There is a lot to be said about the play Carmen. However, I for one feel that I must start off with the atmosphere first.

Walking into the Opera House to begin with, I felt very much out of place. It was filled with chaos and old couples making their way about to the theatre as a monstrosity of a chandelier hung down begging for attention. Men dressed in suits scanned your tickets and then rushed you in. Women strolled the lobby in furs and ten inch heels. God forbid you got too close to one of the older people, they’d give you the evil eye for even having the nerve to show up to an event meant solely for the old and rich. I felt as if I had dressed up not to see a show but instead put on a show for all the pretentious people who had paid hundreds of dollars for seats in the very front rows.

After finally finding my seat in the “family circle,” matters only seemed to worsen from there. I barely had enough room to move my legs, my purse didn’t seem to be able to fit on the floor, nor under the chair, and barely even on my lap. Had a phone gone off, someone from across the theatre had the nerve to SCREAM across the theatre to turn it off. In fact, from the treatment I myself and others received, it felt as if we had been beggars who had been so graciously let into the show for free and should therefore be thankful and on our knees.

Aside from the horrific treatment I feel we received, the opera itself was simply not worth the money. From my seat, the actors/singers could not be seen and the sound, the entire reason for the opera, was almost inaudible. I could have easily dozed off for those three hours. Along with the awful seats, came the structure of the opera house itself. I’ll assume its original architects must have wanted the poor to feel poor, because boy did the man’s head in front of me block the entire stage for the following three dreadful hours of my life.

Whilst forced to read subtitles for the Opera for three hours, I did notice quite a few things. Number one, the play took place in Spain, specifically Seville and Granada, but can anyone explain why on Earth the play was in French? From quite a few different people I’ve also learned that the play is sometimes performed in Italian, but isn’t that interesting that not one person has told me that they’ve seen it in Spanish? Number two, the play lasted for three full hours, however, I’m sure it could have just as easily been told in about ten minutes. The songs were so repetitive and it seemed to take each character about a full hour of singing just to tell another person “I think your pretty.” Number three, why was everyone in the opera white? During the entire performance I could only find one black adult, and one black child. What, did it make enough sense to have a play set in Spain in French, but not enough sense to add black people to the equation?

Honestly, after this terrible experience I will never go back to an Opera. I had really expected more. The people there were condescending and to put it in simpler terms, fake. The performance itself was not very loud at all, difficult to see unless you were willing to shell out a few hundred dollars, unnecessarily long, and absolutely illogical. People say opera is a dying form, and I can definitely agree and understand why.

Here’s the song!

After getting off the horrid elevator, we had finally arrived at the INTAR Theatre. We took our playbill for Teach, Teacher, Teachest by Koteles, waited for the rest of the class, and then followed a narrow pathway into a small dark room with a maximum capacity of about fifty people. In the middle of the room was a miniature, brightly lit, green and purple stage. The professor’s maid/lover, a man dressed as a woman, seemed to be patrolling the floor. She gracefully slid around, occasionally targeting flirtatious glances at some audience members, and giving playful waves to others. Her make up was dreadful, her dress and apron smudged and tattered, her wig a frizzy mess, and her legs awfully hairy. “What an introduction,” I thought.

As the play progressed, it seemed to get only odder. A pixie-like student with big bright blue hair bearing a tank top, shorts, and incredibly long socks appeared on stage. Not long after her, the nutty Professor in a green shirt and overalls appeared, after his maid opened the safe where he was trapped inside. With all three characters on stage, there were constant strobe lights, acrobatics tricks, dancing, stomping, and all in all complete chaos. The play was comical, captivating, and invigorating. However, considering this is an adaptation of Ionesco’s French play, The Lesson, in which Ionesco uses dark humor and satire to criticize the intellectuals of his country and time, Koteles does more than simply make the audience laugh. He addresses real and ever present issues that America as a whole still faces today.

While playing a “Name this Picture” kind of game, the Professor touches upon his opinions on big business, politics, and religion. For example, he calls this man right here…

… a really wonderful man who creates minimum wage jobs, twelve hour shifts, and awful working conditions. After his pupil inevitably disagrees with the Professor’s opinion for every picture, the Professor finally has enough of her “nonsense” and “ignorance”. He takes a wooden stick, and smashes it into her, killing her (in real life he smashes a watermelon that got all over our clothing). This is just another example in which Koteles is making fun a system, in this case the educational system.

Teach, Teacher, Teachest was a really lively and entertaining play. I loved it and I would recommend it to anyone with an open mind and anyone who just wants to have a good time.

Have you ever ridden a subway cart and seen a businessman in a crisp suit carrying a fancy leather suitcase? Next to you, was there a family with their luggage, making their way to the airport? In that same cart, did another man happen to step on, tell a long tragic story, and beg the crowd for loose change? Class structure is an undeniable ever-so present system that distributes society into three main categories – upper class, middle class, and lower class. In New York City, with the rich living just blocks away from the poor, it isn’t difficult to find the contrasting differences in both lifestyles. However, not every city is New York City, and not everyone can have the opportunity to see the stark differences in class. Artists give insight into the different lifestyles that people of different classes live and really reinforce the general implications associated with each standard of living.

Taxi Driver the movie, approaches class structure from the low end of the spectrum. Travis Bickle is a Vietnam Veteran and an ex-Marine out of work. He doesn’t have a lot of money, and is forced to become a taxi driver to make a living. Working the night shift (the worst shift), Travis usually drives the bottom feeders of New York City from borough to borough, and regularly cleans blood and semen from the backseat of his taxi. His terrible job exposes him to guns, violence, drugs, and prostitution – child position to be more precise. He is unaware of social norms such as a first date should not be to see a Swedish sex education film inside an adult movie theatre. By the end of the film, Travis finds himself plotting to assassinate the presidential candidate, Senator Palantine, and shooting at the pimp of a prostitution ring. The director, Martin Scorsese, shows the audience of the film all the horrors that lower class citizens are exposed to – horrors that seem to almost become inherent to the lifestyle of the lower class.

Artists can paint an entire picture for audiences and form the way their audiences think of certain scenarios – including the lives of the poor and rich. Whether in film, literature, or art, they show the audience what they want the audience to see.

I remember visiting my best friend’s grandpa in Hospice. As I roamed the hospital floor, I noticed dark beige walls, cold sterile floors, paintings and portraits made of dark greens, reds, and browns. I turned to my friend and nearly spat out, “ This place is so depressing! Why would anyone ever design the hospice section of the hospital like this?” She giggled and blew it off as if what I had just said was a negligible thought.

A week passed and we visited her grandpa again. When I looked up at the wall directly across from her grandpa’s bed, I couldn’t help but notice that the painting of the two black falling birds once hanging on the wall was now turned, facing the wall on the floor, so that not a soul could see it. In its place hung a bright abstract oil painting with hot red, fuchsia pink, and sunset orange streaks and squares filled that the painting. I couldn’t help but ask her grandpa, “Grandpa, what happened to the old painting?” Her grandma responded for her ill husband, “He said it made him feel sad and he didn’t want to have to look at it everyday.”

Art is the relation of feelings from one individual to another. How well can an artist express himself so that not only does he deliver his message, but also that the audience receives it full force? Does the artist allow for his audience to see his agony or joy, or does he instead allow them to feel it? A true artist can leave a mark on the art connoisseur, as well as on the man who has never taken a day of any sort of art class in his life whether it is band, chorus, painting, drawing, etc. The audience, no matter how inept or proficient in their knowledge of art, should be moved with or without understanding as to why.

Museums, such as the Brooklyn Museum, display several arrays of art. Tourists and locals the same, all come to gawk at the beautiful art. But what makes the art beautiful is not the fact that the audience finds it beautiful of their own taste, but instead that the people who run the museum decided it was “good enough” to have its own display case. Museums with big money and names decide whose art is good enough to be adored by the public eye. From there, the name and artwork can only grow in popularity. How else would famous artists such as Da Vinci and Michelangelo become so recognized and used as standards for what makes art beautiful today? They were supported by big money and names such as the Church, the Royal Crown, and the Medici Family. Whatever “refined taste” the rich had for art and artists, is what became known as the greatest masterpieces and artists to exist. Had the rich back then enjoyed a different type of art, who then would be “one of the greatest artists of all time, a man whose name has become synonymous with the word ‘masterpiece.’”¹ 

P.S. Have you heard of any of these female artists from the Renaissance?²

¹http://www.michelangelo.com/buon/bio-index2.html

²http://www.artcyclopedia.com/hot/women-artists-of-the-renaissance-1.html