Last night I was lucky enough to see the astonishing Fuerzabruta, a kinetic dance/circus show down at Ocean Terminal in Edinburgh. Men running along treadmills, ballerinas chasing each other up walls, dusty cast members smashing pieces of set over the audience members’ heads, and a huge transparent paddling pool lowered to just a foot above the audience member’s heads! Each set piece presents a new thrill that challenges one’s perception of space and one’s relationship to the performers.
From the shocking opening to the wet finale, Fuerzabruta feels more like a concert than a theatre show. Never have I been to a Fringe show (or circus for that matter) that creates such a sense of communality in the audience. It is that visceral pleasure of being simply a part of the moment, that human moment, when everyone is moving to the same beat.
It will quickly become the talk of the festival – book now!
Author: Robert (Page 258 of 328)
Dave Gorman’s depressing post Twisted (via Post of the Week) prompts a pause for thought. He was harrassed by a couple of police-people for taking photographs at a fair-ground. Although he was not taking images of children at all, he was apparently making security guards nervous. In the comments, Matthew makes a related point:
One of my requests for the recent events was to take photographs for the PTA/school website. Nope no go due to child protection laws.
We often read such laments about how society is changing, and parents are becoming more risk averse. However, it always seems to be ‘other people’ who are the problem. I’ve never read an article or blog from a parent endorsing the stigmatisation of photography in public places or in schools. Anecdotal evidence would suggest that such litigious parents are in the minority. Yet schools and councils and the police have to err on the side of caution, and then bear the brunt of the criticism when taking measures to avoid trouble.
I wonder if the web has a part to play in emboldening a more permissive society that (it seems) most people want? Perhaps a website with a similar set-up to Creative Commons could provide a set of guidelines and a handy logo, which any event organiser could attach to their flyers and advertisement:
“Heatherside Junior School’s Nativity Play is operating under the Creative Commons Family Photography Guidelines (UK) Level 2 (Close-up Photography Allowed; Scenes of a Mild Christian Nature).”
Risk averse parents would then have plenty of time to withdraw their children from events they disapproved of, just as some kids do not participate in school prayers. This approach would still be highly problematic, however, since it still an imposition of values, only in reverse.
Either option flies in the face of such concepts as “parental choice”. This is an idea that seems to have much currency in education debates at present, but it looks to me like a red herring. In some areas of communal life, it is possible to partition time and resources so that people who make different choices can access the resources (think of women only swimming sessions). In other areas, such as a school play or an annual fair, such allocations are impossible. Someone has to impose their values onto the event, and no “choice” is possible.
This is a street light in Embankment Gardens, at 3.45pm on Saturday. It is fully switched on and drawing electricity, despite the clear blue skies and impeccable visibility that one might associate with a mid-summer mid-afternoon.
There must be a cheap piece of technology that solves this inefficiency. The logo on the public bins says City of Westminster Council, so I assume they’re responsible. I wonder who I should write to?
Some people may argue that excess streetlighting is barely an issue when London has so many other problems, such as gun crime and poverty. To be clear, I’m not whining from a climate change point-of-view, so much as the general administration of the thing. How can we have confidence in local authorities to tackle the more complex social problems, if they cannot tell the difference between day and night?
Congratulations, dear brother of mine, on your recent ‘swearing in’ as a Police Constable. You are now officially an agent of the state, and we have given you power over us so you may act as our protector, an enforcer of our laws.
It is natural that you will wish to do the job with which you have been tasked in the most effective and efficient manner possible. Without doubt, it is this noble sentiment that has led some of your colleagues to call for more powers: To detain suspects for longer without charge; and to retain our DNA on a database. It must be frustrating when we prevaricate over such requests.
Remember that there are two kinds of freedom that we strive for. The first of these is freedom from the harrassment of other individuals. By enforcing laws and catching crimminals, you are ideally placed to offer protection against the people who would do me harm and steal my laptop. However, we also require freedom from harassment from the machinery of state, a machinery of which you are now a part. It is therefore much more difficult for you to protect us against this threat, and you may only be able to do so through inaction, rather than the more proactive approach that you will be trained in.
In the week that you take up your duties, you might find it offensive for me to talk about state harassment and abuse of powers. Please remember that when we make laws, set bench-marks and draw moral lines on the pavement, we must do so for all time, and all situations, for all citizens. I know I can trust you, and I hope I can trust the men and women you will be working with next week. But we already know that not all those who join your service are worthy of that trust… and to trust all politicians would be foolhardy!
Read Matthew Parris on ID Cards:
I just don’t want to give government — any government — that much control … I oppose them because evasion, deceit, even crime, and the irregular organisation of one’s own affairs, are part of a citizen’s weaponry of last resort against State oppression. They are weapons I may never need, but I need to know they are there.
Read David Eastman on Anonymity:
Its when computers talk to other computers that liberty disappears. Because a computer can correlate countless bits of data and create new records that would take many humans exponentially longer to do. And that gap, or grace period, is actually where anonymity lies, or did.
… or, for that matter, on civil liberties:
The outgoing Mr Blair bemoans how hard it is for the authorities to fight terrorism and maintain civil liberties. That to me seems a reasonable balance. Terrorism and road accidents are comparable; they are bad and sometimes preventable, but are a result of modern urban life.
…
Civil liberties on the other hand are the glue that allows trust between those who govern and everybody else. Without that trust, modern life is impossible. There is little point in being protected from one set of arbitrary beliefs only to be subject to another.
I’m afraid the obstacles we place in your way, and the high-standards of proof we set, are all necessary. Yes – it is a problem that the two types of freedom, the two types of protection, are often antagonistic. It is a paradox that giving you more powers to protect us in one way, will actually end up harming us in another. It is a paradox that your occasional failures might demonstrate the success of our system. In striking the balance between the two, we are in effect asking you to do a job, and then willfully hampering you in your efforts! Its a devil of a task… which is precisely why we respect you for taking on the challenge.
I greatly enjoyed Oliver Burkeman’s take on the silly season earlier this week:
A whale, tiger or escaped pig caused hilarity or uproar after it was spotted in the Thames, on Dartmoor, or openly wandering through the streets of Nottingham, according to prominent reports in all newspapers. The surprisingly located animal became an unlikely hero, and was given a cute nickname as the whole country watched the drama unfold on Sky News.
And already we find that life imitates satire (again) with the news that A minke Whale has been causing a furore up in Fraserborough Harbour.
Yesterday I realised how amazing it would have been if the shark story had occurred in the same week as the floods. We all felt sympathy for those on the flood-plains who found their living-rooms submerged in five feet of water… but just imagine if a shark had been swimming around too! It would have been like the Beast of Bodmin, only for sharks.