As a New Yorker I sometimes forget to be impressed by the grandeur of my home. Having lived here my whole life, I feel like there’s so much more to the city then what I’ve seen. Knowing people who live outside of New York and are constantly trying to absorb as much of this city as they can motivates me to do the same. This semester I was able to do this through film, opera, interpretive dance, and plays. Many of these works allowed different views of New York and some of them overlapped. Often times media portrays New York as a magical place—not that it’s not—but they seem to forget the problems that New York faces. The Muppets take Manhattan is permitted the romanticizing of New York, as it as a children’s film and underage prostitution is perhaps not an appropriate platform for their thoughts. Moonstruck, being a romantic comedy, has a similar portrayal of New York; I don’t think it’s as justified, although I recognize that the setting didn’t play as big a role as it did in other movies. Breakfast at Tiffany’s utilized this same idea but slightly differently—the film had us wondering how a woman lived the life of an elite without the budget of one. Wall Street showed the dirty ways of climbing from the budget of Holly Golightly to sitting on the pile of cash like Gordon Gecko. The willingness to do anything for money is also seen in The Producers which showed us that this nature exists outside of the business world and how it affects the arts. Our idea of class distinction was further propelled when we went to watch Carmen at the Metropolitan Opera; we got to experience it first hand simply by sitting in the audience. The New York City of Taxi Driver allows a man struggling with post traumatic stress disorder a violent outlet based on the horrors of those less financially fortunate he sees during his night shift as a cab driver. A Sucker Emcee used a combination of hip-hop and poetry to talk about the struggles of growing up in a poor family and being exposed to the dangers of the slightly concealed world. Do the Right Thing uses administrative violence while Yellow Face uses racial discrimination to speak out against a problem that is still very pertinent in today’s society. Recent Tragic Events and The 25th Hour both approached the topic of a very grave and sensitive topic—one was very explicit in it’s categorization of people while the other used the event as a way to bring two character together as humans. Aside from Birds with Sky Mirrors, the problems and struggles of the movies we’ve seen continue to be important in today’s society.

My favorite of the works we’ve seen this semester is also the one I feel is most truthful to the New York I know. Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing portrays the tension in a community of minorities. Sal’s sons, Vito and Pino, have their disputes and the tension rises when Mookie gets involved. There’s tension when Buggin’ Out demands that Sal have a black person up on his Wall of Fame and Sal refuses. But the tension of the film climaxes when the police get involved and Radio Raheem is killed in a chokehold by one of the cops. 

I was raised in a middle class family in Queens. I’ve been taking the train for several years now and as a young white woman I have never been stopped by a cop. I am a beneficiary of the stereotype that exists. Having said that I recognize how ridiculous that sounds. Just because I look a certain way I’m assumed to be innocent until I do something to prove otherwise, which is the way it should be. Learning about the civil rights movement for the first time I remember thinking, I’m so glad racism isn’t a thing anymore, it sounds ridiculous. As my eyes were opened to racism in America I remember thinking, this could never happen in New York. But over the past couple of months I’ve learned otherwise. Some of the works I’ve been exposed to have exposed me to truths I’ve been missing as puzzle pieces that make up the city. As it turns out this puzzle is not complete yet, it’s constantly changing and I have hope that the issues we face today will be a part of history textbooks not realities of the city’s residents.

This semester began with a definition of art. I defined “art” as the expression of emotion or thought that evokes a response from it’s audience. So “selling out” would be the production of content that lacks that expression. This lack of expression most commonly roots from the artist creating content with the sole purpose of pleasing the audience and getting the most financial benefit from their disingenuous intentions. 

Having said this, I think that there are several major ways to succeed. Some people create content they are passionate about and through pure luck they are noticed and other people find themselves connecting with the idea. The other way, of course, is to understand what the people want to be exposed to and create that and shamelessly promote. And then there’s the cross section between these two extremes. A compromise of sorts. An artist can weave their message into something they know will have all the teenage girls spending their parents money. I believe this is an ideal situation because the artist is able to sustain themselves and simultaneously produce content they are proud of and content that resembles their beliefs. 

The interesting thing about selling out is its parallel to instant gratification. It’s bubble of popularity bursts as quickly as it builds. There’s minimal residue and the world continues as if it never existed. Truly meaningful art that holds the message of people who had something to say affects the lives of many and outlives the artist. 

To answer the question I think it’s very possible to create successful work that also has important social or political value. Looking over the list movies we’ve watched this semester I see some of the ones that really stood out to me. First we have, Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing”, which made an adjusted gross revenue of over fifty six million dollars. The movie was made almost twenty five years ago and still hits so close to home today. Had Lee made an easy to watch it wouldn’t have had the relevance it does today and in my opinion that is the true measure of success. Scorsese’s film “Taxi Driver” explores the dark sides of New York that are often coincidentally left out of media portrayal of the city. Scorsese has a point to make and he makes it along with a lifetime gross revenue of nearly thirty million dollars. Both Scorsese films starred famous actors for their lead role which is often a tactic used to gain popularity. It worked for “Taxi Driver” but not so much so for “Gangs of New York”. Not that DiCaprio didn’t do a good job, but the movie as a whole didn’t work as well and thus wasn’t as powerful in its message as “Taxi Driver”. DiCaprio appears in another one of Scorsese’s films, “The Wolf of Wall Street”. Much like “Taxi Driver”, this film showed beyond the facade into an unfortunate truth. To me, this film remained true to Scorsese’s intentions. Yes, there was a lot of money put into the production of this movie and yes, it was promoted without end, but as a whole the movie went beyond being entertaining. This goes to show that at the end of the day, a movie can be highly funded but not one be whose artists are “selling out”.

Birds with Sky Mirrors is an interpretive dance performance, which automatically means it’s gonna be great. To preface the following review I would like to say that I acknowledge the fact that people like me were not the target audience for this performance. Though they were few, there were several standing ovations, so it did get a message across to some. I’m trying to justify this performance and all that’s coming to mind is that it was made for people who enjoy dance so tremendously they’re willing to sit through an hour and half of torture to see the four seconds of Chinese ribbon dance that were snuck into this performance. On a serious note, I think one can only truly appreciate the performance if they have an extensive knowledge in dance.

If your friend dragged you out to see a show she’s dancing in or working on the creative process of and it ended up being Birds with Sky Mirrors you would have a very difficult time after when she asked you how you liked it? “Um…the lighting. The lighting was out of this world!”

I attended a New York City public high school. Funding was always low. And the arts were constantly receiving the short end of the stick. Every year there’s a student written, directed, and performed show called SING!. During rehearsals, performers are trained to react to technical difficulties. The specific technical difficulty that is inevitable is static from the sound system. This year instead of attending SING! I went to see Birds with Sky Mirrors. I would like to know who was in charge of making the soundtrack? BAM has the funding to provide for equipment that doesn’t produce static during the performance. The producers of this performance for some reason decided the soundtrack would be almost exclusively static. This was definitely headache-inducing.

Back to the idea of not being the target audience for this performance, the plot was extremely unclear to me. When I say plot I don’t mean a storyline. I mean just any event or emotional change that occurred in the characters. Were they even characters? I think the most I could tell you is that at some point, who I assume to have been the lead female character was going through some emotional distress when she started screaming very suddenly and loudly. It is to my understanding that the choreographer has done dances with political inspiration, but having watched this piece I couldn’t begin to tell you what the intention was. A New York Times article by Siobhan Burke says the dance was about the “threshold between life and death” but I don’t think I would have ever gotten to that on my own. 

I think what is really upsetting is that the dances were well executed. For the most part every one was in sync with each other and there were bits when the dancers showed a great amount of precision and skill. If it was bad dancing it would have been a different story all together. It’s frustrating because they had the potential to do a really great dance with a more evident plot and music that didn’t make you consider suicide. 

Performances have different engagement levels. The best kind of show will have you enthralled and completely out of your own world and the only thoughts you’ll be having will be relating the ideas displayed to the world outside the theater. Next we have shows that every once in a while your mind will side track and you’ll be thinking about the cheesecake you had last week. Lastly we have the show that doesn’t engage you at all and you’re having a complete internal monologue or building your schedule for next semester. I think every show I’ve ever seen falls into the spectrum of these categories. I don’t even know where on the spectrum this show would fall because I didn’t find myself enjoying the performance but it was entirely impossible to have any other thoughts because of how demanding the performance was. Perhaps that was the intent.

Early in the performance a woman comes out onto the stage topless. She disappears and returns completely naked. The man who is on the stage at the same time is partially clothed and I immediately thought about the over-sexualization of women. Later in the performance, a man is completely naked on the stage except for his bird mask. One might think that both genders are represented in a sexualized manner. But something that stood out to me was that the woman’s nudity was marked with spotlights from several angles and she walked across the stage in a catwalk manner several times. When the man was naked he stood towards the back and slowly rotated. The lights were dimmed and limited to his upper body. The sexualization of the woman was more prominent and almost flaunted while the man wore a mask while naked. Perhaps if I had understood the context of the performance I would be able to understand why this happened as it did. 

The star of these piece was the finale. Okay, imagine a yo-yo who’s string has been replaced with a short thick rope. The discs on the bottom have been replaced with a flour filled spherical cheesecloth. Now imagine meticulously dusting the entire surface of the stage with this flour. One square foot at a time. Ten minutes. That’s how long it took for four people to dust the floor. This was so ridiculous that it couldn’t have been purposeless. There had to be some deeper meaning. 

This single photo accurately sums up the entire performance

This choppiness of this review was meant to represent on a much smaller scale the roughness of this performance. Unlike the performance, however, I hope readers may leave with some understanding of what has been expressed. 

Ah, the sweet joy of sitting in the “Family Circle”. In all seriousness though, there are seats worse than those of the “Family Circle”. I’m not sure if you can still refer to them as seats since they’re standing spots in the very last row.

Seeing Carmen at the Metropolitan Opera hasn’t been my first experience at the opera. My parents are both frequenters of the Metropolitan Opera House and drag me along every once in a while. Let’s just say, mom has an entire album on her phone dedicated to pictures of me sleeping at the opera. This time, I promised myself, would be different. I would stay awake the entire time. My problem tends arise after the intermission. It’s the end of the night. It’s so dark. The music is so soothing. But not this time, sleep would not get the best of me; during the intermission I got a cup of coffee.

If one were to call the opera a dying art, I would understand them. Movies made their debut in the 30’s and were able to gain popularity because of their financial availability over live performances. But truthfully I think it goes beyond the fact that operas are expensive. Opera’s require a lot of brainwork. I’m not saying that it’s a not enjoyable form of entertainment; I’m saying that it’s not a mindless form of entertainment. It’s not a romantic comedy you could have on in the background while having a discussion and still be able to catch the all the details of the movie. You really have to invest yourself in the performance. The performance is in a language you aren’t fluent in, but even when it is you have to read the subtitles (I’m a fluent Russian speaker and when I saw Eugene Onegin at the MET, I caught maybe a total of four words). The plot is usually pretty intricate, often containing love polygons, but it’s not all bad; reading the synopsis in the playbill is always helpful. In addition to that, being a personal of limited knowledge on classical music makes it difficult to identify the character by voice, which becomes necessary when you are sitting so high up. I have to admit though, this time when there were two male characters on the stage I tried to pay attention to the distinction between their voices and began to just barely be able to distinguish them. Something I learned from the San Diego Opera Podcast about Don Jose, is that the singing also tells a lot about character development. It continues to intensify when you take the scenery into consideration. The scenery of the Metropolitan Opera House is always so beautiful and when you can’t seem to catch on to the plot you could spend the entirety of the performance admiring the costumes and the set. This specific feature that intrigued me this time was the stage, particularly in the final act. The stage appeared to be intentionally higher on one side, giving the scenery a sense of dimensionality. I wasn’t sure whether the stage was actually lifted or it was an optical illusion made possible by the use of lighting. All in all, I would say operas are demanding. They demand you to be entirely present in the performance. You have to have the plot in the back of your mind, you have to read the subtitles and listen to the singing and the orchestra and manage to see visuals on the stage. All that being said, if you truly submerge yourself in the performance it becomes less overwhelming and more enjoyable. I don’t know if I would have enjoyed the performance as much as I did if this had been my first opera. I’m starting to think that perhaps opera is an acquired taste.

I would go back to the opera, I would even come back to see Carmen. I can’t imagine watching it for a second time and feeling bored; I feel like with each viewing I would notice something I missed previously. I wouldn’t be able to tell you whether or not from a technical stand point the performance was well executed but I could tell you that if there intent was to tell a story with emotion evident in vocal projection, they were successful.