March 2011
“With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy?”
—Oscar Wilde (via nolanrose)
“Fair enough. But, thinking back on that conversation and my own experience, I wonder if something deeper is going on. I wonder if Londoners simply like the theatre more than New Yorkers. Consider: Transitions between scenes that never once felt problematic in London seen as agonisingly long, boring, momentum-stopping crises in New York; plays that felt brisk at 100 minutes in London feeling five minutes too long at 95 in New York; monologues that were full of drama in London feeling strangely inert here. It might be argued that British culture has always viewed theatre as central in a way American culture does not; the British (and I say this as an American) are more literate and verbal and appreciate the emphasis on spoken language in the theatre in a way that Americans, a visually-oriented people, do not. Are the British even less critical because they are paying less?”
—
interesting question, but really isn’t the tempo problem related to the differing tempos of two cities?
and is there a problem with an audience and collaborators being critical? Aren’t there benefits to taking a fresh look with every production?
And is there a problem with wanting theater to be both literate & visual as I do?
I guess this article angered me a little bit.
Laisse Tomber Les Filles
France Gall
Laisse Tomber Les Filles - France Gall
“Laisse tomber les filles” (English: “Leave the girls alone” i.e., “stop messing around with the girls”) is a French song composed by Serge Gainsbourg and originally performed by France Gall in 1964.
et aussi
Dis Lui Non
Françoise Hardy
Françoise Hardy - Dis Lui Non
A little bit of French music to start off the day
“Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love. So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises before you larger than any you’ve ever seen, if an anxiety like light and cloud shadows moves over your hands and everything that you do. You must realize that something has happened to you; that life has not forgotten you; it holds you in its hands and will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions? For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke (via sometimesagreatnotion)
“Art is an idea that has found its perfect visual expression. And design is the vehicle by which this expression is made possible. Art is a noun, and design is a noun and also a verb. Art is a product and design is a process. Design is the foundation of all the arts.”
—Paul Rand (via egoetschius)
“Art is to me the glorification of the human spirit, and as such it is the cultural documentation of the time in which it is produced..”
—Hans Hofmann (via yama-bato)
“I’m a huge fan of creating safe space to have serious conversations about identity politics, but I’m also determined to bring the lessons from queer theory (and race studies and feminism) into broader conversations. Sure – I’d love to call out these frameworks explicitly and have everyone who should hear the concepts come to the room. But, at the end of the day, I prioritize strategy. So I’ve gone out of my way to integrate these frameworks into my own work without ever calling them out explicitly, specifically so that those who are constitutionally incapable of listening to any argument that involves identity politics will accidentally listen to the underlying theories without realizing it, will incorporate the tenets of queer theory into their understanding of the world without realizing that this is where the roots of those frameworks come from. At the root of queer theory is a very simple practice: questioning what is “normal” or normative, complicating any simple framework by asking critical questions about who is excluded and what is assumed. Anyone who has studied queer theory immediately gets how this framework is useful beyond analyses of sexuality, yet those who haven’t been trained as such see two scary words: queer and theory. Depending on the audience, either word can prompt a serious phobia. But that framework does more than answer questions about sexuality; it allows us to interrogate any supposedly stable system.”
—danah boyd on The Politics of Queering Anything (via anarchivist)
“Why do we have critics? We have them so that theatre, which can never truly be captured, can be chronicled, examined and preserved by those who love it and have the skill and the opportunity to preserve not the moment itself, but its effect.”
—Howard Sherman’s latest blog @TheWing (via ericamtheatre)
