Bright Club: Craft

Because the first week of the new academic year isn’t busy enough ( :) ), I answered a call from Steve Cross, the impressario behind Bright Club, to appear at the Craft-themed event at the V&A.

With 24 hours notice to prepare, I was glad that I’d had coffee the week before with my colleague Fred Bearman, who had to pull out because he lost his voice. So I knew that he was going to talk about Cranach’s ‘Papal Belvedere‘ and so as well as apologising for his absence, I was able to start with one of his jokes – that the printing revolution was powered by the desire of the Reformation populace to obtain such images.

Hopefully Fred will be able to do another Bright Club in future, but it was a shame that he wasn’t able to do this one, in the beautiful surroundings of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Performers were a mixture of V&A and UCL staff, and 2 things that I discovered were that the museum has its own branch of the Women’s Institute and (quite separate from that) a store of materials that are regularly sifted for politically-correct and non-politically correct jokes.

The evening was introduced by the always wonderful Bec Hill, who, as well as perfoming her quirky mix of visual humour also screened Dinosaurs, a short animation she had made with Jay Foreman which simply must be viewed!!! It was also lovely to hear Strawberry and Cream perform some of their own songs, themed, like the rest of the evening around Craft.

The V&A’s exhibition Power of Making runs until 2 January, and, although you have missed Bright Club, there are lots of other craft-themed events scheduled.

This blog entry was posted on 8 November 2011.

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