Ai Weiwei’s In Alcatraz (Well, His Art Is, At Least)

The trickster artist and Chinese dissident is actually imprisoned in his house in Beijing – so who better for a show at the island prison? “To a site often flattened into a caricature as the onetime home of mobster Al Capone, Ai has layered on a contemporary meditation on political imprisonment, freedom of speech and the power of creativity as a force that can better society.”

When This Famous Orchestra Moved Its HQ Into A Housing Project, Good Things Started Happening

“Eight years ago, one of Europe’s best-known orchestras” – the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen – “moved their rehearsal rooms to a secondary school on this housing estate and pupils from Tenever found themselves sharing their corridors and lunch tables with professional musicians. Since then the school’s results have improved, its drop-out rates have fallen to less than 1% and the atmosphere in the wider neighbourhood has been ‘transformed’, according to Joachim Barloschky, a local official.”

British Theatre Has Gone Election-Mad

“It’s a paradox. In TV studios and on Twitter, British politics seem trapped in a spin cycle of claim and counter-claim, carefully massaged soundbites and kitchen-sink (or kitchen-counting) drama for an audience largely looking the other way. But on stage – particularly in the hands of young, experimental theatre-makers – the workings of democracy have rarely seemed so charged with possibility.”