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Nor is Reita’s rebellious teenage daughter Pinky (Anshula Bain), in the throes of first love and lust, keen to move. Sick of the plaster dust that showers from the ceiling whenever Tube trains thunder past, Reita has her eye on bigger, smarter premises and a new house in a more affluent postcode – but she needs the co-operation of her elderly mother-in-law, Big Dhadhi (an enthralling Souad Faress).
SKIN WARS THE ART OF ILLUSION SKIN
Reita helps them maintain an illusion of Western-approved faux femininity – waxing away unwanted hair, bleaching their skin – but here, hidden from the male gaze, they can also exchange confidences. Reita (Kiran Landa) is the ambitious Sikh owner of Lotus Beauty, a sanctuary where British Asian clientele come to be pampered and groomed. That’s a pity, because Pooja Ghai’s production is atmospheric and vivaciously acted. But it never settles on a decisive tone, oscillating so disorientatingly between sitcom, soap and harrowing tragedy that none of its ideas gets the necessary focus. It raises themes of immigrant experience, generational tension, gender, religion, abuse and mental health crisis. Set in a beauty parlour in Southall, west London, Satinder Chohan’s play has so many snarled threads that you need patience and a teasing comb to untangle it. ★ ★ Kiran Landa in Lotus Beauty (Photo: Robert Day) THEATRE Lotus Beauty, Hampstead Theatre, London Tension may be built into this gloriously odd piece, but for real success it needs to be the push-pull tug of desire and restraint, intellect and instinct, not a head-on collision. From the despair of the opening bars, grunting raw in cellos and double-basses, to the manic shimmer of the Philistines’ victory celebrations, Pappano’s score is pure 1950s Technicolour.
SKIN WARS THE ART OF ILLUSION FULL
But theirs is a wary seduction.īy the time everyone breaks out in the famous “Bacchanale” in Act III, we’re firmly into Jones’s home territory of garish, gyrating horror and the moment has passed.Ĭonductor Antonio Pappano and the Royal Opera House Orchestra and Chorus are giving us the full blood and sweat. It wouldn’t be a problem if Elina Garanca’s Dalila and SeokJong Baek’s Samson generated their own. No diaphanous boudoirs or come-hither draperies here – no heat either, in the middle of Gaza. The tone is set, in Jones’s new staging, by Andreas Fuchs’ lighting, bouncing cool off the corrugated iron of designer Hyemi Shin’s Nissen hut. Dalila wants to lure Samson not just into her bed, but into a trap. Bar by bar, the Philistine sex-bomb Dalila breaks down the waning resistance of Samson, leader of the oppressed Israelites, in some of the 19th century’s most voluptuously beautiful music.
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The whole of Act II is a seduction scene. For those who have yet to discover this inspiring artist, your obsession starts here. There is plenty of less-seen material here too – notably a marvellous drawing of her baby son asleep in an ocean of patterned sheets. She launched a programme that spread across San Francisco, an enterprise described here in the insightful film Of Forms and Growth (1978). They were part of the environment.Īsawa slipped out of view in the commercial art world as her commitment to arts education in the US public school system grew. One of Cunningham’s photographs – blown up to cover a wall – shows looped and gathered wire works suspended from the ceiling all around the family home. Her San Francisco home – complete with six children and an abundant vegetable garden – was documented by the venerable photographer Imogen Cunningham, a close friend. By the time she left, her creative spirit and self-belief had been liberated, and she had already developed the looped wire technique with which she would craft her best-known works.Ĭitizen of the Universe goes beyond Asawa’s sculptures to look, too, at the way she combined art-making and family life. Instead, the tides of circumstance carried her to Black Mountain College, a radical creative institution where students and teachers lived and worked side by side, and where Asawa received instruction from some of the most important figures of her day, among them Josef and Anni Albers, and R Buckminster Fuller. Asawa left the camps to train as a teacher but was unable to graduate: it was not deemed safe for her to receive a work experience placement so she was not considered to have completed the course.
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She, her mother and siblings were forcibly interned in 1942, along with 120,000 others of Japanese ancestry. Asawa was born in California between the wars, to a family of Japanese-American market farmers.