“Words sort of get in the way sometimes,” says Enda Walsh, whose The New Electric Ballroom is making a highly praised New York debut. When he was rehearsing a play in Italy, “I had a translator for three days, but then I got rid of her because I didn’t need her. I knew the play, they knew the play, and it was about finding the rhythm of it.”
Tag: 11.08.09
La Scala Discovers Anglo-Saxon-Style Sensationalist Marketing
“A woman cries out in pain and anguish, her cheek streaked with blood. … In letters of crimson red, the [poster’s] tagline screams: ‘Two fell in love, the others massacred one another’.” (It’s for Tristan und Isolde.) Italy’s flagship opera house “is resorting to shock tactics, risking the predictable wrath of Italy’s conservative opera establishment.”
Academics Find An Algorithm For Hollywood Movie Sequels
“Based on factors such as whether key stars are still on board, how long it has been since the last film and how that performed, the researchers say they can calculate what producers can expect to gross relative to a film in the same genre that is not a sequel.”
A Choreographer And Company Leader Who’s Actually Low-Key? Meet Tere O’Connor
“In contrast to the outsize personalities who dominate much of modern dance’s history, he is a thoroughly 21st-century leader, with a belief that bigger is usually worse when it comes to dance (work on grand stages, he has said, ‘looks like a bunch of No. 2 pencils in an earthquake’) and little interest in lending his name to a specific style or ideology.”
Kenneth Lonergan In Extremis
Directing his new piece The Starry Messenger has proven an especially ill-starred process for the playwright, involving his wife and his best friend (the leads), late rewrites, the 11th-hour walkout of one actor, and the distraction of a complicated lawsuit over Lonergan’s latest film.
Native Peoples Take The Camera And Develop Their Own Cinema
“From Inuit fishermen in Canada … to Quechua salt-harvesters in Bolivia, they are grabbing whatever equipment they can find to make films of their own. … [Absent are] the drama and momentum that western audiences expect. Here, time tends to be circular rather than linear … the idea being to keep the memory [of an event] alive, rather than turn it into entertainment.”
The Pied Piper Of Czech Opera
The emergence internationally of Dvorák’s and Janácek’s operas could not have happened without Yveta Synek Graff’s work as translator, language coach and advocate. “Though her objective of original-language productions by top international casts was clear from the start, she has often had to pursue her Velvet Revolution by indirection: better Czech opera in English or with imported casts than no Czech opera at all.”
Why The New Children’s Films Are Unsettling Some Adults
A.O. Scott: “A movie like Where the Wild Things Are or Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox play a kind of reverse dress-up, disguising adult anxieties in the costumes of innocent make-believe and fanciful spectacle. … [T]oo scary for youngsters? Too confusing? Maybe, for some. So is The Wizard of Oz and half the books in the children’s section of the library.”
Breaking How Many Barriers? Female Scribe Copies Torah Scroll In Public
In an open gallery at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, calligrapher Julie Seltzer uses a turkey feather quill to write out on parchment a new copy of Judaism’s most sacred object, meticulously following age-old rules – despite the fact that those rules say she shouldn’t be doing this at all.
Appalling, Addictive, And/Or Academic Touchstone: Fight Club, Ten Years On
Rex Reed called it “a film without a single redeeming quality”; Chuck Palahniuk called it “the best date flick ever”; professors write about its “rhetoric of masculinity” and “economics of patriarchy”; Dennis Lim says it “is surely the defining cult movie of our time.”