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Private Notes
Alan Yentob follows one of our best loved performers as he releases his first autobiography charting his early years in show business. In this revealing and poignant film Sir Lenny Henry meets up with his closest friends, family and colleagues to remember his sudden rise to fame aged 16 on TV talent show, New Faces, which catapulted him from working-class kid from Dudley to one of Britain’s most celebrated black performers. imagine... also explores Lenny’s other early television breakthrough roles on Tiswas and Three Of A Kind as well as five troubling years as the only black performer in The Black & White Minstrel Show. Alongside his early achievements, Lenny Henry also discusses his recent career reinvention as a serious actor of stage and screen and his work as a political activist campaigning for greater diversity in the entertainment and broadcasting industry
A portrait of the Kanneh-Masons, exploring the music-making of Stuart and Kadiatu's seven gifted children as well as family life at home in lockdown, culminating in a concert.
Following the publication of his new memoir My Name Is Why, writer Lemn Sissay tells Alan Yentob what it was like to grow up as the only black child in a sleepy market town outside Wigan in the 1970s.
Alan Yentob meets choreographer and director Kate Prince as her ZooNation dance company embarks on a new West End production, Message in a Bottle.
Kwame Kwei-Armah is one of British theatre's most exciting creative leaders. Currently the artistic director of London's Young Vic, he has had a successful career as an actor, writer and director on both sides of the Atlantic. He came to fame playing paramedic Finlay Newton in the BBC drama Casualty, and his groundbreaking play Elmina's Kitchen was one of the first by a black British writer to be staged at the National Theatre and in the West End.
In his first two years at the Young Vic, he has programmed a run of sell-out shows, including Death of a Salesman, Twelfth Night, Tree and the controversial Pulitzer Prize-winning Fairview. As the Young Vic celebrates its 50th anniversary, Alan Yentob hears how a young Southall boy called Ian Roberts became the artist Kwame Kwei-Armah.
Marina Abramovic is the reigning queen of performance art. She invites Alan Yentob into her home, opens up her enormous personal archive and travels back to her birthplace, Belgrade. Her early, provocative work was once dismissed, but today thousands go to see her perform pieces that can last for weeks, even months at a time. By using just her own body and pushing her physical and psychological boundaries, she has become an international artistic superstar.
Abramovic talks about her family and growing up in communist Yugoslavia, where she fell in love with performance art and became one of its most outrageous and celebrated practitioners. She remembers her former partner Ulay, with whom she made a series of pieces that broke boundaries – including walking the entire length of the Great Wall of China in 1988. In 2010, 750,000 people went to see The Artist is Present, her solo performance lasting 736 hours at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This September she premiered her opera, 7 Deaths of Maria Callas, at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich.
Abramovic was about to become the first female artist in its entire 250-year history to be given a solo exhibition in the main galleries of the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Her show has now been delayed until autumn 2021, but in its place imagine... is proud to present this intimate portrait
