Live arts correspondent Bella Todd on the hottest happenings in Europe's cultural calendar this week, including a build-your-own festival in the Spanish desert, Diplo in an Irish art deco ballroom, and the London theatre that’s turning itself into a brothel.
The Main Event: Nowhere
At midday today [Tuesday], 500+ artistic adventurers from across the globe will start congregating in a dustbowl in the middle of the Spanish desert. They will come armed with food, water, art materials and instruments. They will build their own camp, from the toilets to the post office, and devise their own entertainments and experiences. And on Sunday they will leave without trace – not so much as a dropped Rizla, let alone the 1,650 tonnes of discarded litter, jesters hats and U2 t-shirts that just had to be removed from the Glastonbury Festival site.
The European baby sibling of the Nevada Desert’s Burning Man (which now attracts around 50,000 annually, making it less of a happening and more of a temporary city), Nowhere is the most underground event on the festival circuit. In fact, we’re not supposed to call it a festival, in keeping with its principles of self-expression and participation, zero commerce and radical self-reliance. Attendees won’t find anything there that they haven’t brought themselves, bogs and bins included, while the only mode of expression that’s off limits is fire, due to the dangerously dry desert conditions.
Nowhere Festival
The first ever Nowhere, back in 2004, was attended by just 35 people and featured a giant bicycle-powered ant, a giant, nature-powered cloud of mosquitoes and a freak storm that blew away four tents (and therefore about a quarter of the event). After trying out locations from mountaintops to canyons (the 2005 site is now a wind turbine centre, which gives you some idea how that spot worked out), the event has now settled 10km east of Sarinea. Spontaneity is naturally of the essence, but this year’s planned attractions (which we admit is so not the right word) include a playable didgeridoo sculpture; a bamboo cage in which prisoners will be subjected to songs, games and – via a special foot hole – pedicures; and an interactive art project in the form of a playable psychedelic miniature version of the FIFA World Cup.
Impossible to get a handle on without having been yourself, the Nowhere experience is so intense that participants are invited to attend a Decompression Party in London afterwards to help ease their reintegration into everyday society. Try to imagine if Jesus had taken himself off to the wilderness for five days instead of 40, and taking with him a good bunch of mates, a crate of beer and some sort of boundary-pushing art installation the like of which even the devil had never before seen or heard. Now you’re getting somewhere.
Best of the Rest
Mervyn Peake Estate and British Library Board
- Mervyn Peake, the cult author and illustrator who reinvented and transcended gothic fantasy in the 40s and 50s with his classic Gormenghast trilogy, gets a high-profile exhibition at the British Library this week. Opening today and running until September 18 to mark his centenary, The Worlds Of Mervyn Peake includes his distinctive original drawings for fellow surrealist Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass as well as for his own novels.
- Ireland’s biggest music festival, Oxegen, runs from Friday to Sunday in Co Kildare, with Beyonce, Arctic Monkeys and Tinie Tempah more than making up for the so-so headliners. Meanwhile the new Red Bull Electric Ballroom will provide an alternative to the usual festival stages in the form of a chandelier and portrait-decked art-deco style ballroom. Eclectic and party-minded Philly DJ, MIA producer and Madonna and Radiohead remixer Diplo is among the mostly electronic lineup.
- The Elizabethan theatres may have been rife with prostitution. But that’s not quite what London theatre the Almedia is getting at by turning all the hidden corners of its Grade II listed building into ‘The Theatre Brothel’ for a fortnight. Opening tomorrow and running until 16 July, the latest project from Grayscale – a company specializing in 'interactive and anarchic theatre for a modern audience bored of being bored', will invite audience members to 'buy the experiences they want or maybe need'. Will you opt for the happy ending?
- Festival d’Avignon, the oldest festival in France and one of the biggest in the world, will be spreading from the Provence streets to the ‘cour d’honneur’ of the Pope’s Palace from Wednesday until July 26. Founded in 1947 to offer an alternative to classical stagings, this year it’s guest directed by the enfant terrible of French Dance, choreographer Boris Charmatz.
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