Colin Grant’s cultural highlights
Colin Grant’s books include the memoirs Bageye at the Wheel and I’m Black So You Don’t Have to Be. His fascination with the craft of oral history telling is evident in Homecoming: Voices of the Windrush Generation, and the WritersMosaic podcast series, What We Leave We Carry, an oral history of migration to Britain which will be published in 2025. Grant is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and director of WritersMosaic. He also writes for a number of newspapers including the TLS, Guardian, Observer and New York Review of Books.
Dance: From England with Love
https://hofesh.co.uk/productions/from-england-with-love/
Once you discover the world of choreographer Hofesh Shechter, there’s no going back. He creates modern dance as a kind of sacrament to allow dancers to transmit profoundly felt emotions. In From England with Love, the company moves collectively at the beginning, almost as one organism, like a giant, menacing snake concealed in England’s apparent green and pleasant land that will pounce at any moment. The dancing becomes increasingly dervish-like, elegant dancers performing with unrestrained abandon. It’s thrilling and transformative. You leave the theatre brimming with a sense of infinite possibilities; that you, too, can glide and soar, not bound by gravity. It doesn’t last, of course, but there’s always the next Shechter show to anticipate.
Theatre: Slave Play
Why is it a good idea to introduce a kind of apartheid into London’s West End theatreland with Slave Play? Although I roll my eyes at the African American playwright Jeremy O. Harris’s gimmick of promoting ‘Black Out’ nights for his play (this scheme aims to encourage black audiences to come en masse to the theatre and suggests that white people should hold back), I’m impressed by the energy and execution of the production. Staging the erotic activities of BDSM and also exploring the possibility of comedy in the legacy of the Atlantic slave trade certainly requires some chutzpah.
Book: Crook Manifesto
https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/colson-whitehead/crook-manifesto/9780349727646/
Colson Whitehead excels in Crook Manifesto, the second outing of his Harlem Trilogy crime series; the first being the impressive Harlem Shuffle. The protagonist Ray Carney (a furniture store owner and former fence, mostly of jewellery) returns ten years on and on the up-and-up. Carney seems to have gotten out of the crime business, but he’s torn between the prospect of social mobility and the attraction of his criminal past. The novel snaps and fizzes with the rich, idiosyncratic dialogue of 1970s Harlem street life. You may not approve of the criminals’ manifesto as a code for living, but you’ll take pleasure in reading how it plays out.
Film: Anselm
https://film.curzon.com/film/anselm/
How I wished I could come close to Anselm Kiefer’s commitment to his art and gravitas when I was younger. Watching the exemplary, consummate artist at work in the documentary Anselm, that same feeling surfaces decades later. The outsized scale of his ambition to conjure the violent history of his German homeland is matched by the rows and rows of towering 7m x 3m canvases crammed with lead, dirt, paint and fern singed with a blow torch. The film captures the undiminished enthusiasm of the seventy-nine-year-old cycling round his warehouse studio, as big as an airplane hanger, filling the basket on the bike’s handlebars with artefacts, memorabilia, and early artistic experiments that will inform his next great work. When I grow up I still want to become Anselm Kiefer.
Art: The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure
https://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/exhibitions/2024/the-time-is-always-now
London’s National Portrait Gallery has put on a stunning show of portraiture with black subjects, curated by Ekow Eshun. There are too many great artists to mention here (more than twenty), but I particularly loved the sequence of barber shop portraits by Hurvin Anderson. We only see the back of the customer, painted in bright red and pastel blues, awaiting the barber and what is to come. The stillness and care in Anderson’s portraits take me back to my childhood. I sat in such chairs on Saturday mornings in 1970s Luton, listening to the banter of the West Indian men as the barber distractedly worked on my hair. Anderson’s portraits are beautiful evocations of tenderness and the delicate power of touch.