Film
Robert McKee, screenwriting guru
It’s hard for movies to capture the zeitgeist because the world is so
fragmented. One current preoccupation is paranoia. The modern thriller is
told from the point of view of the victim because we all feel under threat.
Another preoccupation is cynicism. All social institutions are regarded as
bullshit. We attack them with comedy. The line between good and evil is so
blurred that we retreat to the past or into fantasy to make the distinctions
clear. Telling a contemporary love story is difficult — generally speaking,
the love story is now a period film. Action films are still with us because
the one value all humans agree on is that life is better than death.
Robert McKee lectures on screenwriting and is the author of Story (www.mckeestory.com)
Bobette Buster, film lecturer
The studios are interested in “four quadrant” films — ones that service men
aged 17-22 or 23-35, plus women in the same age groups. This means big
action special-effects films that may cross over as date films, or fun date
films that guys can be dragged in to see. Think X-Men or The Devil Wears
Prada. This collides with the artists’ desire to make edgy films and to push
the envelope of storytelling — but these films rarely make back their money.
There are lovely exceptions, like Juno and Little Miss Sunshine.
The studios are scared stiff that the four-quadrant market is diminishing. A
recent survey showed that young men ranked watching movies below surfing the
web, playing video games and eating out.
Bobette Buster is an adjunct professor at the USC School of Cinematic Arts
in Los Angeles and travels the world lecturingon feature-film development
Theatre
Mark Ravenhill, playwright
One definite trend is verbatim theatre. Black Watch, by Gregory Burke, based
on interviews with soldiers in Iraq, has encouraged others to work like
this. There’s a general interest in finding new ways of doing political
theatre and an impetus to ask bigger questions about society than can be
asked in plays about “my family” or “my relationship with my girlfriend”.
Technically, the most interesting experimentation is when writers ask big
questions. What is character? What is time? Martin Crimp is always asking
new questions about form. Metaphysical questions might creep in, but it’s
not something the British do very well.
Mark Ravenhill is the author of Shopping and F***ing and Mother Clap’s
Molly House
Dominic Cooke, director
Third-generation black and Asian writers are tackling issues of
responsibility, rather than blaming those in power. They’re questioning how
the orthodoxy of their minority group limits them. In a similar spirit, some
gay plays are questioning the received orthodoxy that the only real identity
of a gay person is to sleep around a lot.
Two things I find interesting in terms of form are the fractured playwriting
that wrestles with the fractured nature of the world, and the exploration of
different spatial dynamics, as with a theatrical group such as Punchdrunk or
our production of Levi David Addai’s Oxford Street, which we put on in a
disused shop.
Dominic Cooke is artistic director of the Royal Court
Music
Master Shortie, musician
A lot of black artists talk about stuff that the average person might not
relate to, so their music stays underground. There, the fan base is more
loyal and you can still get by. There are more underground artists getting
by than there are commercial artists who are stars.
People used to have to compose and add instruments. Now we sample. It’s not
stealing, but taking inspiration. You loop stuff that’s already been
recorded and come up with something different on top. I often make the words
up on the spot, and it comes from the head. There are also a lot more studio
effects available. If you’re not the greatest singer, you can be the
greatest singer. It’s a lot easier to create the music now, but a lot harder
to get it out there.
Master Shortie, 19, is from southeast London. His first single, Dead End,
is out now
Nigel Godrich, record producer
There is nothing you can do today in the studio that you couldn’t do before:
there are just new boxes that speed up the process. I like the idea of not
using all the tools at my disposal, so that I rely on my brain, my editing
skills and my musicality.
Technology started hurting music in the 1980s. Now nobody can afford to work
in recording studios, so your average kid with talent will make a dubstep
album on a laptop that then gets put on MySpace. Hip-hop and dubstep are
where the innovation is. It is a genuine burst of energy that is using new
technology to make something new.
The sound of that is interesting to me. What’s not interesting is hearing
another indie guitar band.
Nigel Godrich has produced albums by Beck, Radiohead and Paul McCartney
Dance
Russell Maliphant, dancer and choreographer
There is more momentum in dance today. Now that the brutal language of Wim
Vandekeybus and DV8 has been absorbed, there’s a search for more
sophisticated ways to play with it.
Today, we are exposed to such a vast range of influences. You no longer have
to wait five years for flamenco to come round again. Dancers who see these
things take something away whether or not they like what they see.
One of the most exciting areas is the collaborative work between dancers and
scientists, lighting artists, composers, people like that. I’m involved in a
study of the body and emotion that involves working with neuroscientists.
Dance embraces technological development, but it’s always a balance with
budgets. The people who’d like to explore may not have the money to finance
the exploration.
Russell Maliphant’s most recent pieces are Push and Solo, collaborations
with the ballet dancer Sylvie Guillem
Alistair Spalding, artistic director
The body is doing things in dance that previously wouldn’t have been
achievable. Dancers can no longer expect to get work by learning just one
technique, because choreographers want lots of different techniques, styles
and skills. Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, for example, does yoga and t’ai chi with
his dancers. Lin Hwai-min, of Cloud Gate, uses martial arts as his movement
base. This is a big change.
Dance deals with contemporary issues. Wayne McGregor is investigating the body
and its relationship with science and technology. Akram Khan uses narratives
about being a second-generation Bangladeshi living in London.
William Forsythe’s last piece at Sadler’s Wells was about the Iraq conflict.
Hip-hop is drifting into the canon. The styles are becoming more
sophisticated, as are the way the dances are framed. We have a hip-hop
festival here called Breakin’ Convention, which would never have been done
20 years ago.
Alistair Spalding is CEO/artistic director of Sadler’s Wells
Art
Marc Quinn, sculptor
One of the essential things of the moment is tackling embodiment in an age of
disembodiment. We live in virtual space as much as we do in real space. It’s
to do with using the internet, e-mails and all those forms of communication.
A lot of my work explores what it means to be a body living in the world.
The Kate Moss sculpture is about disembodiment, because it’s a sculpture not
of her as a person, but of her image. We measure our lives against
disembodied ideals. This is a human trait, but becomes more prominent with
new technology.
I’m also interested in how we affect nature. Issues like climate change get
refracted through the lens of my flower paintings. The flowers at the
florists would never normally grow at the same time and in the same place.
Many of them have been flown in. Human desire is shaping nature.
Developments in technology open up new opportunities as long as you can use
them expressively. I’ve used DNA and I’ve frozen things. It means you can
articulate contemporary concerns using contemporary technology.
Jessica Morgan, curator
In a curatorial sense, I am fascinated that few exhibitions try to take on
really big issues. I think there is a certain amount of fear in the idea of
taking them on. One result is that people look to the past. There has been a
tendency to revert to the early stages of modernism. It was a point of
utopian hope, experimentation and bold ideas of political change.
There has also been a type of artwork that allows the audience to create or
complete it. I’m thinking of artists such as Carsten Höller, who made the
slides at Tate Modern, or Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster [whose current show is
in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall]. They take on the role of curator and to some
extent allow the curator to be an artist.
The economic shift will affect the art world. One of the things I hope may
fall by the wayside is the type of fashionable production created by the
market. We’d all be better off without quite so many galleries and useless
publications.
Jessica Morgan is a curator at Tate Modern
Comedy
Richard Herring, comedian
The internet will change comedy. People will make TV-quality programmes, put
them on the internet, get advertising, then sell them to television. My
weekly podcast with Andrew Collins can be heard within an hour of being
recorded and is downloaded by 20,000 people. With radio, it takes you six
months to persuade someone to put it on.
Comedians are always pushing back the boundaries. Some do it for shock value,
others as satire. Islam is the new thing it’s dangerous to talk about. The
comedians of the 1980s were at the forefront of changing attitudes to sexism
and racism. Now that most people accept equality, you can mess about with
it. People will do jokes about race and rape. They might sound straight out
of Bernard Manning’s joke book, but they’re delivered with a different spin.
Lucy Lumsden, BBC comedy controller
The Office made hearing laughter and having obvious jokey moments seem really
odd. We’re coming through that, and have sitcoms with Omid Djalili and
Miranda Hart that have a big comic persona at their heart.
To a certain extent, comedy catches the spirit of the moment, but often it
works by opposing it. It can be the thing you didn’t really know you wanted,
like Gavin and Stacey. If we had tried to predict that, we probably would
have come unstuck.
I’m missing the stronger subjects and the stronger ways we dealt with them. I
want to make sure we can look the latest taboo in the eye and do a comedy
about it. It takes a brave creative spirit to make people laugh, let alone
also make them think.
Lucy Lumsden is BBC TV Controller of Comedy Commissioning
Paul Muldoon, poet
The world is making less and less sense. There is more information, but such
is the assault of it that we understand less about the most basic aspects of
our lives. To be equal to this, poetry has to be complex. That doesn’t mean
more complicated and difficult, simply that it has to take on so much more.
Our tolerance for complex narrative structures is high in film because we’ve
seen so much. The same is true for rock music. Our difficulty with poetry is
a lack of exposure to it. We can untangle the heap of broken images we see
in the shower sequence in Psycho, but we are not so adept when confronting
the equivalent in the verbal arts.
In American poetry today, John Ashbery is particularly equal to the sense of
the random. Although he’s 81, he’s been able to remake himself. He’s the
poet laureate of mtvU (a subsidiary of MTV). Thirty years ago, he was on the
circumference, now he’s at the centre.
Experimentation continues. The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets have attempted to push
the boundaries. Their writing emphasises disjunction. Not making sense is
relatively easy, though. Making sense is what’s difficult.
Paul Muldoon is the Howard GB Clarke ’21 Professor at Princeton University
and poetry editor of The New Yorker
Neil Astley, publisher
The poetry scene used to be dominated by Oxbridge, southeast England and men.
The forms are never tired — only people’s ability to use them. A versatile
poet can use traditional forms to produce work that’s refreshing and
insightful, often by subverting expectations.
There used to be certain schools of poets, like the Movement and the Group,
but poetry is more pluralist today. There’s no one dominant kind of poetry
or subject. Literary festivals, readings and slams have made poetry much
more available. We need to use all forms of media to get poetry out to that
broader public.
Neil Astley founded Bloodaxe Books in 1978; it has since published almost
1,000 poetry books
