BEN OKRI
Ben Okri: ‘We need art more than ever’ at the FT.com
Friday 20 March 2020
This week Ben Okri was asked to comment on Art in the current climate by the FT.com
“This week I was supposed to be in Antwerp for the opening of my adaptation of Moby-Dick at the deSingel arts centre. It was to be an experimental reworking of the great American classic. We were to have Queequeg played by a black South African soprano. It was to be an opera. I heard, on the day before the premiere, that the theatres in Belgium had closed. The contagion of cultural closures began to sweep across the world. Broadway closed; the opera houses shut…
But I soon learnt that the show was to be postponed.”
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