Ashmolean LiveFriday: Social Animals – Friday, 7pm, Ashmolean Museum

Mapping Motion: Impulse, Object and Trajectory – Tuesday, 5.30pm, Jacqueline du Pré Building, St Hilda’s

Leading British choreographer Kim Brandstrup gives a presentation on balancing music with the body in the choreographic process. 

The Surrealists certainly didn’t shy away from metamorphosis. Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory, with its dream-like desert scene, clocks melting and bending into the indistinct earth, remains one of the most enduring images from the early years of the movement. The Spanish innovator is instantly recognised by his eerie and ethereal paintings and of course, that ubiquitous moustache. At the same time there was a master of disguise quietly climbing through the ranks of the crowded surrealist scene in France. Claude Cahun refused to stay silent for long.

Born Lucy Schwob in Nantes at the turn of the twentieth century, the accomplished artist gained renown for her shape-shifting persona and the multiple aliases she assumed. From ‘Daniel Douglas’, drawing inspiration from the English author Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas, famously the lover of Oscar Wilde, to ‘The Unnamed Soldier’, an anti-Nazi propagandist on Jersey during the Second World War, Cahun was a chameleon.

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Just as irreverence and subversion characterised her photography and writing, frequent physical transformations ensured that she and her work consistently escaped comprehensive definition or the constraints of a fixed genre. Ever the enigma, Cahun revelled in reinvention, casting herself as the lead role in the series of self-portraits that she assembled into montages over the course of several decades. She makes the effortless transition from a shaven-headed gamine to a strikingly made-up Marlene Dietrich look-alike, never failing to surprise the viewer with her refusals of consistency and convention. It is for this reason that Cahun is widely credited for her defiance of traditional gender norms; her playful approach to the expression of the non-binary aspect of her self succeeded in rooting her firmly in the canon of intersectional feminist art.

Among her most well-known works is I am in training. Do not kiss me, an image which depicts her resting a pair of weights on her shoulders, sporting a slicked-back cowlick hairstyle and the melancholic gaze of a Pierrot clown. Adopting a role commonly perceived to be masculine while retaining some feminine aspects of her appearance, Cahun refutes the idea that gender identity is permanent, restrictive and assigned at birth, instead favouring flux and transience.

It may be trite to say that Mexico is a country of change, but at the beginning of the twentieth century, it really did have to put up with a lot. World War Two sent a stream of Spanish-speaking European refugees its way, looking for a new home away from the oppression of fascism. Within its own borders, revolution bubbled away under the surface, exploding into the 1910 civil war, and again in various armed conflicts even after the appearance of peace in the form of a constitution in 1917.

‘I have asked myself what is missing from this nation. Kindness, love of people, humour or aesthetic sense? No, one can find all these attributes in England… Finally I have found something which distinguishes English people from all other cultures to quite an astonishing degree, a lack which everybody acknowledges – therefore nothing new – but has not been emphasised enough. The English are the only cultured nation without its own music.’

Writing in 1904, Oscar Schmitz encapsulated the oeuvre of English musical criticism at the beginning of the last century. Despite the English nation’s love of music in the early modern period, we were arguably more a nation of listeners than creators. Our speciality was metamorphoses: of transforming established European genres into anglicised counterparts.

Consider opera. The English interaction with the genre in the mid-seventeenth to early eighteenth century is a tale of one such attempted metamorphosis. The operatic genre gripped the restoration court of Charles II. On his return to England, the exiled King brought with him an increasingly Francophile court. And as opera grew increasingly popular with the French aristocracy at Versailles, the English naturally wished to keep up appearances. If Louis XIV could have Jean-Bapitise Lully write beautiful scores and librettos for performance at Versailles, then Charles could have the same performed in central London. Taking its basis from Elizabethan Court masques, Samuel Pepys notes how the bourgeoisie and royals alike, of both English and Bohemian origins, attending a performance of William Davenant’s The Siege of Rhodes in 1661 at Covent Garden, gorged upon the emulated European decadence, “It is indeed very fine and magnificent, and well-acted, all but the Eunuch, who was so much out that he was hissed off the stage.” 

★★★☆☆

An ambitious musical revue featuring semi-staged morsels from musical theatre centred on the theme of revolution and rebellion. That is how I’d describe the first event of St Anne’s College Arts Week, Revolution – The St Anne’s Musical Revue.  The choice of songs was eclectic, but attractively so, providing something for everyone.

The show boasted a brave selection of famous West End ‘staples’ from Les Miserables and Evita, to the Hollywood heights of film favourites such as  ‘Breaking Free’ from High School Musical. And even in North Oxford, there was an appearance of the song from which there is no escape: ‘Let it Go’ from Frozen.  But the most appealing inclusions were by far ‘When I Grow Up/Naughty’ from Matilda and ‘Cell Block Tango’ from Chicago. Together, they provided light relief from an evening that potentially could have been a series of grating ballads.

Vocally, the evening is hard to fault. Fine solo performances and generally solid ensemble work powered throughout the evening. Special mention must go to Brandon Levin. Truly the star of the evening, he provided not only an outstanding performance as Jean Valjean in ‘The Confrontation’ from Les Misérables, but also an unforgettable rendition of the not-often-heard ‘This is the Moment’ from Jekyll and Hyde, a dramatic and vocal tour-de-force.  Similarly admirable was Sairah Rees’ performance of ‘I Dreamed a Dream’, which rivalled Anne Hathaway’s rendition in its emotional immediacy. 

However, for me, the most impressive musical element of the whole evening was the band and their director Stephen Bradshaw.  Their ensemble was consistently tight, and they were always accommodating for the liberties expectedly taken by the singers, stylistically adapting well throughout the varied programme: if only flawed by the technical glitches hindered the audibility of the finale performance of ‘One Day More’.

Of course, this was not just a musical performance but also semi-staged, complete with full costumes, props, lighting, acting and choreography.  The acting was commendable throughout, particularly memorable in the spritely performance of ‘When I Grow Up’ and the excellently executed conflict between Brandon Levin and Ben Partridge in ‘The Confrontation’. Beginning dramatically with Javert’s entrance from the back of the hall, this was but one of many examples of the production’s inventive use of space. Costumes and props were a welcomed addition throughout the performance, although, to my great disappointment, Elphaba was sadly not painted green for ‘Defying Gravity’.  

Perhaps the weakest aspect of the evening was the choreography. You need only look at the awkward shifts in ‘When I Grow Up’ or the distracting solo dance routine in ‘Listen’, the latter rendering the performance uncomfortable to watch. But all this was trumped by the unenthusiastic and often embarrassing dancing in ‘Breaking Free’. To put it bluntly – better moves can be seen in Parkend or Bridge after one too many jagerbombs than in that number.

Despite these flaws, the experience as a whole was nevertheless enjoyable. The team at St Anne’s, in particular the director Naomi Morris Omori and the musical director Stephen Bradshaw, must be congratulated for taking on and pulling off such an ambitious project.