2013 Arts in the City

34th Street and Herald Square by Jenny and Michelle

Der Rosenkavalier Review: Acting

I only stayed for Act I of Der Rosenkavalier, but I was able to witness the way that both the music and the voices themselves contributed to the acting as a whole.  We were really high up and the faces were blurred, but it didn’t hinder from realizing the emotions that the actors were portraying.  When you close your eyes, you could still feel every emotion and every response that each actor conveyed through the sound of their voice.

Four Directions of an Arist: Charles Hossein Zenderoudi & Eating the Wall Street Journal: Pope L

Four Directions of an Arist: Charles Hossein Zenderoudi

At first I thought this was some crazy abstract piece that I could never wrap my head around.  I thought that it was a beautiful pattern that I would wear on a dress, some kind of contorted floral print.  After explanations, you realize the power in this piece.  They are words without meaning.  The artist took Arabic symbols and contorted them into nothing.  It really shows how we are the ones who give words power.  The actual sketches on the page are meaningless.

Eating the Wall Street Journal: Pope L

At first, I thought this was just some construction going on in the museum.  I didn’t understand why newspapers were all piled up to lead to a toilet thrown, but when you watch the video of his performance, you can’t help but want to throw up.  People stood as he ate the Wall Street Journal and proceeded to throw it up.  It inverts the social ladder, bringing the elite newspapers down to the bottom, and these mundane things like ketchup and milk and human excrement up to the top.  It also turns this representation of elitism into something as mundane as a bodily excretion.  We give the elite the power and we can easily take it away.

Interaction Between Characters in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

The interaction between the characters in the play added a great deal of comedy to the piece as a whole.

The relationship between Hermia and Demetrius is mirrored in the relationship between Helena and Demetrius.  Hermia scorns Demetrius just as Demetrius scorns Helena, but both Demetrius and Helena chase after the person who caused them pain.  I don’t understand how anyone can continuously go back to someone who has hurt them so.  Yet, these relationships are presented in a comic way.  Helena even says that she is Demetrius’ dog that will follow him to the end no matter how much he beats her down.  Unknowingly, Demetrius acts this way towards Hermia.  Even though it is obvious that Hermia is hopelessly in love with Lysander.  This unrequired love had a comic twist to it. 

Romeo and Juliet: Interaction Between Characters

My favorite interaction was the interpretation of the relationship between Romeo, Benvolio and Mercutio.  The playful way the characters interacted with each other is what made the play ultimately seem more modern and therefore, more relatable.

Fall for Dance: Costumes

In all four dances, the costumes contributed to the mood of the pieces.  For example, in the fourth dance, the black and grey, minimalist costumes represented the ominous and primal essence of the dance.

Ariel by Sylvia Plath

     Ariel was published after Sylvia Plath committed suicide through the efforts of her ex-husband, Ted Hughes.  Plath’s manuscript for Ariel and Other Poems was set on the coffee table just before she killed herself, as if it were her last proclamation to the world.  Hughes altered this original manuscript, adding fifteen poems and discarding twelve of the poems Plath originally intended to be in the book.  Many of Plath’s followers, especially the feminist literary critics, despised Hughes and accused him of rearranging the poems to protect his own reputation.  However, some now believe that Hughes reconstructed Ariel for the better.

Plath was an iconic poet because she was such a different writer.  She discussed painful topics including shock treatment, suicide, and dysfunctional relationships with this control.  She paints surreal pictures, one after the other, to portray the larger image of suffering, an ultimately unsettling experience for readers.  Also, she was able to write poems about self-loathing, elemental female anger and sexual voracity in 1963! In the early 1960s, many publishers did not want to publish Plath’s poems because of their content, but Hughes’ rearranging helped Ariel become as well-known as it is today.

Art is Desire

The first picture depicts the basic desire of most artists: the desire to escape the world, even if it is just for a little bit.  In the end, we all look to the sky and have this hope we can fly and never look back at the earthly conflicts that drown us.  In contrast, the second picture shows the complete opposite of desire: apathy.  Even in repulsion, we have a desire to get away from the object of our disgust.  In apathy we have no desire to do anything.  So, in the contrast to craving the sky, the second picture depicts the desire for nothing and the concern for nothing at all.