Building Cultures Film Evening

Curated by Dr Isabelle Fremeaux and presented in collaboration with the Birkbeck Film Society as part of the Reveal King's Cross Festival on Friday 30 April, this screening and discussion reflected and questioned the relationship between art, activism, urban regeneration and gentrification.

Three films offered different perspectives on these issues: Dereliction of beauty (dir. Shehani Fernando) (8mins) described the day long experience in March 2009 during which 70 artists took over London's doomed Market Estate. Nike Ground (dir. Franco Mattes) (6mins) related the spoof renaming of Karlplatz in Vienna into Nikeground to critique the corporate take over of publuc spaces. The Battle for Broadway Market (dir Emily James) (75mins) followed the 3 month long occupation of a local cafe to resist demolition and protest against the gentrification of Broadway Market in East London.

Dr Paul Watt, Senior Lecturer in Urban Studies at Birkbeck College and Andrea Gibbons, a Los Angeles based organiser of tenants rights movement and PhD student at LSE, were guest speakers and analysed some of the most salient issues with "culture-based urban regeneration". About 20 people attended and joined a very lively discussion about the problems, most notably the deep inequalities, which processes of gentrification too often entail.

The London Butoh Festival: Celebrating Fifty Years of Butoh - The Birkbeck Connection September - November 2009

Butoh is a form of movement originated by dance artists Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno in Japan after the Second World War. This approach to movement emerged at a time when many artists in Japan were seeking to escape from the weight of Japanese tradition and the force of westernization that followed World War Two. The butoh founders were seeking a redefinition of Japanese contemporary dance and rejected western ballet and modern dance, although German Expressionist dance was a strong influence on the early butoh founders.

Read more:

In conversation - Maria Koripas and Fran Barbe

The London Butoh Festival and the Birkbeck Connection

New book by Jonathan D. Mackintosh is published

Jonathan's first monograph is called Homosexuality and Manliness in Postwar Japan, published in September 2009. It looks at the constructions and representations of male-male sexuality and manliness as they were explored in the first years of Japan’s first specialist magazines catering to male-male sexuality: Barazoku (The Rose Tribes) (pictured), The Adonis Boy, Adon, and Sabu. Taking their cue from this genre of lifestyle and erotic articulation, it explores various episodes in this history of men across the early-to-mid postwar period and earlier including: the first stirrings of a homo movement in the early 1970s, which in turn sparked expressions of virulent anti-homo sentiment; the impact of American ideologies and idealisations on the conception of Japanese manly beauty from the 1950s to the 1970s; manly ethics and a geneology of masculine expression; and finally the very modern love of elder and youth. www.routledge.com/9780415421867

Yorkshire Sculpture Park Event

Dr. Cameron Cartiere leads a walking lecture at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, September 2009. Here the group visits Andy Goldsworthy's 'Shadow Stone Fold'.

Yorkshire Sculpture Park Event

Dr. Cameron Cartiere leads a walking lecture at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, September 2009.

Dance

Photo by Step Haiselden

Dance

Photo by Step Haiselden