To the Barbican again to play for Mark Morris & company. He and they are so great to work with, so much fun, such great dancers, so intelligent, so appreciative. The enjoyment from those classes gets me up in the morning, and is so intense that it lasts the whole year until next time. I’d probably self-combust from overstimulation if I did it any more than that.
By coincidence, Maria Somaraki, who graduated from the RAD in 2000, was in London on a flying visit to see the RB, and staying down the road from Barbican so we went to Starbucks and caught up. It’s quite a coincidence that the last time I saw her was in Athens when I was playing for Mark Morris’s Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes at the Herod Atticus amphitheatre. Well we think it was anyway.
The Barbican’t
It’s a good job I had such a good time, because I have come to hate the Barbican itself with a loathing so intense, it’s almost unhealthy.
It’s not near anything, not even to the station that bears its name. It has no geography; no maps and no signs (at least, not where you need them); no grace, no contours, no softness, no line, no contrast, no differentiation of tone.
It’s an unkind, unforgiving, ugly, selfish, arrogant, pompous, square dump of a building, though so overwhelming that you can’t see it, because it has simultaneously annihilated and become its own location, a topography without topoi. How anyone could have consented to such an affront to human worth and dignity is beyond me.
To be lost in it, or be trying to get into or out of it, is to experience being hated, humiliated and taunted by a building, its architects and its administration. Well, Barbican, I hate you back.
There, I feel just a bit better now.
