In Eleven Khan demonstrates kathak’s mathematics with a rhythmic cycle of eleven beats, elaborated by dancer and tabla player (Partha Sarathi Mukherjee) in a competitive exchange. The first beat is, as Khan tells the audience, “the sublime”, the one to which you always return, the destination to which the tabla player might take one route and the dancer another, but both (hopefully) always arrive there together.In kathak, Khan says, the elements are interdependent. The dancer can’t be separated from the musician, the musician can’t be separated from the dancer. That is part of the tradition of kathak, but Philip Sheppard’s cello adds a discreetly western component. Like all art, kathak needs to avoid becoming congealed in its conventions. This wonderful show presents kathak in both its traditional and its new beauty.. On this day, 66 years ago, The Times and The New York Times published a report from the Spanish Civil War that helped to define the 20th century.
George Steer, a young correspondent in the Basque Country, had returned to Guernica the day after the German Condor legion bombed, burned and strafed the town into bloodstained rubble. He confirmed beyond doubt that, on 26 April 1937, Nazi aircraft had blitzed the citadel of Basque liberty, fighting as the rebel Franco’s secret proxies. From then on, all civilians knew that total war could destroy them: “A vital line was crossed.”
On this day, 66 years ago, The Times and The New York Times published a report from the Spanish Civil War that helped to define the 20th century. It propelled Picasso into the creative rage that led to his Guernica. A copy of that minatory painting hangs at the United Nations in New York.
Before US Secretary of State Colin Powell gave a belligerent press conference there in February, it was discreetly covered over.Nicholas Rankin has written a fiercely exciting and superbly researched life of George Steer. The brilliant, hyperactive South African brought bad news from Spain, Ethiopia and Finland before pioneering “psy-ops” in the British army and dying in a jeep smash in India at Christmas 1944. As in a classic front-line bulletin, Rankin condenses the back-story, and foregrounds the action. Steer’s free-ranging African boyhood, his glittering academic career, his journalist’s apprenticeship, all pass in a flashback or two. Otherwise, a breakneck narrative rivals Steer’s high-octane prose with matching colour and swagger.Rankin whisks readers from the Italian invasion of Ethiopia through the Basque tragedy and the Soviet-led slaughter of Finland’s “Winter War”.