals, so it seems fitting that surrounding them are the physical impressions that the artist has left of herself. Whereas in that stone box are the inner framework of what's left of people long passed, the art surrounding it shows the outer impression of someone that's still alive. Maybe as a juxtaposition it's a little on the nose, but it's still pretty neat and manages to make a point while showing some reverence for the dead whose homes the artists have temporarily occupied.
There were a few pieces that I don't think worked particularly well down here. The majority of the two dimensional paintings and photographs were overpowered by the architecture they were placed in. Aside from that, some of the subject matter and form seemed at odds with the sepulchral atmosphere, especially Andy Charambolous' photographs representing physical representations of Feynmann diagrams. While a very neat idea, and well executed, theoretical science just didn't seem to work in the context of a crypt. I'm all for an exploration of the conflict between hard science and contemplative mysticism, but in this location it's an all or nothing proposition - you either devote the entire place to it or don't. It's for this same reason that I didn't think Maureen Klingels-Pruss' sculpture pictured above worked - despite being a beautiful and finely executed object - here it tends to meld with the walls of the crypt and the hard, cold, clinical lines are too much at odds with its dirty, dusty, mildewy surroundings.
For something randomly wandered into from off the street this was a very nice exhibition, and upon writing this article I wished I had taken more photos. I very much enjoyed the blocks of soap, the book of buttons and the 'lightbox' off in one of the rooms, but unfortunately forgot to photograph them. What this exhibition underlined for me is the importance of making sure art is complemented by the space its placed into and vice versa. St Pancras' church crypt has such a unique atmosphere that it becomes almost immediately apparent when a piece seems is working against it. I'm sure that my opinion of much of the art I didn't think so highly of would be changed having seen them in a more sterile gallery environment, or that some of the things I very much enjoyed were largely because of where they were, not what they were.
Edit: Thanks to Celine Samson for updating me as to the names of the pieces and the artists that made them.
Edit: Thanks to Celine Samson for updating me as to the names of the pieces and the artists that made them.
'Points of Contact' is at the Crypt Gallery, St Pancras church until the 1st of August 2012, 11am to 7pm
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