Girls like dancing and boys play football. Such old-fashioned notions are being regularly questioned, especially at London’s Pineapple Studios, where school groups can book a session with a dancer before watching them perform in a West End musical.
Andrew Lloyd Webber’s latest musical blockbuster, The Beautiful Game, cleverly combines sport and dance, and is proving a popular option for schools participating in London Theatre Tours.
A matinee ticket, and an hour-and-a-half at Pineapple, costs pound;24. Other combinations of theatre visits, sightseeing tours and activities are available from LTT. These include backstage visits to the National Theatre and tours of the Globe Theatre, as well as drama sessions and theatre walking tours.
The best way to keep up with new offers is to join the emailing list. For information: 020 7226 4972; www.londontheatretours.comeducation London is, of course, one of the cities featured in Century City: art and culture in the modern metropolis, at Tate Modern. Here you can buy a cup of coffee and imagine being part of Vienna’s cafe society while looking out at a panorama of the real London.
The Vienna exhibition is subtitled “City in Analysis” and focuses on the period between 1908 and1918, when Vienna was an intellectual powerhouse. You can gaze at a reproduction of Freud’s consulting room, set in a room full of paintings by Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka. (These are probably among the exhibits which have led to warning notices about “explicit” and “challenging” material.) This arrangement gives some indication of the thinking behind Century City - context is all-important. In fact, this show would be as useful for history and sociology teachers as for art classes. Some, however, might think the balance too much in favour of surrounding circumstances and material.
This matters less in the Moscow and Paris rooms, where politics in Moscow, between 1916 and 1930, and the celebration of modernity in Paris from 1905 to 1915, were inextricably bound up with art ad also gave rise to some brilliant examples of it.
The Moscow and Paris displays are extensive enough to warrant their own separate exhibition. They include works of constructivism in the Moscow room, with the films of Eisenstein and the sets for plays by writers such as Mayakovsky and El Lissitskey’s Prouns (an acronym for the Russian Project for the Affirmation of the New). And the Paris display includes examples of works by Braque and Picasso and posters for the Ballets Russes. But perhaps it is still easier for some of us to appreciate modernism, rather than postmodernism.
I have a confession: Tracey Emin’s box of underwear in the London section simply annoys me. The London dates are 1990-2001 and it seems that the prevailing notion now is not to relate to others and their surroundings so much as to excavate each person’s own preoccupations.
The other cities represented are Lagos (1955 to 1970), New York (1969 to 1974), Tokyo (1967 to 1973), Rio (1950 to 1964) and Bombay (1992 to 2001) - or Mumbai, to give it its older, Marathi, name.
There are some fascinating insights, but less of a sense of a whole society and an explosion of creativity, such as you get in early 20th-century Moscow and Paris. For tickets for related events: 020 7887 8888.
Scarborough has celebrations of its own. The Crescent Arts Workshop’s Youth Outreach Programme is holding an exhibition, Impressions of Youth, from tomorrow until March 17. The show will feature work made in sessions with professional artists. Graffiti, sculptures, mosaics and wax masks are among the items on display. Poetry and acoustic music will feature as part of tomorrow’s session. For information: 01723 351461.
Fashionistas should hurry to the Victoria and Albert Museum on February 23 to see shows by Julien Macdonald, and catch his ideas before he presents them to the Hollywood crowd. The stars are sure to choose from his revealing, romantic creations for the Oscars in March. Information: 020 7942 2000.
Heather Neill
