06/02/2013

Sasha Waltz’ Matsukaze / Staatsoper im Schiller Theater

Sasha Waltz’s Matsukaze/Staatsoper im Schiller Theater

The internationally renowned German choreographer Sasha Waltz and her company Sasha Waltz & Guests celebrates their 20th anniversary in 2013, starting off their jubilee season with a bang. Last weekend Sasha Waltz & Guests took over Berlin’s Staatsoper im Schillertheater for three sold out performances of Matsukaze, a choreographic opera based on the eponymous classical Japanese Noh play from the 14th century. It tells the tale of two poor sisters, Matsukaze and Murasame, living in a hut on the beach and both hopelessly in love with the noble man Yukihira. After three years Yukihira dies unexpectedly, leaving the two sisters behind with their love unfulfilled.


Toshio Hosokawa, the Berlin-based Japanese composer, wrote the music that is performed by the Staatskapelle Berlin, Vocalconsort Berlin and several talented soloists. Far from the classic western opera the European audience might be used to, the Matsukaze score lingers somewhere between western avant-garde and traditional Japanese music culture. In almost a Buddhist cycle; the tones go from silence to powerful noise only to return to silence, perfectly illustrating the balance between life and death, nature and its transience.

Brilliantly portraying the two sisters, the singers Barbara Hannigan and Charlotte Hellekant enter the stage from above, dangling from ropes inside a black, giant net that was created by Waltz together with the Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota. Spiritually and quite literally, they are caught between worlds. How Hannigan and Hellekant manage to sing with such power and clarity while dangling upside down, that remains a mystery throughout the evening.

The ensemble and guests dancers carry the music with their floating movements. As in large amoebae of bodies, the beautiful group choreographies go in and out of symmetry. The dancers enter and exit a large, minimalist wood structure by Pia Maier Schriever, wearing delicate costumes by Christine Birkle in dim shades of grey, blue, and white. Along with the sounds of the sea, the dripping water and the blowing wind, they appear as elements of nature more than human beings. The beautiful, impossible love story of Matsukaze deals a lot with the heaving seas, tumbling waves and the human in relation to nature. In Sasha Waltz’s and Toshio Hosokawa’s piece, there is an incredible beauty in the sadness of a life that decays and passes.


Helena Nilsson Strängberg – All images by Bernd Uhlig

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05/02/2013

Fashion Don’ts Become Fashion Dos

Fashion Don’ts Become Fashion Dos

Remember when seeing sandals and socks together was a concept that would make you cringe with embarrassment? Remember when white pants after Labor Day was considered a mortal sin, so in the winter time a white pant was as rare as snow in June. Remember how these were unimaginable things if you wanted to be “in the know” of fashion?


Today it seems as if the only rule for fashion is that there are no rules. A struggling need for an own identity and fashion footprint has forced fashionistas all over the world to create new styles, outfits and even silhouettes. Bringing inspiration even from the so-called fashion faux pas. Red and pink was for long a color combination for kindergartners, but now seen walking around on many streets of fashionable metropolises.

Fashion icons of the 21st century such as MIA, Emmanuelle Alt and Iris Apfel have all cleared the path for celebrating the individual. It’s not about what you wear but how you wear it. Expressing your own unique self with chains and colored feathers, or just donning a clean white t-shirt, have become celebrated in fashion cities all around the world. In each of these cities there will naturally be some styles that are still more accepted and in general more easy to adapt when visiting, context is the key! A strong identity can pull off any style in his/her own way – anywhere, anyplace. Bringing back acid-washed jeans which long were considered “out” is an estimate of adapting to change in the fashion climate.

So the trend of rocking a fashion may not have been done by a fashionista who adapted to another fashionable climate in a try to survive. Still, one needs to keep in mind to do such with a certain finesse. Wearing a pink top and a red skirt in a luxurious material such as silk or chiffon, or pairing a high-heeled strappy sandals with a fine knit sock can be examples of how to change a fashion don’t into a fashion do.

Victoria Edman – Photos courtesy of Angelica Blick, Atlantic-Pacific, Helena Dewitt & Burberry

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05/02/2013

Gianni Berengo Gardin at Casa dei Tre Oci in Venice

Gianni Berengo Gardin at Casa dei Tre Oci in Venice

If you use the Internet in your everyday life, then you are inevitably and constantly immersed in a world made of images. As thousands of images are poured in front of us day by day, we have somehow forgotten that they aren’t just made of electronic impulses. There are still images that possess a material quality which makes them particularly special. Hence, if you look up on the Internet Gianni Berengo Gardin, hundreds of black and white snapshots will appear, but nothing might impress you as much as seeing them printed and hung on a wall.


Gianni Berengo Gardin, born in 1930 in Santa Maria Ligure, is one of the most influential Italian photographers. Since he took his first shot in 1954, Berengo Gardin has never left the camera and has also never changed his tool: all of his photographs are rigorously in black and white and never digitally manipulated, maintaning an extremely unpolished and realistic sensibility of a true photojournalist. If you think, though, that he is a formalist, you are completely wrong. For Berengo Gardin using a raw language isn’t an issue of style, but about the process of documentation, capturing the reality, telling the truth.


Gianni Berengo Gardin’s truth is currently being told in the most complete anthological exhibition dedicated to his work titled “Stories of a Photographer” and held at Casa dei Tre Oci, in Venice. More than 130 photos were meticulously selected for this show with the idea of telling the story of his journey as a photographer: photos that are as sublime as they are real, as delicate as they are severe. But looking at the photos displayed at Casa dei Tre Oci one may also feel estranged. The beauty and reality of those images make them strangely surreal, as if they were taken on a set of an old movie, depicting the world where time has stopped and the genuine enthusiasm for life has finally emerged.



“Gianni Berengo Gardin. Stories of a Photographer” runs until 12th of May at Casa dei Tre Oci, Venice.

Rujana Rebernjak

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04/02/2013

COPENHAGEN FASHION WEEK AW13

COPENHAGEN FASHION WEEK AW13

Last week’s fashion happenings took place in the north and The Blogazine went from Stockholm to Copenhagen and crowded with the other 60 000 guests dressed to shield from the January cold.

Despite the large differencies in collections and style, there were some trends, from colours to details and techniques, that was shown repeatedly. Just like in the pre-season collections, the emerald felt somewhat like a key colour on the somber palette. Cut-outs, geometric shapes and graphic prints were other apparent elements, defining the simple silhouettes and often very wearable collections.

Last year’s opening act, Freya Dalsjø showed another confident collection for Autumn/Winter 2013 and had collaborated with Kopenhagen Fur, unexpectedly mixing this debated material with neoprene. In knits, we watched Gaia’s simple yet statuesque silhouettes, rich colour palette and mix between large and heavy to the finest loops. Vivienne Westwood, old in the game but new among the shows on the CPHFW schedule, was one of the highlights for the Danes with guests.

Another established designer celebrated her 10 years anniversary by throwing a real play: at the Royal Theatre, among crystal chandeliers and champagne, opera glasses and a personal letter from the designer in our hands, the By Marlene Birger show was one big celebration. Starting out rather expected, she ended with a ‘grand final’ of statement pieces.


Expectations, even though in another sense, was also the subject for the young designer Stine Riis. Having won the H&M Design Award 2012 as well as collaborating with the Italian high-end store Luisa Via Roma, no one expected less one year later. She delivered a put-together collection with a colour palette in harmony with both the inspiration and the season, confirming the standing point of her brand R II S. “The fall season certainly is my comfort zone and with this collection I feel that it all came together”, the designer told The Blogazine after the show. On the menswear side, Han Kjøbenhavn had gattered every cool kid in town in an old school gym hall and presented a complete men’s wardrobe. The collection managed to stay whole, even though showing a range of outfits from lazy Sunday’s to more dressed up occasions.

During CPH fashion week several buyer’s fairs attract the international audience, and as a growing segment of the business, a whole area was dedicated to that fashion that we don’t always pay much attention to: children’s wear. To widen the views, The Blogazine paid a visit to the kid’s area and attended the Noa Noa Miniature show, where we found ourselves in a fairyworld of smiles and joy.

On a 45-show schedule there are a lot that one could bring up to light: the Desingers’ Nest Award (rewarding especially skillful design students) collaborating with Honest by, the new model regulations and another 2 600 brands attending northern Europe’s largest fashion festival, to name but a few. Scandinavia continues to contribute with an interesting point of view, different from what we might see at the upcoming weeks in London, Paris and Milan.

Lisa Olsson Hjerpe – Image courtesy of Copenhagen Fashion Week®

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04/02/2013

Manet: Portraying Life

Manet: Portraying Life

Capturing the Paris of his day and legitimizing ‘modern life’ as an artistic subject, Edouard Manet, with his candid approach and stunningly subversive use of paint and subject matter, is seen as the father of modern painting. So, it’s rather fitting that London’s wonderfully atmospheric Royal Academy of Arts is currently staging its first major Manet exhibition.


Arranged thematically, ‘Manet: Portraying Life’ explores the lives and loves of Manet’s nineteenth Century Paris through 50 portraits, that themselves redefine traditional ideas of portraiture. Vibrant, intimate and challenging, these works have a unique, photo-like feel and effortlessly blur the line between staged, carefully constructed portraiture and scenes of everyday life. This makes them as captivating now as they were in Salon days gone by.

A highlight is ‘Music in the Tuileries Gardens’ (1862). At first it appears to be nothing but a hypnotic and colourful sea of humanity, yet you soon discover that the painting brings together Manet’s cultural world. This artist, theorist and musician-filled piece, considered compositionally daring at the time, was designed to reflect Charles Baudelaire’s definition of modern beauty, and by extension Modernity – something Manet was particularly fascinated by. By showing these elegant Parisians in a blurred, chaotic manner, Manet is able to reflect modern life – a chaos, a constant, overwhelming experience filled with people and ideas, known and unknown, that gradually, when given the appropriate attention, become recognizable. Hanging alone in an Academy room, you find yourself just standing and staring at this piece. It’s busy, beautiful and utterly enthralling.


The intimacy of the works is astounding. None of the portraits feel posed. Rather it’s as if you’ve stumbled upon the sitters going about their daily business. ‘Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets’ stares at you as Manet would have stared at her. Unblinking, unapologetic and genuinely stunning. She seems completely unaware that she has been captured in time – or that she became the poster girl for the exhibition itself. This only seems to make her more alluring. In ‘The Luncheon’, Manet’s young, nonchalant sitter is actively walking out of the painting. Seeing these natural, seemingly spontaneous works you begin to understand Manet’s artistic significance. He captures what most modern artists still strive to – a truthful, seemingly natural image of the sitter and their own unique world.

As his paintings would imply, Manet was a fairly colourful and contradictory character. He once dueled with critic Edmond Duranty over an article (affable relations were quickly reestablished) and refused to be exhibited with the Impressionists; despite considering Degas and Monet close friends and going down in history as a central figure in the transition between Realism and Impressionism. Artists, and art for that matter, were never meant to be simple.

Manet: Portraying Life is on at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, until 14 April 2013. It has previously toured to the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio.

Liz Schaffer

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03/02/2013

Sunday Breakfast by Love For Breakfast

Sunday Breakfast by Love For Breakfast

I get lost in the perfect shape of a circle. I follow the endless curve like hypnotized while having my first meal of the day.

Alessia Bossi from Love For Breakfast

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01/02/2013

The Land of Ice and Snow

The Land of Ice and Snow

Paradise has been found. But it looks nothing like you’d imagine. Devoid of foliage or warmth, this Shangri-La is a spirit lifting collage of blue, grey, utterly untouched white, snow, penguins and whales. Paradise is Antarctica, and it’s flawless.


Not necessarily on the top of most conventional holiday lists, Antarctica can only be reached by travellers in the fleeting, light-drenched summer months and remains almost completely untouched. Most of the human residents are scientists, who inhabit brightly coloured, eco-friendly research stations, and you’re unlikely to spot another ship, except for the ever-moving National Geographic Explorer. As a result, the wildlife simply assumes humans are larger version of themselves. This explains why penguins (when not doting on their fluff-covered chicks) chose to nibble your gumboots rather than maintain their mandatory five-meter distance.


It’s difficult to describe the beauty that surrounds you here. Even the photos don’t quite do it justice. Expansive snow-covered mountains, breaching humpback whales who find boat-dwellers fascinating, glaciers that roar and crumble into the sea, cacophonous penguin colonies, seemingly endless amounts of sunlight, sleeping seals and icebergs that take on a fluorescent turquoise hue as the day progresses. You feel so small here, so in awe and so full of joy. Looking around everything is simply stark, cold perfection.

But there’s a certain bizarreness to this place too. In the middle of nowhere you’ll stumble upon a British research station/post office, set up during World War 2 to keep an eye on the Germans, that’s now exploring the effect of tourism on penguin colonies (using penguins who refuse to stay within the boarders of their ‘control’ environment). If you’re interested, the station is called Port Lockroy and you can apply at the end of the month for a year-long posting. Miles away are the ruins of an Argentinian station, burnt down by a doctor who refused to spend yet another year alone on the ice. And then there are the bizarrely inspiring creatures you travel with.

In my two weeks I encountered a novel-writing expedition leader, wilderness-seeking doctor, a barman turned zodiac hoon and a superstitious chef with a remarkable ability to avoid parking fines and elections, simply by never being in his home country. Add to this the fact that you’ll most likely be travelling on a Russian ice breaker, that began its life as a Cold War spy vessel, and the Antarctic appeal only grows.

Uniting past and present, the bizarre and the serene, Antarctica is inspiring, incomparable and sure to leave you with ice, snow and future expeditions on your mind.

Liz Schaffer

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