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Pogo-ing away at a night of jazz
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July 14, 2011 01:00 AM
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JBEIL: “My hair,” Jamie Cullum announced to his Byblos International Festival audience Tuesday night, “is not normally this curly.” Lebanon’s summertime coastal temperature – the cause of the English celebrity’s excitable hair – reached its 2011 high...
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Blunt tells Beirut that the real stars are those helping others
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June 29, 2011 12:59 AM
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BEIRUT: Benefit concerts have become a fashionable phenomenon in recent decades. From “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” to the Live 8 performances, one would be hard-pressed to find a cause without a song or celebrity attached. That doesn’t mean the relationship need be...
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‘Music can be a great friend’
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June 02, 2011 02:19 AM
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Beirut: “I have never paid attention to what is in fashion, in terms of music,” says Roger Hodgson, “and I have been lucky, because my songs have stayed. And now I need to give. That is why I perform at the moment as opposed to record. I need to give.”The former front man of legendary rock band...
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Shooglenifty cuts a rug at Music Hall
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May 17, 2011 01:51 AM
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BEIRUT: It isn’t often that one hears the shrill tunes of traditional Scots music in Lebanon. Perhaps this is why Sunday night’s chord-strumming, string-whizzing performance of Scottish fusion band Shooglenifty had such a dramatic effect. Twenty-year veterans of the stage and studio, this six-man...
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Six poets, three countries, transcending borders
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May 13, 2011 02:28 AM
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BEIRUT: “All writers have to cross a border of some kind,” said Scottish poet Tom Pow, “real or imagined.” Pow was one of six international poets to participate in “Crossing Borders/Bearing Witness,” a panel discussion held Wednesday evening at the Saifi Urban Gardens as part of Reel Festivals...
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The art of bringing people together
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May 09, 2011 02:53 AM
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BEIRUT: Art’s ability to incite social change is one of history’s most discussed topics. Since “The Republic,” in which Plato famously argues for poetry’s removal from the state, the subject has been debated by philosophers and artists alike. Plato wasn’t as anti-art as is popularly believed. His...
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Was the bard an Orientialist?
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May 06, 2011 01:37 AM
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BEIRUT: There is no shortage of outsider characters in the work of William Shakespeare. Literary history being what it is, the best-known of these is probably Shylock, the villainous Jewish moneylender in the bard’s “The Merchant of Venice. ”Queasy at the thought that English literature’s greatest...
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Beirut Music and Art Festival: ‘This is just the beginning’
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May 05, 2011 03:04 AM
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Beirut: Lebanon’s big summer music festivals seem designed to lure people out of Beirut. Baalbak has its festival, as do Beiteddine and Byblos. Beirut, on the other hand, seems to be the preserve for year-round festivals, platforms and forums devoted to film and video art, dance, fine and plastic...
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The first Lebanese circus comes to town
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April 30, 2011 01:26 AM
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JDEIDEH: Without a second thought, fearless kids take risks that their parents would balk at. They ski backwards, jump out of windows and dangle their bodies out of speeding cars. This is one reason child performers are so appealing: youngsters throw themselves entirely into their practice; they...
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Turning the tables on the audience
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April 22, 2011 01:24 AM
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BEIRUT: A strange sight greeted dance enthusiasts intent on enjoying a pre-performance drink at Masrah al-Madina Wednesday night. Anyone descending the stairs from the box office to the auditorium found a hooded girl laying at the base of the stairs, sandwiched between red bathroom scales (two at...
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Painting in the company of Antonio Vivaldi
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April 15, 2011 12:00 AM
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JOUNIEH: The Tate Modern, one of the U.K.’s most renowned museums of modern art, is currently showing a retrospective of works by Catalan artist Joan Mir?. Produced over a 40-odd-year career, Mir?’s work was, in part, an act of defiance to Franco’s regime. It was also inspired by the music of...
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The virtues of stepping outside Lebanon’s performative box
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April 05, 2011 12:00 AM
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Beirut: “Why is improvisation so important?” Ziad Nawfal asks rhetorically. “It’s a wide open field that leaves a lot of room for ideas, for novelty, for unexpected things to be created.”Nawfal should know what he’s talking about. A well-known DJ on Radio Liban, where he presides over “The...
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The manifestation of God, through Orthodox chanting
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March 25, 2011 12:00 AM
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RABIEH: Invocations of God manifest themselves in a multitude of ways. Monks devote their lives to isolated contemplation; hermits cut themselves off from human society altogether. A Julian of Norwich-esque mystic writes, a Michaelangelo transforms a chapel’s ceiling into a work of art....
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Dania el Kadi’s ‘Summer Blast’ take on the summer 2006 war in Lebanon
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March 24, 2011 12:00 AM
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Beirut: Like business, the making of art is disrupted by war. War also stimulates some sorts of business, of course. A short roll-call of past centuries’ cultural production – Homer’s “Iliad,” say, or Wilfred Owen’s World War I poetry, or Picasso’s “Guernica” – lends weight to the notion that,...
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Mahler’s ‘Titan’: truly madly deeply
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March 16, 2011 12:00 AM
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BEIRUT: “Truly, Deeply, Titanic,” as Al-Bustan organizers called Monday evening’s Lebanese Philharmonic Orchestra performance of Gustav Mahler’s first symphony, may sound a bit incongruous. The festival booklet’s description of the piece – “It releases an ardent energy, depicting true joy of life”...
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