In the Studio

Inside a simple, white walled office in one of the world’s smallest countries, Daniel Schoppen is busy designing roller coasters that will scare, excite and delight riders from all over the globe.

Brian Froud is not just an artist and illustrator; he is the conceptual designer behind the 1982 movie, The Dark Crystal, the first ever to have an all-puppet cast.

Now decades later, Netflix return to the world of Thra where the film was based, with a new 10 part prequel series. Ahead of its release on 30 August, Clem Hitchcock joins Brian - who is back on board as Creature and Costume Designer for the new series - at his home in rural Southwest England, where his characters begin their lives on his drawing board. As he sketches, Brian explains how the brooding surrounding landscape of Dartmoor inspires his ideas for Thra and all its weird and wonderful inhabitants.

But turning his drawings into physical puppets is a family affair – on set at a secret London location Brian is joined by Wendy, his wife, and Toby, their son. Brian and Wendy first met on the original Dark Crystal and they have collaborated together ever since. Wendy is a sculptor and a doll maker and was part of the team that built the original Yoda for Star Wars. Whereas sculptor and fabricator Toby was literally born into the business, playing the baby in another cult classic the Frouds worked on – Labyrinth, starring David Bowie.

Working on their most complex creation to date – a creature with a human performer and several puppeteers to bring it to life as its filmed – the Frouds explain how they struggle to keep the spirit of Brian’s original designs – with all the quirks and imperfections of real life.

Every year since 2000 London’s Serpentine Gallery has offered an architect who has never built in the UK a very special challenge - to design a boundary pushing temporary building to stand in the heart of Kensington Gardens, London. They have just six months, a sixth of the average amount of time it takes to design and construct a building.

Architect Maria Smith follows Junya Ishigami and the pavilion team as they use their experience and ingenuity to try to construct the design. It’s a forest of slender white columns supporting a 61 ton roof of Cumbrian slate, a structure Junya refers to as 'a black bird flying through the rain'. How can they realise such a technically demanding building in such a short time and what will the public and the critics think when it’s finally complete?

Featuring a diverse selection from the huge team which contribute to the building, including architect Sir David Adjaye, curator Amira Gad, Project Manager Ted Featonby, Engineer Michael Orr and Serpentine Head of Construction and Buildings Julie Burnell. With access to almost every facet of the project Maria takes us into the normally unseen corners of this complex, challenging and internationally unparalleled architectural event.

How is a script transformed into a staged play? The UK’s National Theatre is one of the world’s most prolific producing houses and its artistic director Rufus Norris might have the biggest job in British theatre: balancing its commercial success with the need to take a chance on a new play. His latest production, Small Island, is the first theatrical adaptation of the well-known novel by Andrea Levy about Caribbean migration. Set in the 1940s, it deals with the experiences of Jamaicans and Britons around the arrival of the Empire Windrush in London.

Arts broadcaster and journalist Fiona Lindsay talks to Rufus Norris, as well as members of the cast and crew, to explore the technical and creative challenges of this epic production. With unique access to the rehearsal room, she takes us behind the scenes at the National Theatre to discover how a complex and much-loved story is brought to new life on stage

In 1744, in the grand surroundings of London’s Royal Opera House, a musical scandal occurred. During the austere Christian season of Lent, George Frederick Handel (composer of Messiah, The Water Music, and Zadok the Priest) premiered his new opera Semele. Drawing on ancient writings by Ovid and more recent ones by playwright William Congreve, Handel’s ‘musical drama’ Semele broke the rules, social and musical – with the story of a disastrous love affair between the mortal Princess Semele and Jupiter, King of the Gods.

Sir John Eliot Gardiner is one of the world’s leading musicians specialising in the ‘restoration’ of early music. With a peerless 50-year track record, he strives to recreate the sounds that composers like Handel and JS Bach would have imagined and heard. His approach combines musicology, scholarship, and an uncompromising passion for the music: rather like a picture restorer, he painstakingly strips away the layers of musical varnish and tarnish that have accumulated over generations, to present the music afresh, as its composers intended.

Composer and musician Lloyd Coleman follows John Eliot Gardiner’s work to prepare a brand new 2019 production of Semele. Visiting rehearsals just across London’s Waterloo Bridge from where Semele was first heard 275 years ago, Lloyd talks to John Eliot Gardiner about his philosophy and strategies, and asks some of Gardiner’s many colleagues about how they collaborate with him to realise this ambitious and thrilling project.

An internationally renowned artist from Lahore in Pakistan, Imran Qureshi is a master of the very delicate and the very brutal: combining tiny brushstrokes inspired by the 16th Century Mughal masters with large-scale installations evoking the carnage left after a bomb attack, his work has the power to shock and intrigue in equal measure.

An unlikely friendship connects him with Christian Louboutin, one of the world’s best-known shoe designers, whose trademark red-soled, beautifully crafted pumps are worn by the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow and Rihanna.

For this programme, Christian meets Imran at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, a huge warehouse turned art gallery in Paris. It is the venue of a major solo exhibition, and Christian joins Imran as crates are unpacked and last-minute changes made to individual paintings and the exhibition as a whole, with some new work inspired by the bomb attacks on two mosques in New Zealand in March 2019.

“There is an element of violence in the work,” Imran says, “at the same time, when you get close to it, it becomes poetic as well.”

He has even brought a piece of his studio with him from Lahore, which becomes part of his installation in its own right – and as he and Christian discuss each other’s art, it emerges that these two creative giants have a surprising amount in common.

From Picasso to Ai Weiwei, from Iris Murdoch to HG Wells, cycling has long been the inspiration for artists and creative minds. Yet the fundamental design of a bicycle has remained unchanged for over a hundred years and the material of choice to build the frames is usually metal or carbon.

Top endurance cyclist Lee Craigie travels to Denmark to meet cutting edge bicycle designers Paul Harder Cohen and Mette Walsted, who are taking a very different approach and crafting bikes from a material that’s been around for millions of years: wood.

Paul and Mette take Lee through their creative process in their buzzing dockside studio workshop in Copenhagen, as they design and construct their bike frames from a combination of ash and walnut. Each bike takes over two months to make and each one is unique thanks to the organic nature of the wood they are crafted from.

As well as getting involved in the creation of a new bicycle, Lee finds out about ways that form and function intersect, and hops into the saddle to reflect on how this design gives a highly distinctive feeling of interaction between rider and machine.

(Photo: Bike designers Mette Walsted and Paul Harder Cohen, with kind permission)

This month a new film by the award-winning screenwriter Richard Curtis (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Love Actually) will be launched in cinemas across the world. ‘Yesterday’ is inspired by the music of the Beatles and although the germ of the idea was not his, the story, its construction and the characters created are all Richard Curtis originals.

Yasmeen Khan has been talking to Richard as the film developed over the last two years with the various drafts shaped, reshaped and edited.

In this, the second of a special two-part In The Studio, Yasmeen joins Richard on the film set as the words he’s worked on so carefully are brought to life by actors and the Oscar-winning director Danny Boyle. Yet even here there’s a role for the writer as tweaks and changes are made during filming as the raw material of the screenplay becomes the digital material ready for editing. Yasmeen also joins Richard as the film gets its first trial screening in preparation for its release.

This month a new film by the award-winning screenwriter Richard Curtis (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Love Actually) will be launched in cinemas across the world. Yesterday is inspired by the music of the Beatles, and although the germ of the idea was not his, the story, its construction and the characters created are all Richard Curtis originals.

Yasmeen Khan has been talking to Richard as the film developed over the last two years with the various drafts shaped, reshaped and edited.

In this, the first of a special two-part In the Studio, she hears how his first attempts failed to satisfy his fiercest critic, his partner Emma, who also operates as his script editor. There’s also been the addition of a director, the Oscar-winning Danny Boyle, who provides another set of ideas that need incorporating. All the while Richard strives to ensure that the music of the Beatles, that’s been so important to him throughout his life, should remain at the heart of the final film.

Barefoot, sitting cross-legged at the piano, sometimes even with her own blood streaked across the keys, German-Japanese pianist Alice Sara Ott believes everything should come from your hands.

We meet Alice in her rehearsal room at Steinway Haus on a hot day in Munich as she prepares for new live performances in France, Germany and the UK. Alice shares her sense of humour, explores how she interprets music, talks about the colours she adds, what kind of piano she favours, and why she always travels with a Rubik’s Cube.

And as Alice says; you don’t have to be educated to listen to classical music; you get educated by listening to it. T-shirts, flip flops, popcorn - all are welcome at a concert with Alice Sara Ott.

The pieces come from her new album Nightfall with piano music from Satie, Debussy and Ravel. The album is a personal project for Alice, the recording last year coinciding with her 30th birthday and a sudden illness in her family. The album has taken on an even stronger personal significance for Alice, following her recent diagnosis with Multiple Sclerosis.