one piece

“Quartett” at Brooklyn Academy of Music

 Passion burns cold in Robert Wilson’s trance-inducing production of “Quartett,” Heiner Müller’s ruthless reimagining of Choderlos de Laclos’s 18th-century novel “Les Liaisons Dangereuses.” Lights of many colors dye the all-too-mortal flesh of the figures assembled here to recall the blood-drawing games of lust they once shared. Sometimes their faces glow a reptilian green; on other occasions they are drenched in satanic red.

Yet the hues that seem to capture their spirit most exactly are a frostbitten blue and a pure Arctic white. The dying woman at the center of this forbidding journey into retrospect, which is being conducted at the Harvey Theater of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, may have lived her life in the heat of a chain of carnal embraces. But her world is definitely ending not in fire but ice.

“Quartett,” which opened Wednesday night and runs through Nov. 14, may well be the sexually frankest play in New York this side of a backroom peephole. But with a cast led by the formidable French actress Isabelle Huppert in a magnificently mannered performance, it is the very opposite of an aphrodisiac.

via: "A Minuet Between Sexual Predators" By Ben Brantley

"Song of the Witches"

Double, double toil and trouble;

Fire burn and caldron bubble.

Fillet of a fenny snake,

In the caldron boil and bake;

Eye of newt and toe of frog,

Wool of bat and tongue of dog,

Adder's fork and blind-worm's sting,

Lizard's leg and howlet's wing,

For a charm of powerful trouble,

Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

Double, double toil and trouble;

Fire burn and caldron bubble.

Cool it with a baboon's blood,

Then the charm is firm and good.

By William Shakespeare

 The Random House Book of Poetry for Children (1983)

Photograph: Yasuhiro Ishimoto

Halloween, Chicago 1950s

 

"Adventures of Prince Achmed"

If you ask the average person what the first feature-length animated film was, just about everyone will answer Walt Disney's "Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs". But Disney's film wasn't the first animated feature by a longshot. Arguably, that honor belongs to Lotte Reiniger's "Adventures of Prince Achmed". 

In 1923, Reiniger and her husband and business partner, Carl Koch began work on an ambitious project... a feature length silhouette puppet film based on "The One Thousand and One Nights". She worked with animator Bertold Bartosch and background artist Walter Ruttman for three years on the film. The paper cutouts were jointed using wires and delicately arranged on top of a lightbox, where it was photographed frame by frame. Reiniger continued to animate her distinctive silhouette films up into the mid-1970s. 

On Nov. 11 and 15 the artist Kara Walker will introduce one of the earliest feature-length animated films, Lotte Reiniger’s “Adventures of Prince Achmed” (1926), as restored by the Deutsches Filmmuseum.

The Great Madeline Kahn in "Paper Moon"

" Madeline Kahn has eyes like sad soup, a jaw that is both long and vulnerable, and hair like unexplored jungle. Her voice is high and tinny, as though a midget were making a speech inside a beer can.

All these things are part of her comic equipment, but they aren't what make her a genuine comedian. What she has—as W. C. Fields and Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin had—is a kind of unwavering purpose at right angles to reality, a concentration that she bears, Magoolike, through all kinds of unreasonable events. What is funny is not so much her visible actions as her visible mind."

Excerpt from a movie review by Richard Eder for The New York Times -- May 27, 1976

Luchino Visconti's "Senso"

"If Stendhal had a camera, it would be like Senso," says Martin Scorsese of Visconti's elaborate melodrama. 

Scorsese's deconstruction of Senso is of vital importance for it seemingly explains how Visconti's communist-tainted aristocratic upbringing informed the director's Marxist approach to filmmaking. Scorsese draws our attention toward Senso's colorful cinematography and how it monochromatically crumbles by film's end. 

via: Slant

"Damn everything but the circus."

Paola Ventura brings his imagined stories to life by building three-dimensional sets in miniature.

 Winter Stories also reveals the drawings and watercolors that Ventura uses as a starting point for his stories, as well as the handmade album of Polaroids that Ventura uses to guide the building of his elaborate sets.

 Ventura will be available to sign copies of this newly released publication.

Quote: Sister Corita Kent

Historic Rhode Island Theater Designed by Stanford White to Reopen

The stage has been dark and the curtains closed at the Newport Casino Theatre for more than 20 years, but little imagination can conjure up images of Will Rogers spinning a monologue here or Orson Welles or Oscar Wilde entertaining the crowd.

The building was designed by Stanford White, a New York architect for the rich and glamorous whose murder by a girlfriend's jealous husband became a tabloid sensation, and contributed to the glimmering landscape that made Newport a popular summer resort for affluent industrialists and their families during America's Gilded Age.

Now after years of vacancy and deterioration, the building — owned by the International Tennis Hall of Fame and located at the Newport Casino complex — is being revived through a roughly $4.5 million facelift that will return it to a functioning theater.

This fall, workers will install heating, air conditioning and new electrical systems, make the building handicapped accessible, restore the exterior and touch up other signs of structural defects that led the building to close in 1987. The theater is expected to reopen as soon as next summer.

The theater, built in 1880, occupies prime Newport real estate on the grounds of the Newport Casino, a National Historic Landmark home to the tennis hall of fame and the traditional venue for the opening night performances of the city's heralded folk and jazz festivals. It lays claim to being the first — and only remaining example — of Stanford White's theater architecture.

An architect responsible for Fifth Avenue mansions, the palatial Rosecliff property in Newport and one of the original incarnations of Madison Square Garden, White also occupied high-society circles around the turn of the 20th century.

Evelyn Nisbet, an actress and model who became one of White's lovers as a teenager, famously recounted swinging nude for him on a red velvet swing he had installed. She went on to marry Harry Thaw, who shot White at close range in 1906 during a rooftop performance at the old Madison Square Garden. Thaw's first trial ended with a hung jury, and he was later acquitted by reason of insanity.

Read more here

Staging Area

Donald Oenslager, the great American set designer and a professor at the Yale School of Drama, wrote that “a sketch for a scene is as short-lived as the life of the theater it supports.”

Mr. Oenslager, who died in 1975, was being a bit disingenuous, as he was a major collector of such sketches. In 1982 his widow gave some 1,600 drawings, prints and books on set design to the Morgan Library and Museum. About 50 of these drawings, including two by Mr. Oenslager, are on view there in “Creating the Modern Stage: Designs for Theater and opera.” They present a concise summary of 20th-century stagecraft, one that appeals equally to Museum of Modern Art mavens and seasoned theatergoers.

link: Where All the World’s an Atmospheric Stage By KAREN ROSENBERG, The New York Times

"Erotic City"

The artists, writers and poets associated with Surrealism placed persistent emphasis on the power of the imagination to transform the everyday. Beginning in the early 1930s, the production of elliptically erotic, sexually-charged objects became increasingly central to their concerns.

This exhibition, drawn from the Museum’s collection, includes a number of Surrealism’s most celebrated objects and sculptures, ranging from Salvador Dalí’s bread-and-inkwell-crowned Retrospective Bust of a Woman (1933) to Alberto Giacometti’s enigmatic Hands Holding the Void (Invisible Object) (1934) to Meret Oppenheim’s notorious fur-lined teacup (1936).

via: modemonline

THE EROTIC OBJECT: SURREALIST SCULPTURE FROM THE COLLECTION

june 24 2009 -> january 04 2010

MoMA

Gestures

Choreographer Trisha Brown's dance company is presenting a career spanning season at the BAM Opera House, including her 1979 work Glacial Decoy and 2004'sO Zlozony/O Composite. A collection of Brown's drawings opens at the Sikkema Jenkins gallery in Chelsea on May 9.

Listen to Trisha Brown on

The Leonard Lopate Show.