An Olympics first, three adaptations of writings, and an album that celebrates its form.
The heady highs and horrible lows, the close finishes, the scandals and the astounding feats of human skill – the Olympics are always a thrilling watch. While this year’s are coming to an end, there is still a lot to see before this Sunday’s closing ceremony, including the first ever breaking competition at the games (you probably know it as breakdance).
The fancy footwork and acrobatics of this style emerged 50 years ago from the first thumping beats that, along with graffiti, MCing, DJing and rapping, came to be hip-hop. From the streets of New York to the international stage, competitions have been going on since the 90s and its arrival at the Olympics is a major moment for the sport.
Over the next two days, 16 B-boys and 16 B-girls will battle it out with moves with names like the “turtle freeze” and “coin drop” at Paris’s Place de la Concorde. This piece by sports expert Mikhail Batuev explains how it made it to the Games. If you are interested you should tune in because, as disabilities expert Simon Hayhoe notes, it’s not yet made it to the Paralympics.
Read more: How breakdancing became the latest Olympic sport
Something else I shall be watching this weekend is the last season of The Umbrella Academy on Netflix. The show is an adaptation of a comic series by My Chemical Romance singer Gerard Way, about seven super-powered beings adopted by an eccentric billionaire and raised to become crime-fighting heroes. This grand plan never comes to fruition, however, because they’re a bunch of dysfunctional misfits whose traumatic upbringing has left them with weird relationships and a heap of problems.
Over three seasons we’ve seen them struggle to overcome their lot in life while trying to save the world and each other across various timelines. Season four joins the crew in a new timeline where they have no powers. I’ll be sad to leave the siblings behind, but luckily comic book expert Geraint D'Arcy has come to my rescue with a list of equally weird and wonderful stories to fill the gap this brilliant show will leave.
Read more: Five wonderful and weird comics to read if you love Umbrella Academy
Also back on our screens is the TV adaptation of Interview with a Vampire. This season we join vampires Louis de Pointe du Lac and Claudia in postwar Paris where they try to move with rather than against the times. You can expect sex and death but there is so much more to this show than your average vampire story. It’s a deft update of Anne Rice’s 1976 original, writes our reviewer Catherine Spooner, and season two is a smart and reflexive work exploring the act of storytelling and the complicated psychology of a person who lives forever.
Read more: Interview with the Vampire season two: a hyperintelligent musing on trauma and immortality
On stage in London is an adaptation of Nobel prize-winning writer Annie Ernaux’s The Years. The book is a mix of autobiography and sociological text charting Ernaux’s life alongside France’s history. Dense with cultural and social references, featuring no speech and resisting the use of the first person singular – favouring “we” or “she” –– to render Ernaux’s personal experience universal, it’s not an easy book to adapt.
I had the luck of seeing the play and was blown away by how theatre director Eline Arbo has managed to transfer this slippery work artfully from page to stage. It is powerful and declarative while being sparse. It doesn’t shy away from the details of an illegal abortion or the sometimes ugly and all-consuming nature of sex. It manages to evoke the spirit and feeling of Ernaux’s writing in many ways. In our review, literature expert Scarlett Baron outlines how Arbo’s thoughtful decisions have achieved that coming together to create a powerful meditation of womanhood, life, memory and time.
Read more: The Years: an audacious adaptation of Annie Ernaux's masterpiece of memoir and sociology
A song similarly unafraid of facing sexual desire head on is Guess by Charli XCX. All about the alluring nature of underwear, the song has taken on a sapphic quality in its new incarnation featuring the breathy seductive tones of Billie Eilish. It’s a cheeky, bassy bop that I can’t wait to shout in a club. It also got me back into listening to Eilish’s album, which like Guess is, as our reviewer notes, “a flowing queer triumph”. Unlike other pop releases, Hit Me Hard And Soft wants you to listen to it all the way through and appreciate the album as a distinct and important form.
Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. Sign up here.
