The artistry will be glittering at the second edition of the Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels Festival, which runs in London from 12th March to 8th April at the Royal Ballet and Opera, Sadler’s Wells, South Bank Centre and Tate Modern.
Following on from the hugely successful inaugural event in 2022, this iteration of the festival created in partnership with the world-famous French luxury jewellery company features 15 dazzling shows from a whole gamut of different cultures.
Taking place at iconic venues in our capital city, Dance Reflections showcases artists who, in the words of Catherine Renier, President & CEO of Van Cleef & Arpels, have specialised in, “Collaborations with prestigious partners, contributions to major choreographic events, support for emerging and touring artists… These various commitments, in keeping with the values of creation, transmission and education dear to the Maison, all meet the same objective of celebrating contemporary choreographic art.”
Including repertory works, dance workshops, artist forums and awareness-raising initiatives, all emphasising the connections between dance heritage and modern choreography, the festival highlights imaginative ways in which dancers have evolved exciting new…
A tribute to the work of one of the fundamental figures of French Modernist painting
After three years in the making, the Amar Gallery is bringing to London Hélène de Beauvoir: The Woman Destroyed, a unique exhibition featuring paintings and works on paper from the 1950s to 1980s by this French artist, crucial to the feminist movement. Often overshadowed in the past by her older sister, Simone – the groundbreaking […]
Despite being separated in time by nearly 200 years, Sigmar Polke felt a deep admiration for Francisco de Goya. The show at Museo del Prado, Sigmar Polke. Affinities Revealed, explores how the Spanish master influenced the work of the German painter, after he saw for the first time Goya’s Time and the Old Women in […]
Louis Roederer Photography Prize for Sustainability
Champagne Louis Roederer have long patronised the arts. The Louis Roederer Foundation was created in 2011 with the purpose of perpetuating the company’s sponsorship initiatives which followed on from their discovery of the photography collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in 2003.
Since being awarded the title of “Major Patron of Culture and Arts”, the Foundation has supported and nurtured up-and-coming artists in photography and cinema through their Discovery Award at the Rencontres d’Arles, Rising Star Award at La Semaine de la Critique in Cannes and Revelation Prize at the Deauville American Film Festival, and patronising the French Academy in Rome, among others.
On the other hand, champagne Louis Roederer are passionately committed to sustainability. For more than 20 years, they have been engaged in “renaissance viticulture” using practices that respect the living environment to allow the nuances of the Champagne terroir to be fully expressed. Inspired by the permaculture model, these methods allow the ecosystem to self-regulate. These include organic farming, the use of biodynamic composts, leaving the land to lie fallow for long periods, maintaining hedgerows and low stone walls, growing fruit trees and installing beehives. Louis Roederer’s eco-friendly ethos is rooted in its history and yet looks to the future.
By creating the Photography Prize for Sustainability, Louis Roederer bring together the two causes closest to their heart. The intention is to support contemporary photographers with an interest in shining a light on sustainability and environmental issues.
The prize is awarded to the photographer whose work has most impressed the judges with its reflection of the prize’s them, which this year is “terroir”.
The prize nominators are nine internationally recognised figures in the art world, each of whom nominated three photographers. An independent panel of six judges, also comprising high profile individuals from the world of art, photography and media assessed the entries and selected a shortlist of six artists, from which they will choose a winner and two runners-up, after another round of judging. The shortlisted artists are:
Akosua Viktoria Adu-Sanyah believes in the diversity of thought and expression. Her work is frequently awarded for exploring new territories through image-making, research and human connection.
King Penguin by Himself by Akosua Viktoria Adu-Sanyah
Elizabeth Bick is a photographer influenced by her training in classical and modern dance. She admits to be particularly interested in capturing facial expressions and nuances of movement.
Sian Davey launched her career in photography in 2014 after having practised as a psychotherapist for 15 years. Her work is an investigation of the psychological landscapes of both herself and those around her.
Chloe Dewe Mathews is a photographic artist based in St Leonards-on-Sea. After studying fine art at Camberwell College of Arts and the University of Oxford, she worked in the feature film industry before dedicating herself to photography.
Plastico (cherries), 2019. From the series For A Few Euros More by Chloe Dewe Mathews
Jasper Goodall made a career as an illustrator and trained as a counsellor before re-imagining his creative output in a new and very different form: exploring the landscape at night.
Sahab Zaribaf is an Iranian born narrative photographer who employs the camera to create momentum, shed light on hidden aspects of a moment, and utilize the medium for constructing stories.
The three finalists will be announced on Wednesday 4th May and their work will be on exhibition for the public to view at The WhiteBox, Nobu Hotel Portman Square from 9th May – 29th May 2022. The winner and runner-up will be announced by Frédéric Rouzaud, CEO of Champagne Louis Roederer and President of the Louis Roederer Foundation on Wednesday 11th May.
Organised by Tate Britain in collaboration with the Petit Palais, Paris, this is London’s biggest retrospective of Walter Sickert (1860-1942) in almost 30 years featuring over 150 of his works from over 70 public and private collections, from scenes of rowdy music halls to ground-breaking nudes and narrative subjects. A master of self-invention and theatricality, Sickert took a radically modern approach to painting, transforming how everyday life was captured on canvas. Sickert is probably one of Britain’s most distinctive, provocative and influential artists.
Highlights include ten of Sickert’s iconic self-portraits, from the start of his career to his final years. Visitors will see the variety of different personas adopted by Sickert – a legacy of his early life as an actor – and how his complex personality evolved on the canvas throughout his career. Sickert’s interest in the stage is also reflected in one of his favourite artistic subjects: the music hall, through more than 30 atmospheric paintings and drawings of halls in London and Paris, including The Old Bedford 1894-5, Gaité Montparnasse 1907 and Théâtre de Montmartre c.1906 and includes depictions of famous performers such as Minnie Cunningham and Little Dot Hetherington. His dramatic images of performers and audiences often captured together from unusual and spectacular angles, reflected the energy of working-class city nightlife. These subjects were deemed inappropriate by much of the British art world at the time, but they took inspiration from the café-concert subjects of celebrated French artists such as Edouard Manet and the ballet subjects of Edgar Degas, a close friend and key influence on Sickert after they met in Paris in the 1880s.
The exhibition is the first to explore the impact of American artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler on Sickert’s when the latter was an assistant in Whistler’s studio. On display, visitors will find Whistler’s A Shop 1884-90 and Sickert’s A Shop in Dieppe 1886-8 as well as Whistler’s 1895 portrait of Sickert himself, to reveal how the young artist was inspired by his mentor’s atmospheric tonal style and urban subjects. The show examines how Sickert went on to create a series of works that experimented with how changing light transformed the facades of famous buildings in some of his favourite cities, including Dieppe and Venice.
Sickert went on to revolutionise the traditional genres of painting in ways that changed the course of British art. His nudes were admired in France but disapproved of in Britain, where they were considered immoral because of their unidealized bodies, contemporary settings and voyeuristic framings. They drew on the influence of artists such as Bonnard and Degas and paved the way for later painters like Lucian Freud. The Camden Town Murder series further transformed Sickert’s nude subjects into narrative paintings by juxtaposing two figures in a claustrophobic interior, while his other domestic scenes such as Ennui 1914 and Off to the Pub 1911 continued this exploration of conflicted emotions and complex modern relationships.
Walter Sickert’s The rue Notre-Dame des Champs, Paris the Entrance to Sargent’s Studio (1907). On loan from the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.
In his final years, his work took on a new and ground-breaking form in larger, brighter paintings based on photographs and popular culture, including images of Amelia Earhart’s solo flight across the Atlantic and Peggy Ashcroft in a production of As You Like It. This pioneering approach to photography was an important precursor to Francis Bacon’s use of source material and to pop art’s transformation of images from the media, once again revealing Sickert’s role at the forefront of developments in British art.
Words: Lavinia Dickson-Robinson
www.tate.org.uk Tate Britain. Millbank, London SW1P 4RG. 28th April – 18th September 2022
Opening picture: Walter Sickert, Brighton Pierrots, 1915. Purchased with assistance from the Art Fund and the Friends of the Tate Gallery in 1996.
Serpentine North Gallery, W Carriage Dr, London W2 2AR 31st March 2022 – 29th May 2022
Serpentine and the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham are partnering to present Radio Ballads, an exhibition showcasing a ground-breaking project that has embedded artists within core social care services and community settings across the borough, in an effort to drive change in society through listening, understanding and developing empathy towards others.
Over the last three years, artists Helen Cammock (Turner Prize winner 2019), Rory Pilgrim (Prix de Rome 2020), Ilona Sagar (Stanley Picker Fellow 2021, Saastamoinen Foundation 2022) and Sonia Boyce (representing the UK at the Venice Biennale in 2022) have worked with social workers, carers, organisers and communities to produce four new films and bodies of research, facilitated through the council’s New Town Culture programme, which explores how artistic processes can reframe the work of social care and how embedding artists in local authority services can support systemic change.
The commissions are shown alongside paintings, drawings and contextual materials. Developed and sustained throughout a period of multiple global crises, amid the compounding issues of austerity, systemic racism, ableism and the pandemic, the projects shed light on innumerable ways in which those who do the work of care are often unsupported and devalued.
Radio Ballads builds on Serpentine’s ongoing critical investigation of the role of artists in politics and civic life. The show takes its name from a revolutionary series of eight radio plays that were broadcast on the BBC from 1957-64. Each Ballad presented lived experiences and stories of work and resistance in the UK at a time of rapid growth and change. The exhibition is an ode to this project, positioned as songs for the 21st century that amplify voices and largely unheard experiences of domestic abuse, mental health, terminal illness, isolation, austerity and end-of-life care.
Sonia Boyce’s Yes I Hear You, traces domestic abuse through interviews recorded in partnership with Barking and Dagenham’s Domestic Abuse commission.
With Flat Lines and Bass Notes: The Voice as a Site of Resistance. The Body as a Site of Resistance, Helen Cammock explores individual and collective power, asking viewers to consider where we sit within the social and political spaces we inhabit.
RAFTS is Rory Pilgrim’s way to dig deep into the connections between work, mental health, home and care in a time of crisis, particularly the climate crisis, which is inducing the displacement of masses of the population. The project explores ideas around interdependence and what keeps us afloat, taking inspiration from a raft as a preserver of life whilst also being the most fragile vehicle of survival at sea or upon open water.
Ilona Sagar opts for investigating the difficult, and until recently untold, the legacy of asbestos that is central to the history of work in the area. The Body Blow describes how those who suffer from asbestos exposure are stuck between layers of legal and bureaucratic paperwork.
By embedding art and culture in the core business of local authority services, New Town Culture proposes systemic change. The programme encompasses research, projects, exhibitions, publications, residencies, workshops, training and knowledge exchange to bring together creative and social practitioners in their work.
Sister to one of the most famous names in the history of fashion, Catherine Dior was a tower of strength and courage. She joined the French Resistance, was captured and tortured by the Gestapo, suffered the indescribable in concentration camps and escaped a Death March, returning to Paris a changed woman, but never broken.
The inspiration behind the legendary fragrance Miss Dior, the story of Catherine is the story of many unsung female heroes who never received the recognition they deserved. Journalist and author Justine Picardie spent over a decade researching her life, which she has painstakingly pieced together in a delightful and unforgettable book that honours not only Catherine Dior, but also the many other courageous women who didn’t hesitate to sacrifice their lives to save their country. Born in 1917, Catherine was the youngest of five children. She lived with her family in Granville, on the coast of Normandy. One of her passions was gardening, and she was particularly fond of roses, a love she inherited from her mother and which she cultivated for her own pleasure and as an essential ingredient in the perfume that her brother would name after her and launch alongside his New Look collection in 1947, becoming an icon in itself. Catherine lived with Christian in Paris in the late 1930s, shared a farm with him during the war in the south of France before joining the Resistance.
She served as honorary president of the museum that opened in 1997 in her childhood home at Granville (Les Rhumbs) from 1999 until her death in 2008, aged 90. The horrors of war would touch Catherine from an early age. One third of France’s male population between the ages of 18 and 27 died in the First World War. Her eldest brother Raymond, was the only member of his platoon to survive, but he suffered severe PTSD for the rest of his life, what the French called at the time crise de tristesse sombre (an attack of dark sorrow). Catherine was only 13 when her mother died, forever changing the dynamics of their family life. Around the same time, her father lost his fortune, so Maurice Dior, his children and their faithful maid Marth Lefebvre ended up moving to a small farmhouse, Les Naÿssès, in Provence in 1935. The house didn’t even have electricity. Catherine was unhappy there. So, a year later she moved with her brother Christian to the Hôtel de Bourgogne in Paris. Christian and Catherine would remain the closest of the Dior siblings, sharing their mutual love for flowers, gardening, art and music.
It was a fellow resident of Hôtel de Bourgogne who introduced Christian to an up-and-coming couture designer, Robert Piguet, who bought some of Christian’s sketches and thus started his career as a freelance fashion designer. Catherine also started earning her own money, selling hats and gloves in a fashion shop. Eventually Christian was offered a full-time job at Piguet’s in 1938, which allowed brother and sister to rent an apartment of their own in Rue Royale. Not soon had they settled into their new found prosperity that war was declared on 3rd September 1939. Christian was called up for military service but luckily saw no action as he was sent to provide farm labour in rural central France whilst Catherine was forced to leave Paris and move back to Les Naÿssès with her father. Christian managed to join them in the summer of 1940 and soon they fell into an acceptable routine. They grew vegetables and sold them twice a week at the local market. However, as the Nazis were requisitioning colossal amounts of French produce, food shortages became more severe, even for the Dior family. In autumn 1941, Christian returned to Paris to look for paid work as a designer but Catherine remained in Callian, where soon after, she’d meet the man who’d change her life forever: a hero of the French Resistance called Hervé des Charbonneries.
Catherine and Hervé met in a radio shop where he was manager. Catherine was looking for a radio to listen to the broadcast of Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French in London. It was love at first sight. However, it was not to be an easy relationship. Hervé was married with three children, he was amember of the Resistance as was his wife Lucie. Hervé was part of a network called F2, which had close contacts with Polish and British Intelligence services. Following the invasion of Poland in September 1939, the Polish Intelligence had moved to Paris, where they got very close to the station chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service, Wilfred Dunderdale, a suave character who legend has it was the inspiration for James Bond, since Dunderdale was friends with Ian Fleming. By the end of 1941, Catherine was dividing her time between Callian and Cannes, where she rented an apartment to be closer to Hervé and the other members of F2, in charge of gathering information about German troops and warships. Records show that by the end of the conflict, F2 had around 2,500 agents, of whom 23 percent were women.
At least 900 of them were interned, deported or killed. A dossier in the military files of the Resistance shows that Catherine played a vital role in the operation of the Cannes office gathering information, compiling intelligence reports and even hiding incriminating materials from the Gestapo during a raid, before delivering them safely to another member of F2. She and her colleagues actually provided vital intelligence for the Allied invasion of France – D-Day – planned for early June 1944. In summer 1944 though, Catherine had to flee Provence so she returned to Paris, to Christian’s apartment. She was being hunted by the Gestapo so by sheltering her sister – and her comrades – Christian was risking his own life. In July that same summer, Catherine ran out of luck and was apprehended by the Gestapo, taken to the infamous 180, Rue de la Pompe in the elegant 16th arrondisement, where she and many other victims suffered terrible forms of torture. Several other women from F2 were arrested at the same time: Anne de Bauffremont, Yvonne de Turenne and Jeanne Van Roey.
She didn’t want to be pitied. She was the captain of her own soul…
– Zahava Szász Stessel
Catherine and her colleagues were beaten, raped and almost killed, as a favourite form of torture by the leader of the Gestapo gang (Berger) was to submerge his victims in icy water for hours, take them to the verge of death and then bring them back. Despite suffering a series of violent assaults, she was not broken. Whichever answers she gave to her captors, she protected her colleagues in the Resistance, saving the lives of many, among them her friend Liliane Dietlin, her lover Hervé, his wife Lucie, and two of the F2 leaders, Gilbert Foury and Stan Lasocki. By the time the Gestapo got to their headquarters, they had all fled. No wonder that the records of the Resistance speak about Catherine’s “exemplary courage” when subjected to “particular odious” forms of torture.
Unfortunately, some of the torturers at Rue de la Pompe were French nationals. The most telling evidence comes from a member of the Resistance who had been interrogated there and scratched on the cellar wall with his nails: “We have been tortured by the French people.” There is very little information left from Catherine’s imprisonment in Fresnes, Paris, but we know that by the time she got there, it was filled with members of the French resistance and agents of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) and that the conditions were subhuman. At the end of July, a large group of women were moved from Fresnes to Romainville in the outskirts of Paris before being deported to Germany. Catherine was among those women, as it was the American Virginia d’Albert-Lake, Agnès Humbert and several other female members of the Resistance. By that time, US troops had taken Avranches in Normandy and opened the way to Paris so prisoners at Romainville were hopeful that they may be liberated before being deported to Germany. Christian Dior in the meantime had discovered where his sister was held and was desperate to save her.
Catherine would become associated with the scent of Miss Dior, a parfum launched at the same time as the couture brand in 1946…
Unfortunately none of the above was to happen. On August 15th, the women at Romainville were asked to pack their things. It was time. They were put in buses filled to the rim to get to the train station in Paris, where cattle wagons waited for them, insanitary and with hardly any ventilation. Many fell unconscious, most remained strong. Several witnesses said that as trains pulled out of stations, a proud chorus of La Marseillaise could be heard continuously until it faded in the distance.
After travelling for a week, Catherine Dior arrived at Ravensbrück concentration camp, the only one intended exclusively for women. Every prisoner was assigned a number according to their date of arrival and alphabetical order. Catherine was number 57813. In total, 22 other women tortured at Rue de la Pompe ended up at Ravensbrück, among them Elisabeth de Rothschild, who had been arrested for refusing to sit next to the wife of the German ambassador at the Schiaparelli show, and who would die there. By the time Catherine arrived, there were already 40,000 prisoners interned. During the six years of existence of this camp, about 130,000 women went through its gates. Estimates tell us that between 30,000 and 90,000 lost their lives while in Ravensbrück. As a memorial site, it never received as much attention as Auschwitz but in 1959, a small area in the camp was opened as a memorial, and several sculptures there symbolise the suffering of the female prisoners. The conditions were inhuman. They were crammed into rat-infested accommodation with hardly any food, rags for clothes and forced to sew a triangle in them coloured according to their category: political prisoners, Jews, asocials… Himmler took a personal interest in Ravensbrück using the women for medical experiments.
Ravensbrück was considered a slave labour camp rather than an extermination one but the truth is that it was “extermination through labour”, as prisoners died by the hundreds of exhaustion, sickness and starvation. Maisie Renault, a survivor of the camp described in her memoir “…Many of our companions are suffering with purulent wounds… Dysentery begins to spread… Even more horrific was the sight of dead bodies lying in the filthy washroom.” Catherine’s godson, Nicolas Crespelle told Justine Picardie that her godmother spoke to him only once about her time at Ravensbrück. Catherine said to Nicolas that she would never fall to the ground to pick up food thrown by an SS guard because “if you did that, your life was over…” That is one of the many things this incredibly strong woman did to not lose her self-respect.
In October 1944, Catherine and another 250 women were taken to another camp, Abteroda. There they worked as slave labour for BMW, building military engines. The conditions were even worse than at Ravensbrück, sleeping on cold cement floors, with nothing but watery soup and dry bread to eat if they were lucky. Still, many of these women,including Catherine, had the courage to sabotage as often as possible the jet components they were being forced to build. As the Allies intensified their bombing campaign against Germany, the Frenchwomen were transferred to another camp near Leipzig, Markkleeberg.
Catherine arrived there in the last week of February 1945. A survivor of the camp, Zahava Szász Stessel, who had worked there since the age of 14 said of Catherine, “She didn’t want to be pitied. She was the captain of her own soul…” Catherine had one single fierce desire: to return to her family home in Provence. So when in April 1945 the Allied forces were approaching Leipzig and the hundreds of thousands of concentration camp prisoners were forced to move towards what was left of Nazi-controlled Germany, Catherine was put into one of these “Death Marches” – so called because one in three prisoners died in them – and managed to escape from it, together with other women who had also been held at Markkleeberg. It was the 21st of April, 1945. In the meantime, Christian had continued to work as a designer in Paris for Lucien Long, and kept desperately looking for his sister. He even employed a clairvoyant. Catherine Dior arrived in Paris at the end of May 1945; her brother met her at the station. Such was her state of emaciation that he did not recognise her at first. Catherine received some of the most prestigious national decorations from several countries: the Croix de Guerre, Croix du Combattant Volontaire de la Résistance, the Polish Cross of Valour, and the King’s Medal for Courage in the Cause of Freedom.
Reunited with Hervé, the couple moved into Christian’s apartment at Rue Royale and sold flowers grown in Provence to florists in Paris, rising at four in the morning to go to the flower market in Les Halles. Her stoicism and determination to rebuild her life were extraordinary. She was also fundamental to the identification of Berger and the other monsters who had tortured her and many of her colleagues at the trial of “Rue de la Pompe Gestapo” at which she testified in 1952.
Catherine was recognised a true heroine who exemplified the best and bravest spirit of French resistance during the war. However, she didn’t enjoy being in the limelight so although she worked with her brother and even modelled for his earliest designs, she was not his muse. Her innate modesty and the scars of war probably prevented her from seeking attention. However, Catherine would become associated with the scent of Miss Dior, a parfum launched at the same time as the couture brand in 1946.
Legend has it that Christian was wondering what name to give to his parfum when Catherine walked in and Mizza Bricard (exclaimed, “Tiens! Voilà Miss Dior…
Legend has it that Christian was wondering what name to give to his parfum when Catherine walked in and Mizza Bricard (head of millinery at Dior and muse to Christian) exclaimed, “Tiens! Voilà Miss Dior!” This is how Catherine became the godmother of one of the most famous and delicate fragrances in the world, Miss Dior. Catherine spent the rest of her life with her beloved Hervé until his death, tending to the garden at Les Naÿsses together with the fields of jasmine and roses that would provide key ingredients for the production of Miss Dior. She never boasted about her achievements or her prowess, nor the medals she had been awarded for her courage, including the Légion d’Honneur that she received in 1994. She died in her beloved Callian on the 17th of June 2008, aged 90. In September 2019, Maria Grazia Chiuri, creative director at Christian Dior, dedicated the Spring-Summer 2020 Ready-to-Wear runway collection to Catherine Dior, inspired by her passion for flowers. A fitting homage to a woman who carried her strength inside, a woman quietly beautiful, like a rose in a summer garden.
Miss Dior, A Story of Courage and Couture is the work of journalist and author Justine Picardie. Published by Faber. Hardback, £25
Talulah Riley jumped to fame after playing Mary Bennet in the 2005 version of Pride & Prejudice, opposite Judi Dench, Donald Sutherland, Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen. In 2010 she married Elon Musk and moved to the USA. Now divorced and back in the UK, she speaks about her latest TV show, Pistol, where she plays Vivienne Westwood, her book The Quickening, and female empowerment.
Talulah grew up in Hertfordshire, in a family that had nothing to do with the world of film and entertainment. In fact, acting was a weekend hobby, not something she thought she could make a career of. However, by the time her A level exams came close, she panicked and simply wanted to avoid them. “I attended a very academic school, Haberdashers’ Aske’s School for Girls, and I was feeling under a lot of pressure,” she explains. “I was going to be the first person in my family to go to university.” The anxiety she was feeling led her to tell her parents she wanted to drop out of school and become an actress.
I am trying to be as self-sufficient and sustainable as possible…
– Talulah Riley
Dress by Dsquared2. Earrings by Tiffany & Co. Shoes by Dee Ocleppo.
Understanding where the hesitation came from, her parents offered her an alternative. “They were happy for me to have a go at acting but they encouraged me to stay in school and take my A level exams out of discipline,” Talulah shares. “To help me with the apprehension I was feeling they said I didn’t have to open the results, and so they ended up in a frame, unopened, at my father’s office.” The day after she finished her exams, she went straight onto a film set (Pride & Prejudice) and started working. While acting in London, she started a degree in Natural Sciences at the Open University, although she couldn’t finish as she moved to America with Elon Musk and the Open University didn’t allow her to continue internationally. At present she is studying again with them, this time Maths and Physics. “I feel very strongly about the Open University. It saddens and upsets me in equal measure that they have lost support.”
Thomas Brodie-Sangster as Malcolm McLaren and Talulah Riley as Vivienne Westwood in Pistol. CR: Miya Mizuno/FX.
Talulah is referring to the rollercoaster that the institution has gone through in the last decade with regards to their funding and as a consequence, the closure of seven of their regional centres. “I see the Open University as important to our society as is the NHS.” After her appearance in Pride & Prejudice, other films quickly followed, among them the St Trinian’s series (2007, 2009), Inception (2010) and TV shows like Nearly Famous (2007) and Dr Who (2008). In 2008 though she started dating Elon Musk and got married two years later. She moved to America and with five stepchildren (from Musk’s first marriage to writer Justine Musk) under five years of age, she took the decision to put her career mostly on hold. “I came back for the second St. Trinian’s movie but apart from that, I stopped working almost completely to focus on Elon and the kids.”
To read the full interview order our spring issue, HERE.
Opening Picture: Photograph by Leo Cackett. Concept & Styling by Sascha Lilic. Hair & Make up by Hamilton Stansfield. Talent: Talulah Riley. Dress by L’Agence. Necklace by Van Cleef & Arpels
In all my days of watching film, I heavily doubt I’ve seen a piece as complicated, hard to follow, but at the same time as gripping and attention capturing as The Long Walk.
Written by Christopher Larsen and directed by Mattie Do, the two fusion their skill to bring us a motion picture filled with sorrow, haunting realities, supernatural occurrence, and occult practise. Mattie Do is Laos’s first female film director, critically acclaimed for her previous film, Dearest Sister.
The Long Walk is set in Laos, in a humble village where an old man old man (played masterfully by Laotian actor Yannawoutthi Chanthalungsy) discovers that he can travel back in time and speak with the dead. In the first scene, we find him walking through the forest as he speaks to a mute woman, of course getting no response at all. Yet we can sense that he is completely comfortable with his companion, as he continues to converse. When the same man goes to make a sale to a local tradesman, payment is made with a new age virtual barcode which appears on his wrist, giving the feel that despite us being in a rural village, we are in the midst of a futuristic dystopia.
The old man goes back to his own past to convince his younger self to forestall his mother’s terminal suffering.
In a separate scene later in in the movie, we learn of a small boy of this same village helping his poor parents work the fields in order to make ends meet, at the same time trying to learn life. He has a very close, loving relationship with his mother, not so much the same with his angry alcoholic dad, and the young man is dealt a harsh reality of life when mother turns chronically ill.
Enraptured by his new ability to travel back in time to influence the course of his mother’s passage into the next life, Chanthalungsy’s character is oblivious to the consequences of his interventions.
WATCH THE TRAILER:
In the absolute weirdest way, the film develops and I promise that you’ll be completely astonished by how the story of the older man and the small boy amalgamate, not to mention the mute lady he walks with at the start.
From the beginning all the way through to the end, the film is painfully harsh and sorrowful, especially on our young friend, no older than six years of age I’m guessing. But Christopher Larsen and Mattie Do do a wonderful job to keep us riveted to the storyline, right till the very end.
What impresses me the most is that none of the main characters are named throughout the film, a very skilful strategy by the creators. Without knowing anyone’s name, we still manage to drum up much passion for all of them as they endure their plights, allowing us, the viewers, to relate to them on a deeper level.
Chanthalungsy’s character had his first encounter with a ghost as a child.
As well as ghostly presences, death, torture, false imprisonment, and futuristic new world order payment methods, we also witness timeline shifts aplenty, as well as merging of the past and future.
A true enigma of a film, The Long Walk requires a bit of patience as it gets pretty complex at times, but Do infuses it with so much poignancy and humanity that to me, makes it really worth watching.
Words: Papa-Sono Abebrese
The Long Walk is available on Digital Download Here
BAFTA winner David Bradley, known for his work on Oscar level films, is usually cast as a dark, cold-hearted man. In Harry Potter, he plays Argus Filch, a miserable caretaker of Hogwarts, forever giving the students a hard time. In-Game of Thrones, an even more sinister character as Lord Walter Frey. In Roy, he dazzles with completely different performance, one of vulnerability and intense loneliness.
Produced by Chris Everton and Rebecca Harris (Slick Films), this live-action short film is the directorial debut for co-writers Ross White and Tom Berkeley. Roy is a funny, heart-warming tale of two lost souls who find companionship just when they need it most. Roy is an elderly widower, living alone. Desperately in need of human interaction, he resorts to cold-calling random numbers asking if they had just called him, hoping someone on the other end will have the time to converse with him. The first few attempts results as one would expect: A very puzzled being denying they had initially called him, then hanging up the phone when Roy tries to force the conversation. Frustrated that his current strategy bears no fruit, Roy pulls out a yellow pages book and finds a number from within.
https://vimeo.com/523474424
A conversation with a hotline worker by the name of Cara (Oscar winner Rachel Senton, The Silent Child – 2017)) ensues and Roy is pleasantly surprised, as she is extremely easy to talk to and patient. But the pleasant combo doesn’t last, as certain questions being asked by the woman reveal her occupation and why she is so comfortable and easy being on the phone with a stranger. Realising he is in dialogue with an x-rated phone worker, Roy tries his best to excuse himself and end the call, but the slick tongued madame comforts him, letting him know that they do not have to talk about anything uncomfortable for him.
Roy spends his days going through the phone book, cold calling strangers in hopes to have a few minutes of companionship.
Tables turn when a wonderful and interesting friendship develops between the two. They both seem to forget about the vast age gap, engaging on the phone daily to joke, play games, spill opinions, and hold council with each other. It seems Cara has taken pity on our old boy and appreciates his genuine and honest spirit. My point is displayed when Cara asks “Roy, you are aware you’re being charged for us speaking aren’t you?” To which he replies “Well, I should hope so. How else is a nice lady like yourself going to earn her crust?”
The sincerity of this companionship further shows when Cara makes steps to make sure Roy isn’t lonely for much longer. Both the filmmakers and David Bradley expertly capture the realities of loneliness and isolation that most of our senior citizens suffer nowadays, especially in the western world.
Produced by Rebecca Harris and Chris Overton, ROY is the directorial debut for co-writers Tom Berkeley and Ross White.
Margaret Allan: Bletchley, Bentleys and “Chelsea in Bloom”
At the height of the conflict in World War II, Bletchley Park’s Hut 4 contained an eclectic group of codebreakers. Everyone from specialists in Egyptology to a debutante who was to become Prince Philip’ first girlfriend. Margaret Allan was part of that exclusive group. Not only did she have the intellect to keep pace with academics, but the daring that would set her apart. Codebreaker, racing driver, journalist and horticulturist, Margaret Allan was an extraordinary woman.
Born Margaret Mabel Gladys Allan into a wealthy and unconventional family, Margaret was educated at the liberal and unorthodox Bedales school. The Allan family were progressive and politically active; her paternal aunt was the militant suffragette Janie Allan. Margaret became a keen horsewoman from an early age and in due course was encouraged to swap one horsepower for several as she was taught to drive as soon as she was old enough.
Margaret started motor racing – aged 21 – with the family’s Lagonda. There was nothing particularly special about the car, but she successfully completed the London-Gloucester Trial winning the Ladies’ Prize, with her driving being described as “neat and fast” by Motor Sport magazine. She continued to enter trials and rally events over the following few years, most notably the 1932 Monte Carlo Rally, where she raced in a works Riley Nine with co-driver Eve Staniland and finished in 10th position. Later that year, with her brother Hamish acting as co-driver, she entered the Alpine Trial, a week-long event which was then considered the most demanding in Europe. This time driving their Wolseley Hornet, they were awarded a Glacier Cup prize for completing the trial without penalty and her driving earned her joint victory in the Coupe des Dames.
Margaret had her first taste of circuit racing in 1932 following a visit to Brooklands. You had to have a special form of nerve to hold your car at over 120mph on the outer lap of that circuit in the 1930s. The track was an uneven patchwork quilt of concrete slabs that were rapidly decaying. Margaret, faster than some of the noted male drivers at the time, was one of only a handful of female drivers who earned Brooklands’ 120mph accolade.
Success was almost immediate. The 1933 Inter-Club Meeting saw a change of car and an increase in speed. Margaret had acquired the ex-works 1928 Le Mans winning 4½-litre Bentley “Old Mother Gun” driven by Woolf Barnato and Bernard Rubin. Her first outright circuit race victory was in the Junior Long Handicap event. Showing her form in the more powerful car, her fastest lap was timed at 97.65 mph.
A repeat victory the next year in the same event with the same car attracted the attention of the works MG Cars team and she was asked to join their squad for the Light Car Club’s 1934 200-mile Relay Race. The all-female team took third position overall. Margaret maintained close links to MG throughout her career entering the 1935 Le Mans with the same marque as a member of George Eyston’s “Dancing Daughters”, a three car, all-female entry driving works-prepared MG PAs.
Although there is no clear evidence, it seems that eventually Margaret sold “Old Mother Gun” to one Richard Marker, who upgraded it to a 6 ½-litre engine and fitted it with a streamlined, single-seater body that replaced the original tourer coachwork. She kept racing this car. However, her finest hour at Brooklands was in a single-seater Frazer Nash Shelsley with which she won the handicap race at the August Bank Holiday Meeting – best lap speed of 119.15 mph. In practice she had lapped at 127.05 mph which was quicker than Earl Howe’s contemporary race record of 127.00 mph, and only about 10 mph slower than Tim Birkin’s all-time best of 137.96 mph. It earned her the 120mph accolade for the circuit.
At the outbreak of World War II Margaret Allan enlisted, unsurprisingly, as an ambulance driver. No doubt she had the talent for the job. After all, driving an ambulance through the Blitz in London was probably similar to taking on the outer banking and competitors at Brooklands. Not a great deal is known about this time in her life, but at some point, her intellect and ability in problem solving must have been noted as she applied and was accepted by the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park.
Bletchley Park September 1938, GC&CS BP visit. Credit: Judie Hodsdon via Bletchley Park Trust
Winston Churchill had visited Bletchley in September 1941 and instructed Dennison (in charge of Station X – as it was known) to find any and all individuals required by whichever means necessary. One such method was a crossword puzzle in the Daily Telegraph where successful completion was coupled with a request to send the result in, after which they were invited to undertake “a particular type of work as a contribution to the war effort.” It was unknown if Margaret joined the team this way or through an application, but she did take up her position shortly after the puzzle winners took up theirs at Bletchley.
The collection of eclectic staff of “Boffins and Debs” caused GC&CS to be whimsically dubbed the “Golf, Cheese and Chess Society”. A breakdown of the people in Hut 4 certainly tends to endorse the view. Among Margaret Allan’s contemporaries were J. W. B. Barns – later Professor of Egyptology at Oxford, Sarah Baring – who’d become Viscountess Astor, Osla Benning – Prince Philip’s first girlfriend, Leonard R. Palmer – later Professor of Comparative Philology at Oxford, along with historian Sir Harry Hinsley, who’d rise to Vice Chancellor and Professor of International Relations at Cambridge University.
At the time, Alan Turing and the codebreakers in Hut 6, had found their way to deciphering the Enigma coded messages, the transcript of which were divided between Hut 4 and Hut 8. The former was responsible for the translation, interpretation and distribution of the German navy messages deciphered by the latter. The messages were largely encrypted by Enigma machines. As the German navy operated Enigma more securely, Hut 8 had less information for Ultra than Hut 6 which handled Army and Air Force messages. Hut 4 had the additional task of various hand cyphers and some of the Italian naval traffic. The work at Bletchley, according to Sir Harry Hinsley’s official account of the Bletchley Park war effort, reduced the duration of the war by one to four years.
After the war Margaret (now married to Christopher Jennings) became a journalist and was Vogue magazine’s very first female motoring correspondent for many years in the 1940s and 1950s, as well as providing road test articles for The Motor, Autocar, and other motoring magazines.
Still proving that she had the speed to compete, in 1950 Margaret made one brief return to competition in the Circuit of Ireland rally. Despite having been absent from competitive motorsport for well over a decade, she won the Ladies’ Prize. Even into her later years, past her 80th birthday, Autocar magazine invited her to test three sports cars and despite the advances in motor vehicles, she proved too fast for the photographer to cover the story, so the article had fewer pictures than planned.
Her husband was also a motor journalist (later editor of The Motor) and retired racing driver. They had one son. They moved to Gellideg, Carmarthenshire, where Christopher became High Sheriff in 1957. As she grew older, she became a proficient gardener and won multiple Royal Horticultural Society prizes over the following decades, as well as exhibiting at the Chelsea Flower Show. Margaret Jennings died in Carmarthenshire, aged 89, in September 1998.
An exceptionally skilled break-dancer and a gifted showman, Magical Bones is considered one of the most exciting talents to emerge from the Magic scene in recent years.
Born Richard Essien, he was nicknamed “Magical Bones” for his hard-hitting dance style. Despite having a successful career as a dancer, Essien’s heart was in magic and as such, a few years ago he chose to shift careers. Magical Bones was selected as the headline magician for the hit West End magic show, Impossible. This played for two seasons, at the Noel Coward Theatre before moving on to a hugely successful world tour in 2017. He has also featured in Sky’s TV series Around The World in 80 Tricks, CW Penn & Teller: Fool Us In The USA, Crackerjack on CBBC and ITV’s This Morning. He also closed BBC One’s coverage of the BAFTA Awards ceremony.
Magical Bones is considered to be the most exciting talent to have emerged from the magic industry in recent years.
After getting to the finals of Britain’s Got Talent in 2020, he decided to create his own show and go on the road to entertain crowds with the width and breadth of the country. With his unique style of combining high-octane break-dance moves with the coolest back-flipping card tricks and jaw-dropping street magic, guests will be surely kept at the edge of their seats.
Black Magic challenges the connotations usually associated with this term and the show culminates with a tribute to the Black Magician Henry Box Brown, a 19th-century slave from Virginia who escaped to freedom at the age of 33 in 1849 by arranging to have himself shipped inside a wooden crate to abolitionists in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.#
The tour encompasses some rescheduled dates from his 2020 tour along with the new shows. The tour will start on February 9th this year at the Phoenix in Exeter and will finish in April of this year.
Schedule:
Wed 9th Feb 2022 Exeter Phoenix
Thu 10th Feb 2022 Maidenhead Norden Farm
Sat Feb 12th 2022 Winchester Theatre Royal
Fri 18th Feb 2022 Newbury Corn Exchange
Sat 19th Feb 2022 Bridgwater McMillan Theatre
Thu 24th Feb 2022 Leicester Curve
Sat 26th Feb 2022 Southend Palace Theatre
Sat 5th March 2022 London Leicester Square Theatre
Fri 11th March 2022 Colchester Arts Centre
Sat 12th March 2022 Cambridge Junction
Sun 13th March 2022 Peterborough Key Theatre
Fri 18th March 2022 Salford Lowry (Quays Theatre)
Sat 19th March 2022 Cheltenham Town Hall
Thu 24th March 2022 Maidstone Hazlitt Theatre
Fri 25th March 2022 Wellingborough Castle Theatre
Thu 31st March 2022 Farnham Maltings
Fri 1st April 2022 Bognor Regis Regis Centre
Fri 8th April 2022 Isle Of Wight Medina Theatre
Sat 23rd April 2022 Solihull Core Theatre
Thu 28th April 2022 Bishops Stortford South Mill Arts Centre
