Exploring with P and B: London Shows

We went to five shows. Four were traditional theater. A couple were quite flashy but still, theater. We enjoyed them all even though they varied from Matilda - The Musical to Shakespear's Coriolanus.

The fifth was a digital illumination. More on that below.

Matilda: The Musical

This is a Children's Book translated to the stage. It had the simplest, staging, just something that served as a protrusion of land or some furniture and some similar background. Being a children's story, many kids were in attendance. and, for us, it won the post-show award for charm....After exiting the theater we were surrounded by colorfully decorated electric carriages loaded with or waiting for kids and families to tour around the neighborhood.

Coriolanus

This is a Shakespearien story of "Public" life in Rome and the difficulty of transferring battle field skills into Political life. For staging it uses an interesting huge cubical structure suspended over the stage. This was lowered briefly between sets to reveal a wide range of smaller rectangular pieces to frame the action. And while the play takes place in Roman times, the costumes were modern dress.

Coriolanus was at the National Theatre which has a fine dining option (Ladnum). We met our friends Mark and Rosemary Keatly there for lunch before the play.

SIX

SIX gets the award for cutest concept. The storyline is that the 6 wives of Henry VIII compete to see who had it the worse. Which is worse, having the whole church changed so he can get a divorce or being beheaded? It is a colorful show, again with pretty basic staging.

Wicked

Wicked takes place in OZ preceding Dorothy's visit. It is the background story of the Wizard and two of the witches. It's glitzy stage is overlooked by a flying dragon and clock backdrop (we aren't sure why they used a clock though.). There were very few props, it was all in the costuming.

Frameless, the ultimate immersive art experience

This is an entirely different experience from the other shows. Imagine a large basement of a large city development that is intended to house a multi-screen cinema but converted to house 4 large vacant rooms equipped with 50 of Panasonic's most innovative projectors and 360 degree surround sound provided by 158 loud speakers all connected to the main control room with over 100km of cables. Primarily the 4 walls of each gallery serve as the screens. (The audience also serves as small screens.)

Highly regarded artworks, 42 masterpieces, spanning 1C BC to nearly present day are projected individually in huge scale; in whole and in parts with the images moving around the room. The effect is truly mesmerizing and immersive as promoted. We walked into one gallery to see "The Wave" appearing to be actively crashing in front of Mt Fuji. Breathtaking.

It's impossible to convey the experience in photos but we snapped lots of shots. They may look like just views of various pieces of the artworks but they are pictures of the walls acting as screens. The people in our photos are others in the audience. but help provide a sense of scale. Additionally we did our best to correlate our photos to the works of art they reflect but no promises of accuracy,

We really enjoyed Frameless but felt bad when we learned it had replaced our friends local cinema (a huge Odeon complex) with an event that attracts a wider audience to what is there lovely neighborhood (in the heart of London just on the north side of Hyde Park).

Entrance is by escalator lit up with changing colors.

The four galleries have specific themes, a couple with unique features.

We started with The Art of Abstraction.

Extracting a bit from the signage: In 1906 Hilma af Klint, formerly a traditional landscape painter from Stockholm, started to create radical works of art made up of only abstract shapes and fervent color to convey spiritual meaning. ...Through abstract art artists could express spiritual experiences, inner thoughts and feelings, and external social and political realities, without directly relating to our visual world.

This gallery was laid out as a maze with walls of cheesecloth which acted as intermediate screens interacting with the varied views of the artworks.

Pieces displayed in the roughly 25 minute show included:

Hilma af Klint's Group IV No. 3 (top left, bottom right)
Wassily Kandinsky's Composition VIII (top right)
László Moholy-Nagy's Composition 1939 (bottome left)
Piet Mondrian's Composition with large red plane, yellow, black grey and blue (center left)

We moved on to The World Around Us

Again, excerpted from the signage: The World Around Us captures the drama and beauty of our physical world. using art from the Baroque and Romantic periods, Impressionist and Post Impressionist movements, as well as Japanese woodblock art.

Pieces displayed in the show included:

Artwork from Pompeii (top left)
J.M.W. Turner's Sun-drenched Ethereal Plain
van Gogh's Starry night in Provence,
Hokusai's woodblock Mt Fuji series (top right, bottom left)

J.M.W Turner-the fighting Temeraire (top left)
Eruption of Vesuvius by John Wright of Derby (top right)
Rembrandt van Rijn's Christ in the storm on the Sea of Galilee
Canaletto's views of the Venice Grand Canal (left center and bottom)

Color in Motion Gallery

Once gain, excerpted from the signage: "Color In Motion connects you with every brushstroke ...in works by Claude Monet, Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, and Vincent van Gogh - who were synonymous with Impressionism, Pointillism, and Post-Impressionism.

The works represented include:

Monet's The Water Lily Pond
Georges Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte
van Gogh's Stary Night
Van Gogh's Self Portrait
Paul Signac's Mont Saint Michel, Setting Sun

A world BEYOND REALITY

Throughout the ages artists have constructed alternative realities through paint with interpretations of myths, dreams, nightmares. The most famous group of artists to produce such works were the Surrealists such as Max Ernst and Salvador Dali, who created surprising, and often challenging imagery with deep symbolic meaning.

Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights (top left, 2 top & center right)
Henri Rousseau's The Dream (center right)
Giuseppe Arcimboldo's Spring (bottom left)
Salvador Dalí's The Persistence of Memory (center left)