Tod Machover’s MIT Media Lab has designed a souped-up face mask which adds extra material (including interactivity) to Punchdrunk’s now-famous immersive-theatre adaptation of Macbeth. Bravely, they invited a New York Times reporter to give the new device a test run.
Tag: 05.23.12
Bloomsbury Silliness: Rediscovering Virginia Woolf’s Play
“Yes, Woolf wrote a play. There is a good reason why you’ve probably never heard of it: it’s pretty terrible. First written in 1923, and then revised for a performance at Vanessa Bell’s art studio in 1935, Freshwater is a gentle satire of the bohemian world of her great-aunt” and centering on the the young actress Ellen Terry’s departture from her marriage to a middle-aged painter to “lead a life of corruption […] in Bloomsbury.”
Watching Merce Move (In Pre-Arthritis Days)
“Footage of Merce Cunningham’s choreography is everywhere on YouTube, but it’s much harder locating film of him dancing, and this 1964 snippet is a collector’s find. Capturing an extract from Septet (created in 1953), it counters all those memories of Merce’s late, Lear-like performances, when his 70-something body had become straitened and hobbled by arthritis.”
Is The Best-Selling Non-Anglophone Film In History Just Silly Racist Claptrap?
France’s The Intouchables has a worldwide gross of near $300 million (and it’s only just beginning its US release). “Viewers in numerous countries have eagerly devoured this feel-good fable about two men of different races and classes who forge an improbable friendship (dubbed by some wags ‘Driving Monsieur Daisy’). … At the same time, heated transatlantic debate has erupted over whether [the movie] traffics in offensive racial stereotypes.”
Russian Publishers, Claiming Inaccuracies, Scrap Translation Of Orlando Figes’s Stalin-Era History
“Figes had commissioned hundreds of interviews with the relatives of victims of the gulag labour camps to produce a 700-page chronicle” – titled The Whisperers – “of ‘private life in Stalin’s Russia’ … But the Moscow-based publishers, and a historian who conducted some of the interviews, claim some of the material was misrepresented” and that the book contains numerous errors of fact.
There They Go Again: In Praise Of Creators Who Repeat Themselves
Defending the powerful work – Wes Anderson’s films about the precocious progeny of dysfunctional families; David Vann’s novels about men who build their own wilderness cabins where terrible things happen; John Banville’s first-person narratives of articulate and alienated men; even Philip Glass’s perpetually repeated minor thirds – of creators who consistently mine the same material.
‘Too Much Information Is A Kind Of Pornography’: Abbas Kiarostami On Narrative In His Films
“I’ve said before that fortunately or unfortunately, I’m unable to be a real storyteller. I’m sure that we can never be the witness of a story from its beginning to its end … all films start before we get into them and they end after we leave them.”
Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center Cuts Its Presentations Of Touring Artists
Due to its own financial troubles as well as those of its resident companies, the arts center “is shifting away from being a distinct presenting entity, relying more on partnerships with commercial outfits such as AEG and Live Nation” to present popular jazz artists as well as Broadway shows.
L.A.’s Most Important Piece Of Shuttered Architecture
Christopher Hawthorne nominates downtown’s old Los Angeles Herald Examiner Building, the 1914 Mission Revival/Italianate/Moorish-style building out of which the Hearst Corporation operated the HerEx until the news paper folded in 1989.
Screenwriter Sues For Back Royalties On Red Detachment Of Women Ballet
“Last November, actress Liang Danni filed a complaint in Beijing’s Xicheng District Court against the National Ballet of China on behalf of her 87-year-old father, claiming 550,000 yuan ($86,968) in compensation and demanding a public apology. The elder Liang wrote the script for the original, film version of The Red Detachment of Women, from which the iconic Cultural Revolution ballet was adapted.