My Big Gay Icon

The most interesting thing about the Gay Icons exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery isn't the absence of William Shakespeare (the 'icons' have to be in photographs, so Will didn't stand a chance), Oscar Wilde, Kylie Minogue or even Judy Garland, it's the diversity on offer. Even if Elton John's choice of Graham Taylor (manager of Watford FC) is the most perverse thing in the room (was Taylor gay? or maybe he soothed the pop star after his car-crash marriage to Renate Blauel?).

The images themslves are often banal - though Lily Savage's embittered fag-filled face on Blackpool pier is priceless - the choices odd and sometimes obscure, and yet, the pleasure of spending an hour and half in the company of men and women, gay and straight, black and white, who have stood against the tide of prejudice and hatred lifted my spirits.

For those, like the Observer's Barbara Ellen, who bemoan the lack of trash pop tarlets in the line-up as suitable inspiration for a youngster coming out from a provincial town I say, check out history. Metropolitan gay youngsters may have a dizzy few years on a diet of plastic pop - but losing it bars and clubs was never the road to liberation. It was won on the streets, against the odds and in people's faces. It's like suggesting the Suffragettes would have been more effective by attending the music hall rather than chaining themselves to railings. The word 'icon' has been cheapened, yet if its sense of a venerated image isn't to be lost then the likes of Nelson Mandela, Bessy Smith, Peter Tatchell and, even Lily Savage are the best torch bearers for tomorrow's gay youth.

By the bye, my 'gay icons' in no particular order are: John the Baptist (Christianity's matre d'), Leigh Bowery, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Buddha, puff pastry, things that are shiny and move (see also disco balls/Christmas), bubble wrap and Jean Genet.

Carlos Acosta's flights of fancy

Does Carlos Acosta know when he's hamming it up? I ask the question after seeing his latest '...and guests' performance last night at the Coliseum. If he does,

he keeps it to himself, which is wise for when he and his three male chums make macho whoopy in the gloaming of Plisetsi's 1973 Canto Vital, a snigger or knowing wink would have had the audience in stitches. The conceit of four near-naked youths shooting arrows, clambering over one another, miming drumming and generally making frolicsome without eroticism looks daft. So daft, I had to look away.

Though the ladies in the audience seemed to love it. Which begs the question, is Acosta presenting a kind of high art Chippendales meat-fest? By the amount of male flesh on display including the raunchy unwrapping of Othello's loin cloth in the pas de deux of that name leaves me in little doubt.

And why not? Traditionally ballet's jewels - the glittering expose groins and buttocks of ballerina's have been the eye-arresting consolation for the reluctant husbands and partners of these women. At last the girls have something to ogle beyond the overstuff pouches of the male stars. In last night's series of ballets torsos were only covered in the final Spanish inflected piece, Majismo before finally being flung off again in the on-stage/backstage coda.

Tune! The Takacs Quartet, Sunday 3rd May 2009 , Brighton Festival

To play a Haydn string quartet followed by one by Bartok just five minutes later, requires the kind of technique over which many string quartets will stumble, but the fall might be a valiant one all the same.  The fact that the Takacs played the Bartok C major no 4 - a quartet that requires a tonal understanding at odds (ie.chromaticism) with regular modalities and technical prowess (the central movement is played pizzicato through the full range of dynamics) with greater ease and facility than the classical Haydn (his late F Major op 77 from 1799) is credit to their phenomenal skill and the fact that the quartet has been going since 1975 (albeit with several team changes and one death). 

TheTakacs may now be an international band of musicians, yet the Hungarian folk/classical tradition is embodied by them. The Bartok here was as fresh as a first performance might be imagined in 1927. 

If this quartet were a team of TV chefs - they'd have made a passable light sponge followed by an exemplary and technically advanced souffle  full of exotic and delicious stuff.

Unfortunately, I had a train to catch and missed the second half performance of Schumann's String Quartet in A major Op. 41 No. 3. What a pity as the Takacs are part of the worthy forces pushing Schumann's chamber music back into the spotlight after his glory days in the late nineteenth century where his chamber music was seen as an early herald towards Brahms.

Haydn String Quartet in F major Op. 77 No. 2

Bartok String Quartet in C major, No. 4

Schumann , String Quartet in A major Op. 41 No. 3 (missed)

Dusty Bin, Les Ballets C de la B's Ashes, Brighton Corn Exchange 2nd Mary 09

Ghent-based dance collective, C de la B's new work Ashes, choreographed by Koen Augustijnen was billed as one of the opening highlights of Brighton's 09 festival (curated this year by sculptor Anish Kapoor). 

This was no highlight. A bunch survivors of some un-named catastrophe slowly moved from alienated separation to a kind of wave-like unity with a bit of trampolining on the side.  Surely this kind of dirge would be more suitable at the end of an arts festival? Perhaps one that had incurred some kind of disaster like the ferry connection to the continent being down. In which case we wouldn't have to see it at all. That would be a highlight.

Perversely, Augustijnen chose coluratura Handel arias to accompany his hokum post apocalypse choreography (sung by the singularly good counter tenor Steve Dugardin and soprano Irene Carpentie). Handel's ouevre for contemporary dance was ambushed by American Mark Morris thirty years ago, and anyone bold or foolish enough to make a move on this music will risk instant comparison with a master.

While Morris's moves are humane, witty and moving; Augustijnen's are lumpen, acrobatic and crude.  Noted the use of the roof-like trampoline in Ashes was a welcome distraction from the Bedlam below. Aside: why is repeatedly walking into immovable objects, usually walls, such a trope in so much contemporary dance? It's a cartoonish view of existential frustration. Pina Bausch can get away with this stuff, but then she had her dancers walk into walls in the 1970s. Les Ballets C de la B are still struggling to find the exit in 2009.

I assume Handel was chosen for the marked contrast between the soaring beauty of his baroque sonorites and the flailing movements of the alienated folk below - a point that's made in the first five minutes. It's a point that's made again and again for the next hour and a half. The real star of the show is a young timpanist who sashays between marimba and timpani (incuding gongs and bowed cymbals) with a grace facility patently lacking in the choreography below, which reminded me that the great Diamanda Galas was playing next door and we were stuck in here.

Revolutionary Road - Madame de Sade, Donmar West End 9/04/09

Madame De Sade is a play in which nothing happens - three times over. Three acts where the real action - the Marquis' orgiastic whipping frenzies and bloody splatter-fests - are only divulged with keening pathos by M. de Sade (Rosamund Pike) and with coquettish exuberance by the Contesse de Saint-Foid (Frances Barber). The juicy stuff happens off-stage. Which is a pity.

The play's main protagonists invert the usual moral frame - where the Marquis's brutal sexual transgressions are held in holy esteem by his wife, sister-in-law and de Saint-Foid (a kind of 18th Century whipped up  Jilly Cooper), while his mother-in-law, Madame de Montreil (Judi Dench) doggedly tries to protect her daughters from the tsunami of sexual violence and scandal. Yet she alone becomes mired with the play's true moral repugnance by prolonging the Marquis's imprisonment through her own duplicity. She is the only one deserving our disgust apparently.

Of course, this unholy tale is spun against the backdrop of revolutionary France, where the ancien regime is crumbling under the weight of its corruption and vanity like a vertiginous powdered wig encrusted with acres of lice-riddled lard. The implication being that the Marquis's transgressions are so abhorrent to the social order as his gloves-off brutality holds an unshaking mirror to the order's own corruption. It's a neat trick and one Freud would call 'projection'.

But Madame de Sade isn't a good play. Not enough happens and there's far too much declamation, like a long-winded speech night at the Women's Institute. But, it is a very interesting cultural artifact. Written in 1965 just before the emergence of the gay liberation movement,  by the troubled and sexually repressed  gay Japanese artist, Yukio Mishima, the play bubbles with the thrill of transgression. A society which 'projects' its anxiety, horror, disgust and violence into the body of a polymorphously perverse libertine writer, De Sade must have felt uncannily familiar for Mishima, who committed ritual suicide in 1970.

Madame de Sade is a part of a glorious, glittering, and now, mostly defunct, pantheon of gay literature where the prostitute, outlaw, thief and murderer are transformed into figures of reverence. I'm especially thinking of the work of Jean Genet, Joe Orton and John Rechy.  Their idea of celebrating the outsider -wearing the hurled abuse of straight society as a crown of glory was an important, and necessary step to sexual emancipation. It may seem tired and hackneyed now, but it really was revolutionary then.

Pond life - American Ballet Theater, opening night Swan Lake 25/03/09

How does Swan Lake keep us coming back for more? It's a cheese-fest. Von Rothbart is a malicious owlish no-mark from the 'he's-behind-you!' school of scary. Prince Siegfried is a dreamy mummy's boy unable to fire his cross bow at the pretty swan lady, the wuss, and the courtly dances have the hackneyed feel of a 'culture night' on a school trip to Budapest. Even Tchaikovsky's magical score, which can soar with heart-stopping transcendent melody, also slips at times into oom-pa-pa dirge. Those pesky court dances again.

In last night's opening of American Ballet Theater's version of the old warhorse, matters were further hampered by Zack Brown's costume designs which had the gawdy feel of a Disney Paris's Main Street party. Electric blue, bright purple and scarlet fail in fussy bustled dresses to suggest anything other than a five-year-old's colouring book. Yet Brown's sets, for a touring piece,  had the weight and heft of a more permanent production, suggesting grandeur through scale. Though the attempted transcendence of Odette and Siegried's reunion in death, as the couple were magically reunited in the heart of a rising sun, was let down by a creased backdrop that could have done with a jolly good iron.

And yet, and yet... the moment Siegried (David Hallberg) was padding through the forest to the lake's edge -  as scary with this cross bow as a toddler with a stick -  Odette (Michele Wiles) appears in full flight swan mode among the craggy trees and dry ice - I was holding my breath. The cheese had turned to liquid gold in a way that special alchemical way only classical ballet seems to manage. Wiles's limpid arms, graceful in their wing-like action as a pair of sinuous snakes jutting from her shoulders; her poised legato balances, for in that magical realm she inhabits all the clocks have somehow stopped; her vulnerability and thwarted strength were conjured with limpid precision. We'd left Disney far behind and had awoken, where exactly? It felt like heaven.

American Ballet Theater's Swan Lake turns up the volume on all the signifiers of the chocolate box, yet somehow knows that you can't break this galumphing warhorse no matter how gawdy your painted sunsets. There is a confidence and thrust in their dancing that makes some European classical companies look plodding. From Von Rothbart's (Marcelo Gomes) audacious seduction of international princesses, like a playboy on Viagra, to the military precision of the corps de ballet's swan drills, we were in the hands of a superb company who knows to its very toes that even the stinkiest cheese can taste sublime.

Signifying Nothing - premier of Maliphant's Eonnagata, 26 Feb 09

As Sylvie Guillem swept onto the stage of Sadler's Wells last night enclouded in a billowing crimson opera gown designed by Alexander Mcqueen, expectations were as high as any I've felt in the theatre. Yet here was one of ballet's great stars, a woman whose body of sprung steel enables a technique of dizzying virtuosity doing the one thing she should never do in front of an audience, she opened her mouth and... spoke. Guillem's halting English and rococco words concerning an obscure French hermaphrodite, Chevalier d'Eon, punctured our expectations as swiftly as a harpoon through a Zepellin. We never recovered from the blow.

This interminable performance of stilted set pieces, stop-start ideas and willful obscurantism gave off the stale air of an enclosed rehearsal studio where ideas were smothered at birth like unloved babes. What on earth were they all thinking? The 'dream team' of Lepage, Maliphant and Guillem became less than the sum of their parts as if their collective talents pooled became de-oxygenated sludge. Yes, the sight of Guillem using the heel of sword to write a table-top letter was pleasingly eye-catching in a cartoonish way and lighting director, Michael Hulls can be relied upon to create mesmerising lighting effects in which, in this work the performers ambled through rather than danced. And Lepage's simple 'tables as prop' concept was ingenious, as these everyday objects became doors, hiding spaces, walls, a stage, mirror or boat by their easy inversions and stackings.

But McQueen's costumes were the only real stars on last night's stage. The tricky balancing between historical reference and allowing dancers to move easily has tripped up many a ballet costumerier with far more experience than this catwalk king. Yet his crinolines, kimonos, tulled capes and skirted gilets floated and scooped the air with a pleasing lightness sadly brought swiftly back to earth by the stultifying ponderousness in the rest of the production.