Any other business

A couple of days after seeing Hans Krása's Brundibár , at the Opéra Comique , I set off on a 10-day 'roadtrip' in the UK (which is why my article about the opera appeared so late). As usual, the trip was by car because we were travelling with Olga, the cocker, so off we drove via Calais and the Channel Tunnel. I'd already planned to visit my sister and her family in Wales, when I found out from Isaac Lythgoe that he would be showing some of his work in a group exhibition in Leeds. To be able to catch the show, I added a day to our itinerary, and by taking in Leeds, we were able to visit Chester (much improved by pedestrianisation since I was last there) on the way, and Chatsworth afterwards. The neatly-curated exhibition, called Phantasmagoria: Folkloric Sculpture for the Digital Age , was at the Henry Moore Institute. Its aim was 'exploring how digital technologies are reshaping what sculpture can be, and how it can be used to tell stories about our past, present, ...

Romainville is one of the old industrial suburbs that stretch out north of Paris along the Canal de l'Ourcq. It is now forging ahead, as part of a broader regional plan, with an ambitious, even spectacular transformation project, focusing on what's called the Quartier de l'Horloge. This project includes the creation, on the abandoned sites and in the empty but listed art-déco buildings of the now-departed pharmaceutical industry, of what's meant to become one of Europe's biggest contemporary and performing arts complexes. Already, a couple of years or more back, pre-Covid, a handful of intrepid Paris galleries moved out to ' Komunuma ', on a site re-designed by the Freaks architectural agency for Fiminco, a property developer with its own arts foundation . Five miles from central Paris and a good quarter-hour's walk from the nearest métro station, surrounded by rubble, mud and bulldozers, they must have wondered what they'd got themselves into, esp...