Playing Rachmaninoff in the Tate

So I went to London for a couple of days to take a break from editing, and it was fabulous! I stayed with my friend Marie, who is lovely and very connected with the cultural scene of London, which I benefited from immensely. When I first arrived in the evening, she took me to see some avant garde immersion theatre by the Arbonauts, which was based on Italo Calvino's 1957 fantasy novel, The Baron in the Trees. It was very strange, and I definitely didn't even begin to understand it until I went and googled the novel later, but it was very fun nonetheless, with some gorgeous music and minimalist set pieces, which were all set up in Nunhead Cemetery. I highly recommend people go and see the cemetery itself, by the way, as it's a bit outside the centre of London, and incredibly beautiful, affording a fantastic view of the city. The show was performed as the sun set, so that it started out outside while it was light out, and ended inside the roofless central chapel lit by candlelight as the sky went dark. Even if the content of the performance was fairly opaque, the aesthetic was very effective.

The following morning, we went and saw the 'David Bowie Is...' exhibition at the V&A, aka my favourite museum of all time, and it was also fabulous--full of amazing stage costumes and massive video installations, and lots of really excellent commentary on Bowie as a cultural critic and his interactions with surrealism and various other artists and art movements.

(Did I manage to relate it to my thesis? Of course I did. Commentary on the space age and the isolation of the modern condition! Machine culture! It was rad.)

Also, I bought a t-shirt that says 'David Bowie is Watching You' on the back, because of reasons.

After that, we went and grabbed sushi for lunch on the south bank, and as we had some hours free before I had to catch my train back to Durham, we headed over to the Tate Modern. Marie has a membership, which meant I actually got to look around the temporary exhibitions as well as the permanent collections, which was great fun! Some really interesting international artists, including an installation which was pretty much an interactive museum inside the museum--various rooms of exhibitions, plus several 'classrooms' with activities for children, like building blocks and a playable piano. As a result, Marie and I built an awesome fort, and then waited out a mob of Japanese students for a chance to play the piano.

And that's how I ended up playing Rachmaninoff at the Tate on a Friday afternoon. For a 24-hour trip, I'd say it was a resounding success.