Eastwood series

Given his recent prominence at the Republican convention, I should mention I am doing a three-part series on the films of Clint Eastwood at Grace Church, 802 Broadway, starting at 6:30 PM on September 13, 20, 27. The movies to be shown and then discussed afterwards are, in order, Pale Rider, Unforgiven, and Gran Torino. We will talk about them in terms of faith, spirituality, American identity (and deconstructions thereof) and gender issues. Famed legal and feminist scholar Drucilla Cornell will be joining me for at least one of the discussions (on the 27th). Admission is $10 and includes wine and popcorn. 

Russian resonances

In reading (sadly, the late) Lindsay Hughes's biography of the Tsarevna Sophia Alexeyevna, the regent of Russia from 1682 to 1609, I am struck by how many names of political figures in this era turn up as named of Russian writers in the nineteenth century--in two chapters I have already encountered Tolstoi, Griboyedov, Saltykov. In all cases, I assume these are actual families of the writers; one also encounters a name like Medvedev that occurs in later history but, after all, it cannot be uncommon in Russia to be named after a bear. One would not see this in England: names such as, to do a rough comparison, Dickens, Shelley, and Meredith do not occur in political accounts of the Restoration period (and yes I deliberately threw in the aristocratic Shelley to make the comparison reasonable). This tells us, I guess, what we already knew, that Russia was a far more hierarchical, class-stratified society than England, but in a way it also tells us that there was more crossover between the political and literary spheres which may explain a lot about Russia.

As long as we are discussing things Russian, my mother is going to be part of a group art exhibition in Moscow later this year. Details to come.

Finally---is the Pussy Riot verdict the new Khovanshchina?

Russia and Syria

I am at a loss to understand Russian policy towards Syria. Whereas earlier it was rational, if hardly admirable, now it has become totally counterintuitive.  Russia has achieved the rare feat of seeming to be both anti-Israel and anti-Sunni Islam, by keeping afloat an inveterate enemy of Israel who has oppressed his own majority Sunni population for years. To do this to simply spite the Untied States is the action of a far smaller power than one assumes even a diminished post-Soviet Russia is. To act as the champion of Middle Eastern Christians, honorarily and absurdly extending that designation to the Alawites just because they are not Sunni? Shades of the Crimean War and ‘protecting the holy places’, and Russia was far more feared geopolitically then? Besides, the Assad regime stands as the moral opposite for all the Orthodox Church stands for. I have just been rereading The Brothers Karamazov and Father Zossima would certainly not approve. The entire idea, popularized by Samuel Huntington in the 1990s, that a post-Soviet Russia could find its geopolitical role as spearheading an orthodox population is preposterous. Bulgaria, Romania, Ethiopia all remember the Moscow-fostered oppressive regimes that brutalized them in the Cold War period. Despite what people said during the Kosovo war, the Serbia-Russia relationship has always been very distant (cf. book eight of Anna Karenina). I think the current Russian regime has somewhat offended Georgia, no? Armenia, in case you were wondering is not Orthodox in the strict sense (non-Chalcedonian) and of course most of the Christians actually in Syria as well. That is all a crock. There are all sorts of policy options for Russia in the Middle East, including a friendlier relationship with Israel (and Putin’s relatively friendly visit there recently was an interesting token, and of course the only Russian-speaking population in the Middle East today, side i guess from all the Russian advisers in Syria, is in Israel) but this bizarre association with Assad until death do them part is ruining these possibilities. So Russia is supporting an un-Christian regime loathed by Muslims and Jews. Not a winning policy. Turkey was originally against a regime change in Syria because it saw this possibility as helping the US too much, but, as in Libya, they realized their credibility with the broader arab world depended on a change in policy. Why has Russia not followed suit? In general, Russia and, perhaps even more surprisingly, China, are far too supportive of a host of regimes that will simply not be there in the medium-term future, that while we are all still active and vigorous will topple—Syria, Iran, North Korea. It is a losing strategy for them, and as unpopular as the US is in the Islamic world it has to be said that the US, inter alia, has had elements in its foreign policy favorable to Islamic peoples Russia and China simply have not—any popularity they have in this world is totally due to expediency and not due to any sense of shared values. Which is why Russia has very little room for maneuver….

Tempest, dance fllms, and pizza

Saw the movie of Des McAnuffs' production of The Tempest, starring Christopher Plummer, last night. I last night. I realized that when Miranda teaches Caliban the language she does so under Prospero's supervision: they are a two-person academic department, with Prospero as chair and Ariel as secretary. Alas, they would get terrible student evaluations from Caliban! I also felt as much as Prospero and Miranda despised Caliban they needed him for company, otherwise it would have just been a Robinson Crusoe scenario--there was a sociality in their tense relationship that this production brought out. This was the best production of the play I have ever seen in that they managed to embody the whole play rather than just making it a star turn for Prospero. Indeed one realizes how much Prospero is absent in the middle of the play, at first giving us a release from his at times overbearing authority, than once Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo start capering about we realize we need a little Prospero. In addition, the Caliban-Stephano-Trinculo alliance was, in a quasi-Marxist sense, a proletarian alliance of the subordinated of two worlds against their masters---which inevitably ends in tears among misunderstanding and ethnic strife. also, this production eschewed the obvious New World applicability of the play for a firmly Mediterranean Tempest--in the filmed talkback afterwards, Plummer showed he was thoroughly aware of the Aeneid allusions in The Tempest, and Caliban (Dion Johnstone) looked half like a Tuareg tribesman (I guess perhaps now a militant of Azawad) venturing onto the coast, half like a Green Man from the Barsoom books. The feminine-androgynous, shimmering-blue Ariel (Julyana Soelistyo) also had a science-fictional feel. But the focus was as much on the Neapolitan/Milanese characters as o the island’s weird transplanted denizens, and really for the first time I had a full sense of their relationships, motivations, and why there are so many people in the play Gonzalo especially emerged as salient for his sagacity and principle.

As opposed to other live simulcasts of theatrical performances I have seen, Plummer and McAnuff made clear this was a film of a performance, and was to be perceived as a film, albeit a quickly and inexpensively made one, and not just a mere transcription Coincidentally, the day before I had seen Richard James Allen and Karen Pearlman show several of their dance films, as well as two by other hands, at the Gibney space near Union Square. Pearlman and Allen made clear that they were not just dancing as such but dancing for film, that the body was put into the picture with the already-present intent of filmic mediation as a kind of third space. Thus they could d a Second Life-style simulation and not have to constitute a quantum difference from the more straightforward films of themselves dancing. This capacity of film to both convey and frame liveness (in Philip Auslander's use of the term) was evident in these two very different performances.

Finally, no account of my life in the past tow days could be complete without the triumphant tale of my at last  getting to eat at Nicoletta, the much-talked-about, super-chic pizzeria on the corner of Second and Tenth. As these pictures demonstrate it was more than worth the wait! It was delicious and utterly pleasurable,  and once one got in there the atmosphere was quite informal and comfortable. 

Santana

I vowed early on not to blog too much about sports, as aware that many who otherwise share interests with me lack my obsession, but tonight's extraordinary event--Johan Santana's pitching the first no-hitter in Met history...deserves mention. When I went  to  the Met conference at Hofstra month before last, the fifty-year futility of the franchise in his respect was a leitmotif. That the moment of deliverance has finally arrived is a real tonic for a franchise that has been star crossed by an abrupt ending to their 2006 playoff drive, traumatic collapses in 2007 and 2008, a series of injury-riddled, mediocre seasons, financial instability, bad karma--all of this negativity was lifted in an instant by Santana's extraordinary achievement. That it was done by such a special player, a Venezuelan lefthander of incredible agility and intelligence someone who has starred for two estimable franchises, the Mets and the Twins, who has come back from shoulder surgery of a sort that has severely damaged many careers, makes it even more worth it.

Sometimes pessimism is a concession to the realities of life, but more often pessimism is a burden, a residue of negativity with which we saddle ourselves The way Santana's achievement dispelled Met fans' pessimism is a good augury for how we should always assume that better possibilities are near. 

The Brechtian Imperative

(a slightly shortened version of this appeared in the printed program of the Eugene Lang College production of Judith of Shimoda, May 3-6, 2012)

     Judith of Shimoda---an adaptation by an exiled German of a Finn’s translation of a Japanese play about an encounter with Americans, translated into English-is irreducibly hybrid. Zishan Ugurlu’s production stretches this hybridity further into the performance, giving an extra dimension to the play that at once complicates it and aerates some of its density. And dense the play is. Not only does Brecht, as always, deliberately prevent full emotional entry into the play by his distancing devices, but the story is unobtrusively sly. It is not simply a Japanese Judith, a Judith of Shimoda. The Hebrew Judith stands up for her people as a national heroine, kills her male opposite number rather than placating him, and there is no hint in the Biblical account of anything but acclaim for her.  Okichi’s offense is not only to placate the enemy but to dissolve cultural barriers between "us” and “them;” that when she is reviled, the crowd vilifies her as “the Yankee Okichi” is no accident. Okichi is as much like La Malinche, who betrayed the Aztecs to Cortés, as Judith. Brecht’s tale is a subversive sequel to the Judith story that tells us not only its dark underside but the reality of how heroes can be despised for precisely the same qualities that exalt them.
      By using two Okichis for the two different eras of Okichi’s life, Ugurlu has dramatized the change in Okichi’s confidence and in her treatment by society. As I sat in on the audition and several rehearsals, I watched as Ugurlu elucidates the various talents of the cast, stitched them into the play, and then, at strategic moments, temporarily undid this stitching to let more of the actors’ real-life attributes into the fabric of the play. We are taught in the arts to take the measure of ourselves and then plunge straight into the discourse no more looking back on our ‘real’ selves than, to allude to another Biblical character, was Lot's wife encouraged to look back to the cities on the lain. By urging her actors to periodically replenish their characters with themselves, Ugurlu was interrogating the opposition between affective and performative, ego and scene. One of her periodic aperçus during this process was “Brecht and Stanislavski”, which I first heard as an opposition (Stanislavski the advocate of identification, Brecht of distancing) but later understood as a linkage. Both thinkers, by different means, were rending the distinction between inner and outer.
   Theater people often caution against overacting, and this process was no exception to that. But even more striking was how the actors were never allowed to fall into the prosaic, to make an abstention from histrionics into a pallid ordinariness. The compelling moments of high drama in Judith of Shimoda stand out aghast a baseline that it already catalyzed and quickened. Even in the sinews of the rehearsal process, one saw the Brechtian imperative to assume nothing, to be perennially both self-conscious and daring. Eugene Lang College production

Feathered Friends

Company SoGoNo's dance piece “Bird Suite,” which I saw at Triskelion Arts in Williamsburg on Sunday, April 30, is not just interested in using birds as a metaphor. Bird Suite gets into the birdiness of birds, their feathery idiosyncrasies, their beauty and strangeness. The piece, choreographed by Tanya Calamoneri, presents, not an abstract but a highly concrete idea of what birds are.  Birds represent the heights of our lyric inspiration, but also an essential inhumanity. As someone who lives with both cats and birds, I can easily anthropomorphize my cats; birds are a distant, different matter. 

 Photo Credit: Nicholas Birns    I am amazed by how little I noticed birds before I had birds myself, and how much I notice them now, how alert I am for all manifestations of the avian. We cannot look down on birds. We cannot look down on them both because they are above us physically and because they can do the one thing we cannot naturally do: fly. (We can swim much more than fly, we can keep up with the fish in their motion a lot more than with the birds). No wonder poets such as Keats and Hardy used birds as symbols of attaining notes of concord we cannot reach yet embodying a fundamentally different consciousness.

Photo Credit: Benjamin Heller “Bird Suite” starts out with ”Hatch”, in which four performers, Erin Cairns Cella and Christine Coleman, Dages Juvelier Keates and Mariko Endo Reynolds, d wear blue, feathery costumers, including fluffy blue headdresses, and are hunched over as if about to hatch out of an egg. Raucou bird calls emanate from above as the birds stretch out of their feathered pods of origin.  So compact and controlled were their bodies I had difficultly believing these were people at first, or at least anything but small children, but the dancers’ ability to conceal and unfold was convincing of the action of birds and their ability to foreground or camouflage themselves, to crouch or unfurl, to be self-sufficient or self-advertising, depending on the circumstances and on their whims. First cocooned, then gloriously spread out the blue birds established a tone at once fun, weird, and captivating. Lithe and portable, animated yet supine, the dancers in “Hatch” evoked ideas of motion existing amid stillness. The four dancers squat, extend, contort, gyrate, bespeaking both the necessity, the contingency, and, finally, the insufficiency of motion. As T. S. Eliot put it in “Burnt Norton”: After the kingfisher's wing/ Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still.”

          All the performers are female, raising the question: Why are girls likened to birds? Perhaps it is their voices? I cannot see any other reasons why birds are more female than male. If anything, my male parakeet sings more concertedly than his female counterpart. It is probably, indeed, a comment on the way the identities of women, more than those of birds, are culturally constructed. Indeed, ‘Bird Suite”, if it wanted to, could have gone into issues of gender as well as language, and Calamoneri’s previous work such as “The Art of Memory” has been cogent in its intellectuality, but Calamoneri and the SoGoNo performers preferred to concentrate on the spectacle, the phenomenology, of birds themselves, leaving, of course, these sorts of inferences to be drawn from them. 

Photo Credit: Julie Lemberger, Adam Amengaul

     Different parts of the suite had different emphases. “Catbird Sonata” performed by Heather Harpham, emphasized the lyricism of birds, the way they are torch singer’s vocalists: sound over shape.
Photo Credit: Julie Lemberger
“Aviary,” a solo performance by Cassie Tunick, solicited images of freedom and captivity associated with birds; at one point, Tunick holds a cage up to the audience, reminding us how we imprison birds ostensibly as a way of nurturing them even as we celebrate birds as a major trope for untrammeled liberty. The surface red eroticism of “Flamingo”, performed by Cella and Keates, with its overt references to Las Vegas showgirls, contrasted with the subtler yet dapper white eroticism of “Ain't No Swan Lake,” performed with both dazzle and understatement by Coleman. Keates, Reynolds, Cella, and Soraya Odishoo, who also did the sound design for the piece. Just as the White Queen in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass ends up being more alluring then the red, near-narcissistic perfection became more exciting than gaudiness. But the red might perhaps have the advantage of greater discursivity, bringing issues out into the open.
           Even before the overt references to “Swan Lake” and “The Firebird” I had thought of classical ballet, how different a form it was from what we were seeing here, with its modern, postmodern, and Asian influences, yet also how the two forms were, at a distance, comparable, measurable across the same spectrum. Why the birds/ballet connection? Why do at least two major ballets center around birds? For one thing, birds are natural performers. They are decorative, elaborate, flamboyant, strutting their stuff. In both voice and appearance, birds cry out for attention. They also, as far s land-base creatures are concerned, have unusual forms, do strange things with their bodies: birds as residual, Lilliputian dinosaurs, cold-blooded others, which our bodies at their most trained and prehensile can only faintly approximate. The dancers were so good, so exhilarating, they at times defied gravity, but we will always be more bound to the earth than our feathered friends.

   Photo Credit: Adam Amengual (for both)   The lighting ofAndy Dickerson, the music that included original compositions by Odishoo and Danny Tunick as well as recorded songs, and the costumes by Mioko Mochizuki all added to the delightful and pertinacious quirkiness of “Bird Suite.” The costumes were especially good at addressing the difficult question of how faithful, how 'mimetic' humans in bird costumes should be? Should they try to 'be’ birds as much as possible, or, to refer to T S. Eliot again, should they be like the cats in “Cats,” who, whatever their virtues are in no danger of being mistaken for a cat even by the most dimwitted dog or rat. The costumes here, on the other hand, avoided silly approximation or caricature in going at least halfway in making the performers look like birds, certainly suggesting the extravagance, the vulnerability, the otherness that we see when we see birds.

       There is joy, fun, glamour irreverence here; but also a serious effort to understand the mystery of birds, to use human bodies in performance to reflect in what it must be like to be a bird. The Triskelion space added to the enjoyment by its placing the audience in proximity to the dancers and with ideal sight lines. But it is still good that "Bird Suite” should be seen again at a larger space in Manhattan this fall! I highly recommend it; this is the kind of dance piece I would see angina and again to appreciate Company SoGoNo’s winning comprehension of the incomprehensibility of birds.