This Cultural Life Folgen

Director and actor Simon McBurney, one of the founders of the ground breaking theatre company Complicité, reveals his creative inspirations and influences. For over four decades McBurney has created innovative and experimental works, from immersive staging to the reinvention of classic texts. His works include A Disappearing Number, The Encounter and Mnemonic, a landmark production which has been recently revived at The National Theatre. Simon McBurney tells John Wilson about his childhood in Cambridge where his father, an archaeologist, helped foster an early fascination with time and memory. For This Cultural Life he chooses the 1969 Ken Loach film Kes as a formative influence, offering an insight to a childhood very different to his own middle class upbringing. He recalls seeing the band The Clash whilst at Cambridge University, an experience that had a profound impact on his own creativity and political engagement through the arts. He also chooses the writer and critic John Berger as an inspirational figure, and recalls collaborating with Berger on the immersive Artangel project The Vertical Line in 1999. Simon McBurney also describes how the experience of meeting indigenous Amazonian people inspired his 2016 Complicité show The Encounter. Producer: Edwina PitmanArchive clips from: Kes, Ken Loach, 1969 The Clash Live at Rock Against Racism, Victoria Park, 1978 The Dead Class, Tadeusz Kantor, 1976 Friday Night...Saturday Morning: Cambridge Footlights, BBC1, Nov 1979 Ways of Seeing, Episode 1, BBC2, Jan 1972 The Vertical Line, Complicité, BBC Radio 4, 1999 The Encounter, Complicité, Barbican Theatre, May 2018 Face to Face, BBC2, Oct 1995 Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, Christopher McQuarrie, 2015

One of the world’s greatest novelists, Salman Rushdie has won many prestigious international literary awards and was knighted for services to literature in 2007. He won the Booker Prize in 1981 for Midnight’s Children, a novel that was also twice voted as the best of all-time Booker winners. In 1989 Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini declared that Rushdie’s fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, was blasphemous and pronounced a death sentence against its author. For over a decade he lived in hiding with close security, a period of his life that he wrote about in the 2012 memoir Joseph Anton. His most recent book Knife details the horrific stabbing he survived in 2022.Talking to John Wilson, Salman Rushdie recalls his childhood in Bombay, and the folk tales and religious fables he grew up with. He chooses Indian independence and partition in 1947 as one of the defining moments of his creative life, a period that formed the historical backdrop to Midnight’s Children. He discusses how, having first moved to England as a schoolboy and then to New York after the fatwa, the subject of migration has recurred throughout much of his work, including The Satanic Verses. Rushdie also explains how "surrealism, fabulism and mythical storytelling” are such an influence on his work, with particular reference to his 1999 novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet which was inspired by the ancient Greek tale of Orpheus and Eurydice. As Rushdie says, "truth in art can be arrived at through many doors”.Producer: Edwina PitmanArchive used:BBC News, 12 Aug 2022 Newsnight, BBC2, 12 Aug 2022 BBC Sound archive, India: Transfer of Power, 15 August 1947 Nehru: Man of Two Worlds, BBC1, 27 Feb 1962 Midnight's Children, Book at Bedtime, BBC Radio 4, 27 August 1997 Advert, Fresh Cream Cakes, 1979 BBC News, 14 Feb 1989 The World At One, BBC Radio 4, 14 Feb 1989 BBC News, 28 May 1989 Today, BBC Radio 4, 27 April 1990 Clip from Curb Your Enthusiasm, Season 9, episode 3

John Wilson's guest is the pioneering American artist, author and educator Judy Chicago. Having run the first ever feminist art course in California, she established herself as a powerful advocate of women artists in the early 1970s. She is best known for a ground-breaking installation piece called The Dinner Party, a monumental work which was made with the help of a team of ceramists and needle-workers over five years and first displayed in 1979. Now enjoying her sixth decade as an artist, Judy Chicago is regarded as a trailblazing figure in the art world.Judy recalls studying at the Art Institute of Chicago's children's classes at the age of five, and afterwards wandering around the galleries upstairs where she was particularly drawn to the Impressionists. It was here that she first decided to become an artist. As a young woman she moved to the west coast to pursue her dream. Although she found the art scene there "inhospitable" to women, she was inspired by a group of male artists including Ed Rucha, Larry Bell and Bill Al Bengton, associated with the LA-based Ferus gallery. Judy also cites discovering Christine de Pisan, the Italian-born French medieval poet at the court of King Charles VI of France, as a turning point in her own research and art practice. Like Judy herself, de Pisan had faced obstacles because of her gender and sought to challenge contemporary attitudes towards women by creating an allegorical City of Ladies. She is one of the women represented in Judy Chicago's landmark work The Dinner Party.Producer: Edwina PitmanArchive used: Omnibus: Judy Chicago's Dinner Party, BBC1, 13 January 1981 Rebel Women: The Great Art Fight Back, BBC4, 10 July 2020