Birmingham celebrates 'forgotten pop-art pioneer' Peter Phillips - BBC

The cast and crew behind The Archers, including the one-time guest star Judi Dench, have written to the BBC director general urging him to keep the recording of the Radio 4 drama in Birmingham. It emerged this week that the corporation was planning to stop recording the rural community soap opera in the city for the first time in the show’s 75-year history, after it scrapped plans for a radio drama studio. Staff were informed last week that the BBC, as part of its £500m cost-cutting drive, had ditched plans to build a bespoke studio at the Tea Factory in Digbeth, the corporation’s new Birmingham headquarters. Production staff will still move to the Tea Factory, but the broadcaster is looking for an existing studio where the show could be recorded. The West Midlands is included in the search, but there is no guarantee The Archers will be recorded in the region. Actors rehearse an episode of The Archers in the BBC studios in Birmingham.

A a man died of a freak accident on the property on Friday during a walking tour.

'The fair is proceeding as planned and final preparations are underway,' a spokesperson said. The post After Protests and Riots, Art Basel Readies Paris Show appeared first on Artnet News .

MIRROR-FINISH ACRYLIC PANELS CONCEAL pavilion IN GUADALAJARADesigned by errre taller, Sfumato is a temporary reflective pavilion that reinterprets the Cubo MEM, a prominent sculptural landmark at the ITESO architecture complex in Guadalajara, Mexico. Selected as the winning proposal for the inaugural Pabellón MEM competition, the project investigates how an existing architectural structure can become visually imperceptible while maintaining its physical footprint.all images ©errre tallerCONCEALED STEEL FRAMING FORMS MONOLITHIC SKYWARD PAVILIONThe intervention by studio errre taller wraps the 6.40 × 6.40-meter cube in a reflective envelope composed of 3 mm mirror-finish acrylic panels. The standard 1.22 × 2.44-meter sheets are combined with 76 cm cut sections to maximize material efficiency while maintaining surface continuity. The panels are attached using double-sided tape and silicone to a light-gauge metal stud-and-track framing system supported by an interior wooden sub-structure fixed to the original PTR steel frame. To preserve the illusion of a monolithic volume, a single access portal is positioned discreetly on the less prominent west face.

In August 2019, Omar Rajeh sat in his bedroom, listening to the sound of pounding percussion with his world in crisis. In the midst of political instability, Citerne Beirut, a theatre and cultural centre Rajeh had founded in his native Lebanon, was forced to close, dismantled by order of the local government, who planned to build an incinerator on the site. Heartfelt … Omar Rajeh in Dance Is Not for Us. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/the GuardianRajeh tells us that as a teenager, coming of age at the end of the Lebanese civil war, dance had always seemed like the most revolutionary thing he could do. Now here he is, more than three decades later, still dancing – out of frustration, defiance, resistance and a desire to connect. As the percussive score gains momentum, Rajeh’s busy body builds up a sweat. In this danced stream of consciousness, Rajeh is not always an especially elegant mover, but he dances like it’s a necessary thing to do. Part of this year’s Dance Umbrella festival, Dance Is Not for Us is a solo that appears at times like an explosion of physical instinct, but it is mostly calm, considered musings on the nature of choreography, with all its workings exposed.

Sarah Kane revolutionised British theatre with five provocative plays written between 1995 and 1999. Her final work, 4.48 Psychosis, was her most personal, confronting the clinical depression she struggled with for years. The play was first performed posthumously in 2000, after she died by suicide in 1999. The Royal Opera and Guildhall School of Music and Drama commissioned Philip Venables to adapt the play as an opera, which debuted in 2016. The composer, also known for a certain “in-yer-face” approach, set Kane’s original text almost entirely, realising its 24 disjointed sections in a raw, imaginative score teeming with minimalist licks, prickly synth-pop and consoling nods to the baroque. The libretto shifts between poetic abstraction and scathing exchanges between a patient and a psychologist. An ensemble of six female singers navigates themes of depression, isolation and the agonising choices surrounding medication. One fractured personality … Sophia Burgos, Veena Akama-Makia, Hannah Edmunds and Jacquelyn Stucker in 4.48 Psychosis.