Winter is drawing in; the days are getting shorter, the weather colder. At this time of year, there’s nothing Alex and Matt like better than to curl up beside a roaring fire and reflect on the past twelve months of music over a cup of mulled wine. What changed in 2010? What didn’t? How will the sound of 2010 be defined for posterity?

Most strikingly, the boundary between pop and alternative music became blurrier than ever. After their debut album Sigh No More went double-platinum, folk-rockers Mumford & Sons attracted a fanatical following. Elsewhere, the muted tones of indie minimalists The xx, the adolescent pop-rock of The Drums, and a toned-down, nostalgic Arcade Fire came to define the mainstream rock sound of the year. The xx in particular, what with Four Tet’s remix of ‘VCR’ and Jamie xx’s collaborations with a range of eclectic electronica artists, promoted a new strain of tasteful indie-electro fusion that’ll grow in 2011.

In the charts, the success of acts like Jason Derulo and The Wanted demonstrated the enduring appeal of insipid, lowest-common-denominator music, while the Simon Cowell battery farm continued to breed and milk its annual cash cows. But thankfully, the reactionary spirit that so triumphantly thwarted Joe McElderry’s hopes for the last year’s Christmas Number One remains. A growing desire to embrace the underground has seen genres such as drum ‘n’ bass and dubstep – in the guise of Pendulum, Chase & Status et al – elbow their way into the mainstream.

Accordingly, the standard ‘popstar’ model is growing more sophisticated. Florence Welch and Lady Gaga are following the examples set by Björk and Madonna in cultivating striking, warped media personas. On the other hand, as Laurence Osborn argued last week, the ascendancy of artists such as James Blake and Rudi Zygadlo heralds the emergence of the bedroom producer as a star in his own right. Whereas electronica was once the preserve of weird nerds like Aphex Twin, strands of it are now acquiring legitimacy through their clever Burial-esque sampling of catchy 90s RnB (see ‘Best Single of 2010’, opposite). Blake’s very personal cover of indie singer-songwriter Feist’s ‘The Limit To Your Love’ indicated his genre’s crossover potential.

At a time when cutbacks in funding are plaguing cultural institutions and undermining artistic industries the country over, the UK music industry’s becoming ever more dependent on live shows as a source of revenue. But it’s working – on the back of sold-out festivals like Glastonbury and Reading/Leeds, the industry actually grew by 5% in 2009, and possibly by even more this year. Bestival 2010 stood out as a commercial success story – not only did it sell out, it did so on the back of a non-mainstream lineup that represented a bizarre conflation of genres. Is this kind of all-purpose music festival a thing of the future?

As new music becomes ever easier to record, upload and listen to, breakthrough acts now have to think further outside the box. Although the role of the album as an artistic statement remains important, we’re seeing a shift in focus to the four-minute single, the live performance, and the construction of a striking public image. Whether these trends continue to develop in 2011 remains to be seen.

So what’s your literary New Year’s resolution? If you don’t read Proust now, in your youth, it will be all the more sad when you come to it late on in life – retired, tired, in search of lost time. Far better to invest now for future reward. And obviously, don’t waste time with books about Proust, that’s just putting it off. This short guide is all you need.

First, practical tips. Don’t read every volume one after the other. Spread them out, a year should do it. This book is a whole life, don’t rush. Also, don’t fret about which translation you read, whatever your library has will do. Not having French is no excuse. What you will get from this, and keep, is not the words themselves, but a set of experiences, attitudes, and feelings.

Everyone knows memory is what it is about. This is too deep for you. It rises to the surface only when you look back, like a ship’s wake. Then you’ll see it easily. The way to read Proust is precisely to ignore this what it is about and ask, what else? So much that I can only offer here a ‘summary of key themes.’

As in Jane Austen, you’ll appreciate more of the humour if you read for themes of class, money, and status. One of the best tricks of (our hero, the narrator) Marcel’s introspective alienation is that it gives him a platform to mock everyone else, from his servants to the grandest grandees. And with most vitriol, of course, the upward-moving bourgeoisie, the nouveaux riches – his own kind, by most reckonings.

Onto the next comparison. Neurosis, self-doubt crossed with an artistic arrogance and scathing criticism of the personalities of others, and a dose of young-girl fantasy. That’s right, it’s Woody Allen. Love and trust are held, for Proust, in a corrupting web, both from within and from without. Society, psychology: both are to blame for the impossibility of true love. Our emotions cannot but be self-destructive. ‘Everything that seems to us imperishable tends towards decay.’

But what about a third theme: art, culture, mimesis? The truly beautiful things Proust creates are works of art. Vinteuil’s “little sonata”; the paintings of Elstir; the church at Combray. These are the icons of a radical subjectivist philosophy. Vinteuil’s sonata moves us only through Swann; Elstir’s art, loved by Marcel, goes out of fashion; the church finds its beauty in the shifting sunlight. And all three exist nowhere but in words, in this book.

How you experience them, how you read Proust, is quite in your own hands. As he writes, ‘in reality, each reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self.’

Tucked away in the Oxford Castle complex is the O3 gallery, whose new show of work by Rachel Ducker and Rachel Owen makes it a key Oxford art destination outside the walls of the Ashmolean. As its title suggests, this exhibition is preoccupied with ideas of change, and in particular with capturing the moment in which an object turns from one thing into another. The gallery even provides a little sheet explaining the rationale behind the title, giving a quotation from Ovid about the transformation of Daphne into a tree to escape Apollo’s advances.

This idea of a human/tree figure mid-transformation recurs in many of the wire sculptures, but Owen’s prints seem to relate to metamorphosis in other ways, making the comparison less relevant. Owen’s screenprints and monoprints seem concerned with the effect of crepuscular light on buildings and trees, questioning whether objects alter as the light falling on them gradually shifts to darkness. It is as if, in this liminal space between night and day, what we see becomes distorted and skewed out of visual proportion: a tower impossibly high, a tree horrendously monstrous and black, almost strangling the picture frame towards which its branches reach.
Owen’s prints are striking in their use of sharp contrasts, as well as shades of dark grey on grey. Owen draws clearly from the sights of Oxford: there are images of old stone steps leading up to an indefinite white space, the sharp shadows leading our eye up the angles of the stonework. One of the largest works on show, a montage of several views of a vaulted stone ceiling entitled ‘Magic Forest’, was a focal point of the exhibition and seemed to draw together the sharp lines of Owen’s prints with the magical, other-worldly spectacle of Ducker’s sculpture.

Ducker’s creatures are very much the product of an artistic imagination, and seem to become more striking the larger they get in scale: one life-size work of a figure seated on a chair deserved a more prominent position in the gallery space. With a work this large, the smooth curving silver wires seemed to turn into an expression of the flesh and sinews of a living body, interconnected in a smooth design. Ducker experiments with the applications of her materials in almost every piece: in ‘Reconstructed Tree’, sections of wood are bound up within a tightly-coiled metal wire framework in the shape of a tree, suggesting an intersection of nature and artifice.

The small space is packed with art: even between the closely-hung prints on the staircase you can spot the occasional wired figure suspended in the air, veiled in mesh or leaping through space. The curation within such a small commercial gallery is always going to be limited by extraneous factors: the grey pulpy stonework of the gallery walls detracted from the stark black and white contrasts particularly in Owen’s work, and amidst some of Ducker’s sculptures at the back of the gallery was an apparently unrelated cabinet of vintage button jewellery. There was also a series of screenprints of a young girl’s face, which perhaps represented metamorphosis from child to adult, but it was difficult to reconcile this tender subject matter with the more brutal, bleak landscape depicted in the rest of Owen’s work.

Nonetheless, this is an innovative and subtle body of work in a gallery which deserves more of our attention.

Paul Gauguin has tended to cultivate an image as a somewhat pervy ‘artist-tourist’, travelling to remote lands in French Polynesia painting vivid images of exotic naked women. Indeed, the carved wooden door panels around his native dwelling in the Marquesas Islands, displayed the home’s name ‘Maison du Jouir’, which translates as ‘House of Pleasure’ or ‘House of Orgasm’. This was probably a deliberate provocation to his neighbour, a Catholic bishop – (he resented the fact that in much of the South Seas, missionaries had successfully westernized the lands and stripped them of his romanticised preconceptions of primitivism living on here) – but in order to enter Gauguin’s studio, all visitors would have had to pass under this inscription and through his bedroom. Make of that what you will.

The Tate Modern’s latest blockbuster of an exhibition, doesn’t completely dispense with this image of Gauguin, but it does give the viewer a chance to explore the greater depths to his work, focussing on Gauguin as a storyteller and creator of imaginative, mythical and stylized visions, over Gauguin as simple perv. Instead of the exhibition being arranged chronologically, Gauguin: Maker of Myth is arranged thematically, with each gallery emphasizing the common motifs and ideas that pervaded his work, at various points throughout his career, and at various points across the globe. Themes include Gauguin’s engagement with the familiar and everyday in his still lifes, rural landscapes, and the sacred and religious.

The exhibition characterises Gauguin’s relation with the female form as nuanced and complex. He sought to explain women and their relationship with the landscape, and of his time in Martinique, he wrote ‘what I find so bewitching are the figures and everyday here there is a continued coming and going of black women decked out in all their colourful fiery with their endless variety of graceful movements’. With his female nudes, he intended to suggest a ‘savage luxuriousness of a bygone age’ and so the female form came to embody part of his imaginations of pre-modern existences. In the tropical settings of Martinique and Tahiti, he could present women as timeless figures, their narrative part of enduring myth and folklore.
Gauguin is notable for breaking away from the Impressionist tradition of his time. Lush vegetation, and the warmer climes found at his many travel destinations licensed him to use bolder, more sensuous colours and shift away from the naturalistic conventions that were prevailing in other European art. What’s really captivating about his paintings is that he flattens his composition, and in place of the strong dynamics of perspective, he injects vivid swathes of colour imbued with dream-like intensity. Although he preferred to allow his imagination to guide his paintings in a studio, direct observation still remained important for him, especially given his travels, and his drawings are stripped of redundant analytic detail, and instead emphasize contour, providing highly simplified foundations from which to construct colourful visions for his paintings.

Overall it is difficult to not be enchanted by this display of Gauguin’s paintings. When it’s cold outside, and winter gloom has reduced whatever one can see through the mist to figures from a sombre grey palette, it’s refreshing to be transported to the warmth and comfort of the Tate’s gallery spaces. Also, if you need a further reason to visit the Tate this Christmas vac, Ai Weiwei’s collection of 100 million individually handcrafted porcelain seeds in the Turbine Hall is staggeringly impressive. Tremendously thought provoking, it asks questions about the meaning of the individual within the wider community, and questions about the cultural, economic and political aspects of the ‘Made in China’ phenomenon.

BEST ACTOR

The Nominees

Jordan Waller – Peer Gynt

Joe Eyre – Cyrano de Bergerac

James Corrigan – Streetcar

…but the winner is…

JEREMY NEUMARK JONES

– The Graduate

BEST ACTRESS

The Nominees

Ruby Thomas – Streetcar

Sarah Perry- Love and Money

Erica Conway- The Graduate

…but the winner is…

LOUISA HOLLOWAY

– New Electric Ballroom/Taking Care of Baby

BEST PRODUCTION

The Nominees

Taking Care of Baby

Not for the Faint Hearted

The Graduate

…but the winner is…

A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE

BEST DESIGN

The Nominees

Tamlane

A Streetcar Named Desire

Peter Pan

…but the winner is…

THE ROYAL HUNT OF THE SUN

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

The Nominees

Rachel Dedman – Judas Escariot

Etiene Ekpo-Utip – Love and Money

Charles Macrae –

Taking Care of Baby

…but the winner is…

BELLA HAMMOND – Dinner

TUMBLEWEED MOMENT

The Nominees

The drama-cringe ‘ushering in the audeince’ – Not For the Faint Hearted

The ‘crazy scene’ – The Enemies

Soldier 3 holding a gold wheel – ‘I found the sun’ in terrible Yorkshire accent – Royal Hunt

…but the winner is…

CLIMBING THE ANDES – Royal Hunt

THE VERY WORST HACK

The Nominees

Julia Mclaren (Royal Hunt) – Nominated Royal Hunt for Best Production
Annie Hollister (Producer of Royal Hunt) -nominated “Charlotte Baynon for Best Director based on her work on Royal Hunt, and Royal Hunt for Best Production

…but the winner is…

HEIDI STANCLIFFE – nominated Best Production: Royal Hunt, Best Design: Royal Hunt, Best Actor: Jake Taee (Royal Hunt), Best Director: Charlotte Beynon (Royal Hunt)

Would you please turn me off?’ Michael Boyd, Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, is commanding an RSC techie to turn off his lapel microphone at the opening of the RSC’s brand new theatre in Stratford. Boyd needs his mic turned off so he can turn his back to the audience and whisper towards the backstage, all to illustrate that this brand new theatre has acoustics that allow his whisper to be heard by every single seat in the 1,000 seat house. You would expect such a display of theatrical wonder at the unveiling of the world renowned theatre nestled in Shakespeare’s birthplace.

But the real moment of awe comes not from Boyd’s audible whisper but rather from a suited architect who stands up in the audience to explain why there is no carpet on the theatre floors under the newly renovated, and comfortable, theatre seats. ‘These wooden floors acoustically allow the audience to be aware of their own noise. Not in a negative way, not in a rustle of sweets wrappers way—but it means that when a laugh starts in a corner of the theatre, the sound will run across the entire house. When the audience gasps, they will hear their own gasp. Every gasp and laugh is audible.’

These wooden floors that reflect gasps and laughs are a perfect microcosm of the vision behind the RSC’s new space: that vision is audience engagement. From the deep thrust stage that is now the standard across all three RSC theatres in Stratford to the perfect sightlines from every seat, the audience was possibly more in mind than the actors when creating this new theatrical space.

Of course, such renovations, or should I say total demolition and reconstruction, were the perfect opportunity to fix a few recurrent problems for staging plays at the RSC. For instance, the troublesome fact that two of the theatres shared the same back wall which meant you could hear the canons in Richard III in the background to As You Like It in the theatre next door. Then there was the shared backstage space, which meant a more than one actor getting confused and making their valiant entrance into the wrong play altogether.

All these problems have been field. But the bigger problem that Michael Boyd and the development engine behind the RSC are trying to address is that of the audience. The unspoken question behind the opening of the new space is how can theatre compete in a contemporary society dominated by phenomena like reality TV, YouTube and digital media? Answering this question, Michael Boyd is standing up, rushing about the shiny new thrust stage, gesturing widely: ‘We’re not good at social gatherings. But that’s what the theatre is—its democratic, it speaks to how we can love and live together. That’s what this space is about: the audience and actors together realizing that they have a different view and looking into each other’s faces. It’s about being a place for community.’ This sentiment is aimed not only at current theatre-goers (more often than not silver-haired retirees) but at the next generation. The new RSC space has no ‘ghetto-ized seats’ reserved for school trips. Each seat has a perfect view. Why? Because, as Michael Boyd says, the theatre needs to ‘reinvent itself for the next generation’.

Reinventing the architecture and acoustics of a 1,000 seat theatre wouldn’t seem to be the kind of work that best recruits a new generation of theatre-goers. But Boyd seems convinced that if the theatre is not only to survive but thrive, it has to offer something unique. That uniqueness is in the wooden floors of the new Royal Shakespeare Theatre itself; it is ready and waiting to echo back to us the laughter and gasps that can only happen in a community of people sitting together to share something together. Something like a play.

If we are to take Pitchfork’s sage advice, James Blake is the newest representative of something called ‘post-dub’. Thankfully, judging from this track, the term isn’t another way of summarizing the laddish inanity of dubstep’s ‘bow-bow-DROPPPPPP-duh-duh-dujj’ format; it refers to a new, smart subgenre.

The name ‘CMYK’ implies a boring minimalism, but in Blake’s deception lies his genius. Blake slots a manically sped-up sample from Kelis’s ‘Caught Out There’ into the negative space of Aaliyah’s ‘Are You That Somebody?’, creating a sonic whirlwind of opposition.
While Kelis cusses her boy for betraying her (‘Look I found her red coat/Look I found her’), Aaliyah and Timbaland engage in a breathy back-and-forth, setting the stage for seduction. Blake has a sense of humour – he transforms Aaliyah’s relatively low voice into a pipsqueak and Timbaland’s into a Barry White baritone – but he also knows how to structure a song. He uses the highly gendered vocal spectrum he creates with the Aaliyah sample as the underlying anchor of the track, to which he interjects the Kelis’s anger and sense of empowerment.

Blake fuses the highs and lows of love, betrayal, and hate to construct a modern narrative about a timeless relationship. Not only has the producer made 90s RnB cool again, he’s created his own unique brand of electronica. It doesn’t really matter what you call it, for just as ‘CMYK’ transcends its disparate parts, Blake transcends categorization.

Welcome to our press-preview of The Crucible’ it says on my neatly stapled, colour printed Press Preview Pack from the director, handed to me with a handshake and a warm smile. ‘Would you like a tea or a coffee? There’s already a glass of water on the table for you.’

The cast are there in full costume looking composed: they must have already done their warm-up so as not to keep the reviewer waiting. How considerate. This term will be the touchstone for St. Hilda’s drama society as they put on Arthur Miller’s The Crucible.

Superbly directed by Alicia Luba, powerfully acted by a cast of 24 and also staged in the Jacqueline Du Pre auditorium, a hidden gem, this production has everything going for it and more. They have nearly two weeks left of rehearsals, and they’re doing a full costume press preview with confidence and vigour.

The play deals with issues of betrayal, accusation and hysteria set in the Puritanical town of Salem during the time of the witch-hunts. Miller’s narrative is imbued with catharsis and the play is two and a half hours long – a difficult one to pull off – but Alice Fletcher’s performance as Elizabeth Proctor was as stirring as it was convincing and kept me engrossed throughout. Great British restraint was charmingly adopted by Charlie Trew, playing John Proctor, and by the end when the witch trials accuse this goodly and godly man of being one himself, Trew’s defiant downfall and courageous martyrdom is entirely moving.

The starlight is not all cast by the main actors, either. The Judge (Hannah Schneiders) is foreboding, menacing, someone who could be a baddy in Star Wars; Abigail Williams is a treacherous and flirtatious tart in pilgrim’s clothing, everything makes this production stand-out, and I wholly believe that with or without feedback from student paper reviewers these dramatists will be fantastic on their opening night.
There are those who wish to have press previews and those who don’t. But if there is one thing this press preview proved, it is that press previews can be done well. St. Hilda’s reminded this reviewer that the press preview surely was invented not to fuel reciprocal loathing between reviewers and performers but to provide the first look into the weeks, and often months, of effort that goes into every Oxford play.

The Hilda Players were ready to perform, to be judged, to be criticised, and good on them, I was grateful for the experience. The cherry on the top is that they also looked like they were enjoying it, which ultimately is the point of student theatre, no?

I was the only reviewer who came to Hilda’s impressive recital and they gave it their all and I was left humbled. Thanks for the preview, guys, and break a leg.