Back to Foggy Londontown

Hi everyone!
After a wonderful and restful break, I'm back into the swing of things here in London. Last week was a lot of work, I had a bunch of papers due and reading to do. This week I got out a lot more, as you'll read about in my journal below. Enjoy!

This past week has been a lot of artistic exploration for me. This should not be a huge surprise by now; I’m exposed to art all over the city more than any other place I’ve ever been. One of my flatmates said earlier in the week that here, in London, “you don’t need to find it. Art finds you.” It has been a whirlwind of artistic expression: I’ve seen three plays and two art exhibits since last Friday. It’s a good thing that it happened too, because I was starting to feel like a bit of a shut-in, working a lot and not really seeing the city. This week I really made an effort to get my tired self out of bed and just go places; it was incredibly worth it.

I saw Sea Wall by Simon Stephens at the Bush Theatre, which I enjoyed. I didn’t feel the work was entirely finished, a bit rough around the edges and missing some connections between dots, but the performance was memorable. I had also never seen a one-man show before and was really inspired by the way that it was structured and moved without the help of other characters on stage. Wednesday I saw Mother Courage and her Children for the second time, and I enjoyed it even more this time around. I had forgotten just how wonderful it was to see Fiona Shaw basking in her own glow at the show’s start: the chills I got when she came out on the cart at the start of act I reminded me what feeling I hoped to recreate for my own audience. It was also a closed-caption performance, which was cool, especially since you could essentially read the text and watch the show at the same time. The actors had all really settled into their roles, and it was exciting to see the changes that had been undertaken since the preview we saw as a group. Yesterday I went to see The Pains of Youth at the National (are you sensing a pattern? It’s my favorite theatre that I’ve ever been to) and was intrigued to see something completely different onstage. The show was part drama, part scary movie, with a revolving set of men and women in suits providing the actors with props from sterile-looking plastic bags as surgical lighting poured through the doorways. It wasn’t particularly realistic, even in the dialogue, and most of the shows I’ve seen lately have tried to be as realistic as possible. It was refreshing to see that actors could create out of confusing dialogue and overreaching plots.

The Tate Modern was my museum stop twice this week, and I really enjoyed both trips. Sunday was my first time there, and I saw the Baldessari Exhibit as well as the more publicized “The Way It Is” black box on the ground floor. “The Way It Is” was a really cool experience: the artist described how important it was to relate to one another in the dark, strangers searching for common threads to tie. The Pop Life exhibit was cool too, though a bit overly processed for my taste – but I guess that’s the point anyway. My time here has caused me to ponder a lot of “big questions,” not exactly the meaning of life, but what constitutes art, who decides that, and what is the most effective way of communicating it. Modern art is a really polarizing topic for many people. I can see why: many of these people get thousands of dollars to flip a palm tree over in a room and spray paint it gold. But Baldessari especially questioned the same concept of where the artist and the product become individual entities: many of his works relied on sign painters, and the quotes were not even original, but quotations from an art book. It was funny, smart, and really insightful, and brought about many questions, specifically what my own definition of art is. Quite a lofty question, nonetheless, a worthwhile one to ponder.

I’ve found that what a city values is a really interesting way of viewing its culture. The presence of a huge National Theatre on the South Bank is one insight into what London values, and the fact that students under 26 can register to receive five pound tickets to any National Theatre production is pretty incredible. The nationally sponsored theatre wants to help me afford theatre? Talk about a window into the appreciation of both students and the desire to spread art in the community. The same goes for all of the museums here: I can wonder around these amazing galleries, see works by Van Dyke and Warhol and Zurbaran, and not have to pay a dime if I don’t want to. If art is the highest form of human expression, this city celebrates humanity every day. Finally, I’ve found a reason to account for the fact that I feel so alive over here.

I don’t want to discuss the fact that the program is half-way done. This is not acceptable yet.