Barbican Guide
September 2021

Celebrate your favourite Barbican memories

Our Name A Seat programme is a lovely way to support our artistic and learning work while commemorating a particular moment or as a dedication to someone you’re close to who loves the Barbican. By naming a seat in our Hall, Cinemas or Theatre you will be supporting the artists returning to our stages and helping deliver our Creative Learning programme, which gives young people access to culture and arts. Bring your special memories to life by naming a seat in our venues and support what you love about the Barbican.

Power is a frequent topic of conversation, but how much do you really know about it? Suzanne Alleyne’s been obsessed with this topic for years, and as we quickly found out when chatting to her, the more you discover, the more you realise how much more there is to uncover.

She’s brought together a surprising group of poets, scientists, writers and artists for a series of online talks which will leave you thinking about how power shapes your everyday interactions. They will explore what is happening in our brains and bodies when we acquire or lose power, and why that matters.

Alleyne says her interest in the subject is intertwined with her lived experience as a Black woman ‘who quite often feels overweight, who doesn’t feel like I fit in, who has mental health that I’m very public about’. After many years travelling the world for her successful career as a brand consultant, she moved into the funded sector but said no matter where she worked, she always felt like she didn’t belong. ‘I feel frustrated with “diversity and inclusion” – this is who I am, but for me, I think that if you can get to the grassroots of the matter, you can get to the root of society’s challenges.’ And that’s what led to her think about power.

After studying for Masters in Arts and Cultural Management, where she learned about the topic from a social perspective, she read an article in The Atlantic magazine that said power damages the brain. ‘And I just thought, “hold on a minute.” And I started to think about the power between you and your work, the power between you and your friends. And I wondered, “Where is it in your brain? Is it in your brain? Is it in your body? Is it a chemical? Do you get addicted to it?”’ As she sought answers, she discovered that many of her questions hadn’t been answered by academics. So she started her research project, The Neurology of Power. And if the topic is setting off as many ideas in your mind as it did ours, it will give you an appreciation for why she’s been so gripped by this issue for the last half-decade.

You’d be forgiven for thinking this could get very complex very quickly, and you’d be right, but that’s not what this series of talks is about. ‘I’m not interested in doing anything that’s highfalutin,’ says Alleyne. ‘It has to have an impact. I want lightbulbs to go off.’

Can We Talk About Power takes place from 27–30 September

Leytonstone Loves Film, our annual celebration of the movies, is back, championing local filmmakers and organisations in this creative corner of east London. This year the festival will be a hybrid of real life and virtual events – there’s outdoor and indoor screenings, workshops, online events and more.

Among the in-person events is a screening of Nattawut Poonpiriya’s 2017 hit Bad Genius in Leytonstone Library. It’s organised by Not Another Film Club, a group of four alumni from our Young Film Programmers initiative.

Ademola Bello from the group says: ‘This film was one we all found really fun. It’s like Ocean’s 11 but in a school. I wanted to show it because usually there’s a very specific type of non-Western film that makes it into like the canon of “Oh, this is a good non-Hollywood movie”. And Bad Genius is just a fun movie that anybody can enjoy. When it comes to films from foreign markets, people tend to want art house versions because they look down on pop films. But pop films can be really good as well.’ Fellow film club member Isaac Gold explains the group specifically seeks out films and ‘discover something from places you wouldn’t expect to look or wouldn’t normally see films from.’ The foursome also aims to do more than simply screen films at their events, says Nicole Rego Freitas. In the past, they’ve organised talks from experts. ‘For Leytonstone Loves Film, we wanted to do something more fun. So we’ll be doing a quiz after the film, and we’re partnering with local Thai restaurant Singburi to bring food.’

Allissa Tai agrees with Bello: ‘This film did very well in Asia. I think it’s already in the process of getting a Hollywood remake. But we shouldn’t need to remake these films with white Americans, they’re perfectly great as they are. Even though it’s based in Thailand, the subject matter is really relatable.

‘As a group, a major way we think about film is as a medium of building communities. This film can relate across cultures, but we’re adding another dimension by having the communal experience of a quiz and meal in the local community.’ Whether you come for the physical events, or pick the online options, there’s so much to discover at this year’s festival of film.

Leytonstone Loves Film takes place on 15–19 September

A few years back, multi award-winning violinist Nicola Benedetti played a solo mini tour. But she admits she found it ‘quite nervewracking’, so shelved any further thoughts of taking it further. That’s until six months ago, when she performed solo at Snape Maltings in Suffolk. ‘I enjoyed it so much.’ She laughs: ‘I really embraced the freedom of not having to consider anybody else. Just being able to chat to the audience, to take my time playing, and in any style I like.’

Her performance here celebrates the music of dance, roaming over hundreds of years as she showcases the violin’s versatility – and her own extraordinary talent – as she plays works from Baroque refinement by JS Bach to foot-stomping fun with Wynton Marsalis.

‘The music I’ve chosen to play reflects the diversity of what’s been written for the violin, but also the idea of the violin itself as a creation, as a means of communication and reflection,’ she says. ‘The violin has travelled through all of these incredible, tumultuous periods of history whether it’s a time of devotion and piety, or the Baroque period with its explosive burst of different styles of expression in Central Europe, through the impressionistic style of Eugène Ysaÿe’s Sonata No 5.’

The finale will be Wynton Marsalis’s Fiddle Dance Suite, written especially for her by the composer, trumpeter, and artistic director of the great Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. The pair have a longstanding working relationship, and he’s effusive about her talent. ‘With her, the thing I love the most is the levels of seriousness and dedication to music,’ he said in an interview for Decca Classics. ‘That someone will practice seven or eight hours, will study, will read, will learn harmony, will conquer the fears that come with playing in front of people and will be for real all the time – I have so much respect of that level of seriousness.’

‘As a person and a musician he sees 360-degrees all the time,’ says Benedetti. ‘He looks all around the world trying to absorb and glean from traditions and musical expressions from the entire history of written music.’

This month we’re marking Marsalis’s 60th birthday with a special concert by the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra performing songs hand-picked by their inspirational leader – both his own compositions and work from the artists who’ve influenced him over the course of his illustrious life in music. With their usual international associate residency cancelled due to covid, it’s exciting that they can finally return to us.

‘Wynton has been one of the biggest inspirations and influences in my life,’ says Benedetti. ‘He’s an incredibly multi-layered musician and person. He’s someone who has endless numbers of perspectives that can seem to absolutely contradict one another but that’s where the profundity lies for me. Many people talk about having a diverse group of friends, but when you look closer there’s always something that unites them, whether its politics, income or something else. Wynton is one of the only people I know who I can genuinely say has a diverse group around him. I’ve never known someone to genuinely embrace all shapes and sizes of human beings. He is fascinated in the whole broad, messy picture that is the human race, and that shows in his music.’

Nicola Benedetti performs on Thursday 23 September

Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis: Wynton at 60 takes place on Sunday 26 September

Over the course of his six-decade career, the Japanese-American artist Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988) used sculpture as his chosen medium for exploring the world. The diversity of his work, along with his refusal to affiliate with any style, movement, or neat categorisation, makes Noguchi a difficult artist to pin down historically. For him, the value of a sculpture was not determined by the traditionally insular concerns of Western art history, aesthetics, or the art market, but rather sculpture’s use in everyday life. As he explained, ‘Art for me is something which teaches human beings how to become more human.’

1904–1928: Beginnings

Noguchi’s sense of self and home was complex and ever-evolving. He was a biracial American, the son of Léonie Gilmour, a white American writer and editor of mostly Irish descent, and Yonejiro Noguchi, an itinerant Japanese poet. Born in Los Angeles, California, on November 17, 1904, he moved to Japan with his mother aged two. In 1918, when he was thirteen, his mother arranged for him to move back to the United States by himself to attend an experimental school in Indiana that she had read about in a magazine. The school closed shortly after Noguchi’s arrival, but he remained in Indiana where he attended public school, living with a local family. Noguchi later suspected that Léonie sent him to the United States to shield him from the racism often directed towards mixed-raced people in Japan. She thought it better for him to ‘become completely American’. Of course, that wasn’t so simple, and experiences of discrimination, difference, and in-betweenness followed Noguchi in the United States. Reflecting on his career at age 82, Noguchi explained that his desire to create sculpture ‘that is actually very useful, and very much a part of people’s lives’ was deeply informed by his ‘own background: the need for belonging... the need to feel that there is someplace on the earth which an artist can affect in such a way that the art in that place makes for a better life and a better possibility of survival’.

Following high school, Noguchi moved to New York, where while taking courses at the Leonardo da Vinci Art School, he learned to sculpt in a traditional academic style and was quickly recognised for his virtuosic skill. In 1927 he worked for Romanian artist Constantin Brâncuşi in Paris, where he gained a seminal introduction to the modernist principles of abstraction and a deep respect for the handling of materials and tools.

1929–1940: Deepening Knowledge

On returning to New York in 1929, Noguchi began sculpting portrait busts for patrons and friends as a way to support himself. ‘Headbusting,’ as he disparagingly called it, was a useful way to ‘make money and meet people’, and this is how he met several future collaborators and friends, including pioneering choreographer Martha Graham and architecttheorist R Buckminster Fuller. In Fuller, Noguchi found a fellow optimist whose humanist vision of a future shaped by technology and innovative design deeply influenced his own evolution as a cross-disciplinary artist-engineer-designer.

In a continued effort to locate sculpture’s broader purpose, Noguchi experimented in industrial design and public sculpture (although he had little use for, or interest in, these labels). His designs for a clock, Measured Time (1932), and the shell of Zenith’s Radio Nurse (1937), the first-ever baby monitor, were both put into production.

In 1935, Noguchi presented several ambitious proposals for public sculptures in a solo exhibition at Marie Harriman Gallery in New York. One of these works was Play Mountain (1935), his radically innovative proposal to transform a full city block into a mountain of sloping and stepped surfaces for sliding, sledding, exploration, and open-ended play. The project was flatly denied by New York City Parks Commissioner Robert Moses.

1941–1948: Becoming

Noguchi’s sense of self, the world, and the role of sculptor was profoundly altered during the Second World War. Amid a growing tide of anti-Japanese discrimination in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Noguchi travelled to Washington to advocate on behalf of Japanese-Americans. As a New Yorker, Noguchi was exempt from Executive Order 9066, which authorised the War Department to designate and remove individuals from exclusion zones and was used to force approximately 120,000 Japanese-Americans living on the West Coast into internment camps. Nevertheless, he made the astounding decision to voluntarily enter one of these camps in Poston, Arizona. Believing that he could ‘help preserve self-respect and belief in America,’ Noguchi attempted to establish an arts and crafts programme that could be replicated in other camps. He also planned to rebuild Poston with trees, gardens, and centres for art, recreation, and play.

Within months, Noguchi was overcome with a profound sense of disillusionment as he confronted the brutality of incarceration and suspicion from both internees and camp officials, whom he realised had no intention of supporting his plans. He eventually attempted to leave Poston, but to his horror, his request was denied. It would be another three months before he was granted a temporary furlough.

Noguchi was indelibly marked by this experience, which forced him to reckon with his position in the country and world, and his ability to meaningfully effect change as a sculptor.

After his release, Noguchi moved back to New York and established a studio at 33 MacDougal Alley, resolving to ‘be an artist only’. But this did not mean turning his back on the world. Instead, he set out to find new ways to make sense of the human experience in all its complexity and to shape the world he desired. He continued to experiment with different materials and forms, including magnesite and interlocking marble slabs, and began working with manufacturers including Lightolier, Knoll, and Herman Miller to produce lights and furniture, including his now iconic Coffee Table (1944).

At this time, Noguchi was gaining increased recognition, participating in numerous exhibitions in New York. Over the course of his six-decade career, the Japanese-American artist Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988) used sculpture as his chosen medium for exploring the world. The diversity of his work, along with his refusal to affiliate with any style, movement, or neat categorisation, makes Noguchi a difficult artist to pin down historically. For him, the value of a sculpture was not determined by the traditionally insular concerns of Western art history, aesthetics, or the art market, but rather sculpture’s use in everyday life. As he explained, ‘Art for me is something which teaches human beings how to become more human.’

1949–1957: Seeking

Despite his growing success at the end of the 1940s, Noguchi still sought ‘some larger, more noble, and more essentially sculptural purpose to sculpture’. In 1949, he applied for a fellowship from the Bollingen Foundation to travel the world and write a book on ‘the environment of leisure, its meaning, its use, and its relationship to society’. By this he meant civic, social, and religious spaces used across time and cultures for gathering, ceremony, and entertainment. Over the next six years, Noguchi travelled Europe and Asia searching for different ‘use[s] of sculpture in a spatial, cosmic sense’. Although Noguchi never actually wrote the proposed book, his journeys around the world profoundly impacted his life and work. During his travels, Noguchi spent a great deal of time in Japan, returning in 1950 for the first time in nearly two decades. For a time, he lived in Kita Kamakura with Yoshiko “Shirley” Yamaguchi, a Japanese film actress, whom he met in New York. The two quickly married although ultimately divorced in 1957 after a period of separation. Noguchi became particularly invested in Japanese craft traditions at this time: he created his own large body of stoneware sculptures, many inspired by Haniwa, ancient Japanese burial objects, and first developed his nowrenowned Akari light sculptures, his modern take on traditional chochin paper lanterns. Noguchi considered Akari to be “a true development in an old tradition,” and over the course of his life developed over 200 different models of these electrically illuminated light sculptures. For Noguchi, reinventing tradition was a way of both honoring and transcending a specific history, relating instead to something universal and shared. This vision and his growing identification as a “world citizen” influenced his 1955 garden design for the United Nations’ UNESCO campus in Paris.

1958–1979: Ways of Discovery

In 1958 Noguchi returned to New York and a few years later established a studio in an old factory in Long Island City, Queens. He quickly became involved in a series of large-scale public projects and more serious collaborations with architects. Throughout the 60s and 70s, despite continually pushing the limits of feasibility, Noguchi was able to successfully complete more than 20 public works around the world, including gardens, fountains, playgrounds, and plazas.

In 1971, to manage his numerous public commissions, Noguchi established Noguchi Fountain and Plaza, Inc. with the architectengineer Shoji Sadao, an invaluable collaborator who helped realise some of Noguchi’s most technologically ambitious projects (as well as those of their mutual friend Buckminster Fuller). Among these projects, was ‘the total environment of leisure’ that he designed for Philip A Hart Plaza in Detroit, Michigan (1971–1979), an eight-acre public space overlooking the Detroit River that includes a sunken amphitheatre, stepped seating, and a central fountain. Noguchi described the plaza, which remains a muchused civic centre, as a ‘horizon for people’. During this period, Noguchi also continued his tireless exploration of different materials, experimenting with folded sheet-metal, balsa wood, and bronze. Stone, in particular, became a primary medium for Noguchi, for whom it was expressive of both the past and the future: “a congealment of time.” In order to create his monumental granite sculpture Black Sun (1969), a public commision for the city of Seattle, WA, Noguchi sought the help of the Japanese stone-carver Masatoshi Izumi, who had a studio in Mure on the Japanese island of Shikoku and would become an important collaborator. Noguchi returned to Mure often, and in the early 1970s established a second home there where he continued to live and work part-time for the rest of his life. In subsequent years, Noguchi would become increasingly invested in carving hard Japanese granite and basalt, a practice he regarded as a dialogue with nature and time.

1980–1988: This Earth, This Passage

In his later years, Noguchi was thinking deeply about the full scope of his work and his legacy. Largely discontent with the model of traditional museums and the demands of the marketdriven art world, he decided to establish his own museum near his studio and home in Long Island City. The Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum officially opened to the public in 1985. Noguchi conceived of it as a repository of his work and record of his thinking, but also as a living resource: a shared space for visitors to come together, reflect, and learn. In 1986, Noguchi presented Isamu Noguchi: What is Sculpture? in the US pavilion at the 42nd Venice Biennale. Although memories of his incarceration by the United States government during the war left Noguchi reluctant to accept this prestigious invitation to represent America, he ultimately chose to go through with the exhibition and make it his own. In the spring of 1988, the last year of his life, Noguchi conceived of his final and most ambitious playground design: Moerenuma Park (1988–2000), a 454-acre park on a reclaimed municipal dump outside Sapporo, Japan, designed to include play sculptures, fields, and fountains, and a revised version of his firstever play concept – the monumental stepped pyramid he called Play Mountain (1933). That winter, Noguchi caught pneumonia and died on December 30, after succumbing to heart failure. Although he did not live to see the completion of Moerenuma park, this final work encapsulates Noguchi’s lifetime commitment to creating socially meaningful sculpture, and to sculpting the world he wished to inhabit.

Noguchi takes place from 30 September–9 January
This exhibition is generously supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art

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Stepping back into the shoes of Reno Sweeney, the role that saw her win a Tony Award on Broadway, is ‘a dream come true’, says Sutton Foster.

‘Anything Goes was such a special show and experience for me,’ she says. ‘I never thought I would get the opportunity to play Reno again. The chance I’ve been given to revisit her ten years later, when so much in my life has changed, is an opportunity to explore the character afresh.’

Foster is aboard the SS American for Cole Porter’s classic musical alongside Robert Lindsay, Felicity Kendal and Gary Wilmot, for a night of escapism and comedy as a former nightclub singer and second rate conman try to help their friend find true love.

Yet the sassy star of this much-loved comedy is nothing like the American actor who will be playing her. ‘Reno is very much an extrovert whereas I am introvert,’ says Foster. ‘Reno is much more comfortable in a fabulous gown and I’m often in sweatpants. What I do think we share is a loyalty to our friends. Robert Lindsay says I have a naughty twinkle in my eye. Ha! That I share with Reno.’

Foster says she particularly loves Porter’s score and the ‘unbelievable, witty, smart lyrics’.

‘I think I forgot how funny and farcical this show is. It also feels like such an ensemble show. I love that it takes place in the 30s where everyone wears beautiful clothes and hats – the fashion, the detail, the glamour that we don’t really have right now. The show celebrates the glamorous. It’s a fizzy glass of champagne. I’m not this person at all, so I love being able to step into this world for two and a half hours every night.’

Anything Goes continues until Sunday 31 October