Dinner Guests Research Articles

Dancing on the Tongue

"Unwrap your chocolate, place it on your tongue, close your eyes, and let your tongue choreograph the dance of chocolate,' instructed Alice B. Toklas in This Is Not A Theatre Company's A Serious Banquet. Music wafted over the dinner guests to accompany their site-specific dance. Many immersive and participatory performances include food and/or drink. In most cases the food and drink is not simply an attempt to lower inhibitions (although it can serve that function too), but an attempt to create multi-sensory, multimodal, semi-synaesthetic, embodied engagement; it is an attempt to create theatre that can be tasted, smelled, and touched. What does it mean to "taste" theatre? What does it mean to "taste" meaning, or emotion; to apprehend the world through taste? Asking partakers to eat and drink during performances literalizes the Sanskrit aesthetic theory known as rasa. The Sanskrit term "rasa" has been variously translated as juice, flavor, extract, and essence. In the context of performance theory it is the "aesthetic flavor or sentiment" tasted in and through performance. The Natyasastra, the Sanskrit aesthetic treatise attributed to Bharata, notes that when foods and spices are mixed together in different ways, they create different tastes; similarly, the mixing of different basic emotions arising from different situations, when expressed through the performer—or, in the case of immersive and participatory theatre, through the smell of garlic, the taste of chocolate, or the gentle touch of a hand—gives rise to an emotional experience or "taste" in the partaker, which is rasa (Bharata 55, emphasis mine). Rasa posits the interactive audience as participant and partaker – and co-creator --of the event. Rasa is active, sensorial, experiential, and embodied. It is, then, a theory of aesthetic immersion and participation. As such, it is crucial for understanding and describing the modes of engagement in immersive and participatory theatre.

Ben Buchanan Photographs of Artists

Previous articleNext article FreeAcquisitionsBen Buchanan Photographs of ArtistsMary SavigMary Savig Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThis story begins on April 23, 1985, at Mr. Chow restaurant on East 57th Street, in Manhattan. Dozens of artists, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Andy Warhol, had gathered for a dinner hosted by the owners of Area—a downtown nightclub known for its immersive and idiosyncratic environments—in advance of an upcoming “Art” theme there (see section opener and fig. 1). Ben Buchanan (b. 1958), Area’s official photographer, has donated to the Archives twelve photographs documenting these events, several of which highlight the activities of the gender-bending performer and artists’ muse Bernard Zette, who helped bring the nightclub’s elaborate installations to life.fig. 1. Ben Buchanan, “Jean Michel Basquiat [and] Benjamin Liu 1985 at Mr. Chows NYC.” Ben Buchanan Photographs of Artists, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.During Area’s brief existence (1983–1987) Zette assumed the guise of dozens of characters, from Marie Antoinette to Cleopatra to a mermaphrodite (a hermaphrodite mermaid). At Mr. Chow, he transformed himself into a human guestbook by acquiring many of the diners’ signatures on his coral-hued unitard. “I positioned myself in the entry vestibule and somehow coerced everyone to sign their names,” he recalled in a 2015 email to Buchanan. Alex Katz signed the chest, and Julian Schnabel (who crashed the party) initialed just below. Stefano and Dennis Oppenheim signed the right thigh. David Hockney added his name along the right hip. Kenny Scharf doodled a face over the pelvis. Basquiat embellished his signature (which graced the back of both legs) with a trademark symbol. William Wegman sketched a small dog with a halo on the left foot. Warhol signed under the left arm. And Keith Haring drew one of his dancing figures on the rear end.Weeks later, Zette posed again as a human guestbook to kick off the “Art” theme at Area. At the opening event, and periodically throughout the theme’s six-week run, he draped himself over the open pages of a large book made of foam, posing to display the artists’ signatures on his unitard (fig. 2). Zette later sold the garment and it eventually made its way to a gallery in Japan, where it was purchased by its current owner, an anonymous collector in Sweden. In 2015, Buchanan photographed the unitard in his London studio, and these images are included in his gift to the Archives.fig. 2. Ben Buchanan, “Bernard ‘Zette’ human guestbook on display at AREA 1985 NYC” (detail). Ben Buchanan Photographs of Artists, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.Buchanan’s collection of photos help contextualize a more formal portrait of the dinner guests at Mr. Chow, taken by photographer Michael Halsband and donated to the Archives by Dennis Oppenheim in 1996. Indeed, it was this very portrait that prompted the Swedish collector to share with me the story of Zette’s unitard. More broadly, Buchanan’s 1985 photographs document many of the art world luminaries who expanded the boundaries of pop art by merging art with everyday life. His images compliment the Archives’ existing holdings of personal papers, gallery records, and oral history interviews with artists who attended the events at Mr. Chow and Area, including Hockney, Oppenheim, Warhol, Wegman, and LeRoy Nieman, among many others. Notes Mary Savig is the curator of manuscripts at the Archives of American Art. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Archives of American Art Journal Volume 56, Number 1Spring 2017 Sponsored by the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/692641 © 2017 by The Smithsonian Institution. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

"On the Opposite Side of the Fence": The University of Kentucky and the Racial Desegregation of the Southeastern Conference

"On the Opposite Side of the Fence":The University of Kentucky and the Racial Desegregation of the Southeastern Conference S Zebulon Baker (bio) On Christmas Eve 1965, Mrs. Flossie Northington mailed a letter to Kentucky governor Edward T. Breathitt. Six days earlier, she and her family had been his dinner guests at the Governor's Mansion, where he persuaded her son, Nathaniel, an All-State running back at Thomas Jefferson High School in Louisville, to become the first African American to play football for the University of Kentucky (UK). In that moment, Mrs. Northington believed that her son "had made an intelligent decision." Now, she told the governor, "I am no longer of this opinion." Attending UK was her son's choice alone, but Breathitt's intense lobbying—including a limousine ride for the family from Louisville to Frankfort—was, by her account, "the determining factor in his decision to sign," which, "I think, is not good." He became "overawed by your advocacy," she warned Breathitt, "so much so that I am beginning to wonder if the influence you exerted was not too great." She worried that he might even have been "coerced" into signing with UK, since she was "certain that he has not given enough thought to the question."1 After all, he was being asked to integrate [End Page 561] not only Kentucky football, which was challenge enough, but also one of the South's most impenetrable bastions of racial segregation, the Southeastern Conference (SEC).2 Indeed, it was "Nat's safety as the first Negro to play in the Southeastern Conference" that animated his mother's "natural apprehension" about him taking on this historic role. "I realize the importance of the integration of the Southeastern Conference," she wrote Breathitt, "and, as a Negro, I am an advocate of it." She admired how her son, bravely, "really wants to play in the Southeastern Conference." "But this does not mean," she insisted, "that I would like to have my son break the race barrier." Such trepidation was rooted in her own personal history. Born in Mississippi, she was well acquainted with the realities of life in the Deep South, and this knowledge frightened her as she now confronted the prospect of sending her son to play in stadiums at SEC member institutions in Alabama, Louisiana, and, in particular, her native state. Without a "guarantee of his safety" from Breathitt and university officials, she threatened to withhold her support for his enrollment at UK, "despite my signature" on his scholarship offer. "My attitude, I know, is not the most progressive, nor unselfish," she admitted to the governor, "but this is the way I feel about my son and the problem of athletic segregation."3 For his part, Breathitt reassured Mrs. Northington and her friends in Louisville that he bore "a heavy responsibility" to ensure that her son's "stay at the University and his visits to other states are pleasant [End Page 562] Click for larger view View full resolution Nathaniel "Nat" Northington signs with the University of Kentucky in Lexington at the president's office, 1965. Standing behind Northington are (L to R) Kentucky governor Edward T. "Ned" Breathitt, UK football coach Charles Bradshaw, Thomas Jefferson High School football coach Jim Gray, and UK president John W. Oswald. University of Kentucky Special Collections Research Center. and safe." Nat himself thanked the governor for "your great interest and concern for me" and, in the end, reported for football practice in August 1966 to begin his freshman year at UK. Still, in her motherly concern, Mrs. Northington had put her finger on the main dilemma with which many at UK had wrestled for more than a decade when contemplating the integration of their teams: no one knew what awaited these pioneering black athletes, or their university, inside the SEC itself. UK's president John W. Oswald maintained that it was "our sincere hope" that, since Kentucky "has 'broken the ice,' the others [in the conference] will not feel the same hesitancy they have felt in the past." But not everyone shared his optimism. "I hope that you and the U. of K.," one Northington family friend wrote Breathitt, "have not...

Industrial strength education

It started with a casual dinner and an honest question: “What could we have done better for you?” recalls Mark Banaszak Holl. That night, the University of Michigan inorganic chemist got his answer from his dinner guests, Matthew Remy and Timothy De Vries, former students who now work for Dow Chemical. Nine months later, that answer blossomed into a project to address shortcomings for current and future chemistry graduate students. Banaszak Holl’s former students wished they had had more opportunities to understand how industrial chemistry worked before they graduated and started their jobs. And this desire isn’t unique to Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus. Chemistry grad students across the U.S. feel underinformed about careers outside academia, as C&EN reported earlier this year (May 9, page 14). To help fill this gap, Dow researchers partnered with University of Michigan chemistry professors and students to develop a case study project that gives graduate

Housed Nowhere and Everywhere Shut In: Uncanny Dwelling in Luis Buñuel's El ángel exterminador

El ángel exterminador (1962), Luis Buñuel's penultimate Mexican film, depicts the implausible imprisonment of a group of upper-class dinner guests who cannot leave the room they have retired to after their meal, while the servants have inexplicably abandoned their employers' mansion. Traditionally, the film has invited Marxist readings predicated on an inside/outside binary, whereby the bourgeoisie inside the mansion are trapped by their privilege and the home help waiting outside are excluded by the lack of theirs. This article moves beyond politically motivated readings of the film to consider its weight as a philosophical and aesthetic exploration of dwelling through the concept of the uncanny. The film's mansion bears all the hallmarks of Freudian uncanny, replete with symbolic imagery taken straight from Freud's renowned aesthetic exploration of what is at once familiar and unknown. However, I contend that, as the house crumbles around the imprisoned guests, the Freudian uncanny of the unheimlich home is supplanted by a more general, pervasive ‘not-being-at-home’, rooted in anxiety, that Martin Heidegger associates with the uncanny. This shift in focus frees the movie from auteur-centric psychoanalytical interpretation as the film text suggests an ethical and philosophical comment on what it means to be authentically ‘at-home’.

Uninvited dinner guests: the effect of invasive fish and temperature on the foraging efficiency of southern Iberian chub

Uninvited dinner guests: the effect of invasive fish and temperature on the foraging efficiency of southern Iberian chub

The weird dinner guest who came and then just stayed

Abstract I talked with dance pedagogue Andrew Morrish about his beginnings as a teacher and his understanding of education, his motivation to do solo improvisation as a performative practice, and about what his work brings to his colleagues and to this world. He told me about some of the different layers of his work during improvisation that became his methodology, about what it means to be a dancer (and it’s not about how high your legs can go), and what it means to be an artist. He spoke about differences between therapy and solo improvisation, between professional and non-professional artists, and about the transparency one should work with on stage. He also told me that his work is his political response to the current situation in society.

Lost in Translation?: Gender, Power, and Taste in Dany Laferrière's Le Goût des jeunes filles

The translation of Dany Laferrière's Le Goût des jeunes filles (The Taste of Young Girls) into the English title, Dining with the Dictator, represents a curious movement toward a far more palatable (re)vision of power distribution in Haiti. The addition of the word “dictator” in the English title explicitly situates the dinner guests in a less empowered position. The cunning linguistic playfulness and agency implicit in the phrase le goût (or “the taste”), in the French title, is evicted from the “young girls” and bestowed upon the dictator. Moreover, the revisionary approach displayed in the title change, extends to the conclusion of the novel as well. As with the French title, the dedication also suggests that for the author (and possibly the narrator?), the women are the center of the narrative. However, in light of this proclamation, the conspicuous absence of two concluding segments that focus on the two generations of women in the novel left me very puzzled. I only became aware of the exclusions when Dany Laferrière brought it to my attention during the Haiti in a Globalized Frame conference. We hope that this translation will bring another layer of critical engagement to discourses of gender, sexuality, and power in Caribbean literature.

Washington Brotherhood: Politics, Social Life, and the Coming of the Civil War by Rachel A. Shelden (review)

Reviewed by: Washington Brotherhood: Politics, Social Life, and the Coming of the Civil War by Rachel A. Shelden Jessica Ziparo (bio) Washington Brotherhood: Politics, Social Life, and the Coming of the Civil War. By Rachel A. Shelden. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. Pp. 296. Cloth, $34.95.) In Washington Brotherhood, Rachel Shelden argues that the “social and cultural life” of the capital city was “a critical part of the way that politicians engaged with the sectional and ideological struggles of the antebellum era” (2). Shelden aptly demonstrates that understanding the social, cultural, and political norms of Washington, D.C., is necessary when interpreting politicians’ decisions during the sectional crisis, focusing on the years between the Wilmot Proviso and the winter of 1860–61. More broadly, Shelden’s work suggests a new way of doing political history, one that more carefully interrogates the domestic lives of the white male elite, underscoring for historians of all eras the importance of acknowledging the personal motivations and constraints of historical actors. Shelden organizes Washington Brotherhood chronologically and thematically, opening each chapter with an overview of a major political issue or event and then exploring how the politicians involved in it may have been affected by an aspect of social or cultural life in Washington, D.C. This approach allows Shelden to highlight the interpersonal factors that historians have overlooked in their analyses of antebellum politics. Chapter 1, for example, considers how the culture of Congress affected voting on the Wilmot Proviso in 1846. Shelden posits that historians have “overvalued” the Congressional Globe, the official record of the proceedings of Congress during the mid-nineteenth century, as a source for determining politicians’ positions on sectional issues (39). Shelden found that congressmen and senators were often absent, intoxicated, or distracted during sessions and [End Page 159] votes. Moreover, the unwritten practices of Congress meant that the Globe did not always accurately report debates and proceedings as they occurred. Demonstrating the limitations of the Globe as an official source, Shelden argues that much of the discussion on legislation, including the Wilmot Proviso, actually happened in the cross-sectional and cross-party boardinghouses, association meetings, balls, and dinner parties that she explores in later chapters. Creatively using a variety of sources, Shelden brings new information and perspectives to this and other important political events, including the Compromise of 1850, the caning of Charles Sumner, and the Lecompton Constitution battle. In her final chapter, Shelden explains the three ways the “unique Washington living experience” influenced congressmen’s handling of the secession crisis: first, cross-sectional and cross-partisan friendships gave politicians “a distinctive understanding and approach to Lincoln’s election”; second, while their constituents could spar with each other from afar, congressmen lived together in the capital and “dealt with the realities of their cross-sectional, cross-partisan city during the crisis itself”; and finally, politicians approached the sectional crisis “by working together outside of the halls of Congress at dinners and parties, over drinks, and at the faro table” (171). Washington Brotherhood is supported by broad and deep research. Shelden consulted manuscript collections from eighteen states and the District of Columbia. She mined boardinghouse records, Washington etiquette books, personal papers, letters, invitations, notes, diaries, dinner guest lists, and church pew records in her effort to re-create the daily lives of antebellum politicians, lives that did not neatly compartmentalize the personal and the political. Shelden used the research cleverly, including analyzing congressional seating charts for evidence of cross-party sociability. In addition to being well researched, the book is also fun to read. Shelden writes in snappy, vivid prose, and readers are quickly moved along by stories of parties, drinking, friendships, dinners, hangovers (there is a shocking amount of alcohol in this book), and fighting, all set in the very male arena of antebellum Washington, D.C. Washington Brotherhood is an important and useful supplement to studies that focus on the political ideologies and sectional interests of the age, complicating the traditional narrative of North versus South. Shelden persuasively argues that recognizing the “‘unofficial’ political arena” of Washington—the parties, friendships, associations, and board-inghouses—is critical to understanding antebellum federal politics (2). It is...

The surprising benefit of passive-aggressive behaviour at Christmas parties: being crowned king of the crackers.

To test the effects of technique and attitude in pulling Christmas crackers. A binomial trial conducted at a Christmas-in-July dinner party involving five anonymous dinner guests, including two of the authors. Number of wins achieved by different strategies, with a win defined as securing the larger portion of the cracker. The previously "guaranteed" strategy for victory, employing a downwards angle towards the puller, failed to differentiate itself from random chance (win rate, 6/15; probability of winning, 0.40; 95% CI, 0.15-0.65). A novel passive-aggressive strategy, in which one individual just holds on without pulling, provided a significant advantage (win rate, 11/12; probability of winning, 0.92; 95% CI, 0.76-1.00). The passive-aggressive strategy of failing to pull has a high rate of success at winning Christmas crackers; however, excessive adoption of this approach will result in a complete failure, with no winners at all.

The Science Of Spherification

Gastronomical delights await dinner guests at the home of Christophe Chipot. Depending on their host’s inclination, guests might be served cheese and cognac-soaked figs with honey “caviar” or strawberry napoleons garnished with tiny beads of strawberry juice. On rare occasions, Chipot will make what he calls a “fake Japanese breakfast” featuring an “egg” of coconut milk and mango alongside sweet maki topped with grapefruit juice “roe.” The key to many of the avant-garde items in Chipot’s repertoire is a culinary technique known as spherification. In spherification, liquid food is encased in a thin polysaccharide membrane that, when consumed, pops open to release a burst of flavor—whether it’s juice, olive oil, pureed peas, or some other edible delight. Chipot’s interest in spherification doesn’t stop at the dinner plate though. The biophysics professor, with joint appointments at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and France’s University of Lorraine, and Wensheng Cai, a computational ...

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, and the Watch for Spots of Time

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, and the Watch for Spots of Time

Lisson Grove, Part Two

On December 28, 1817, the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon hosts what he refers to in both his diaries and " Autobiography " as "the immortal dinner." What follows is the second half of the first chapter of a book about that dinner, its guests, and the implied world surrounding it—a moment in cultural and literary history framed by the Regency and Romanticism. The stated reasons for the dinner are, one, that Haydon wants to introduce his young friend John Keats to the great William Wordsworth and, two, that Haydon wishes to celebrate his progress on his most important and largest historical painting so far, "Christ's Entry into Jerusalem." Haydon has invested three years in this work, with three more to go. Keats, Wordsworth, and Charles Lamb (also a dinner guest) appear as spectators in the most vivid quadrant of the painting, along with anachronistic versions of Newton and Voltaire. Later arriving guests include John Landseer, Joseph Ritchie, and John Kingston. After thoughtful and entertaining discussions of poetry and art and their relation to Enlightenment science, the dinner party evolves into a lively, even raucous evening. Haydon also refers to this memorable event as "an immortal evening." The title of the book is The Immortal Evening .

Lisson Grove: Part One

Lisson Grove: Part One Stanley Plumly (bio) On December 28, 1817, the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon hosts what he refers to in both his diaries and Autobiography as “the immortal dinner.” What follows is the first half of the first chapter of a book about that dinner, its guests, and the implied world surrounding it—a moment in cultural and literary history framed by the Regency and Romanticism. The stated reasons for the dinner are, one, that Haydon wants to introduce his young friend John Keats to the great William Wordsworth and, two, that Haydon wishes to celebrate his progress on his most important and largest historical painting so far, “Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem.” Haydon has invested three years in this work, with three more to go. Keats, Wordsworth, and Charles Lamb (also a dinner guest) appear as spectators in the most vivid quadrant of the painting, along with anachronistic versions of Newton and Voltaire. Later arriving guests include John Landseer, Joseph Ritchie, and John Kingston. After thoughtful and entertaining discussions of poetry and art and their relation to Enlightenment science, the dinner party evolves into a lively, even raucous evening. Haydon also refers to this memorable event as “an immortal evening.” The title of the book is The Immortal Evening. I Keats has the most ground to cover. From Well Walk, in the village of Hampstead, to Lisson Grove, west and a little south of what will soon be London’s Regent’s Park, is a distance of about three, maybe a bit more, miles. In 1817, it will be a walk through countryside and emerging outlying city, a combination first of open fields, small woods, and close-in lanes yielding to streets of shops and market gardens, row [End Page 340] housing and classic Georgian brick and stucco houses, some of them mansion-sized. There is also, along the way, the occasional modest furniture or china factory. It is three days after Christmas, and he will have likely started out in the early afternoon since Sunday dinner will be served at a regular 3:30. By report it is already one of those severely cold winter seasons—just three years ago the Thames had frozen over during “the Great Frost of 1813-1814,” and this year seems to be suffering the lingering effects. Keats is wearing, of course, his great coat, the same coat or one much like it that he will forget to take with him on another, later winter day in February, 1820, on a visit into London proper, when the temperature suddenly drops and the consequence is the hemorrhage that will prove to be his “death warrant.” This far from central London there is yet no gas street lighting, so he is probably carrying a lantern for the night walk back. Of the two other major guests invited to dinner, Charles Lamb is next in the distance he must travel—more than a mile and a half, maybe two miles, depending on the route from Russell Street, Covent Garden, just above the Thames. He has recently moved from Inner Temple Lane, from west along the route of the river. “Here we are transplanted,” he writes to Dorothy Wordsworth the month before. “We are in the individual spot I like best, in all this great city. The theatres, with all their noises, Covent Garden, dearer to me than any gardens of Alcinous, where we are sure of the earliest peas and ’sparagus. Bow Street, where the thieves are examined, within a few yards of us. Mary had not been here four-and-twenty hours before she saw a thief. She sits at the window working; and casually throwing out her eyes, she sees a concourse of people coming this way, with constable to conduct the solemnity. These little incidents agreeably diversify a female life.” Perhaps what Lamb is also saying, without meaning to sound condescending, is that Mary’s window life is distracting as well. Mary is Lamb’s devoted but emotionally fragile sister. To get to Lisson Grove, Lamb must pass through his beloved but compromised “commercial” area of the Garden, with businesses [End Page 341] ranging from brothels, taverns, even Turkish baths, to...

Mothers and Sisters

MCA focuses on central categories in talk-in-interaction. It involves enumerating the activities, attributes, and inferences (category-bound predicates) associated with a category, and, based on the category and its category-bound predicates, makes a connection with a social action. In this short paper, I will focus on the categories of ‘mother’ and ‘sister’ and the standardized relational pairs (SRPs) ‘mother-child’ (in this case, a young adult child) and ‘older sister-younger sister.’ I will now turn to a two-part excerpt which exemplifies what Stokoe (2012) calls “going categorical,” a term used when interlocutors explicitly name a category and, in some cases, its attributes. In the excerpt below, two categories are named: 1) ‘mother’ (also called ‘mom’); and 2) ‘older sister,’ a sub-category of ‘sister.’ Also, two attributes (obligations/rights) of ‘mother’ are named: 1) ‘caregiver,’ the person who does/takes care of everything for others; and 2) ‘order giver,’ the person who orders someone under her care to do something. The following excerpt is taken from a longer troubles-telling segment with two female interlocutors, C and N. In this spate, C is telling N about a dinner party she is giving that night, and about all the work yet to be done in preparation. C lives with her two younger sisters and she is complaining about the middle sister, who has invited several of the dinner guests, and who does not help around the house: Extract 1: Cleaning House

Ethics Commentary: The Psychotherapeutic Relationship

Immanuel Kant once observed, “We are not gentleman volunteers; we are conscripts in the army ofmoral law” (Murdoch 1992, p. 35).We recognize that many individuals act primarily, perhaps exclusively, in self-interest. But Kant’s observation that there is a moral imperative—what he called a “categorical imperative”—is indeed compelling. We cannot ignore the fact that moral demands are placed upon us by virtue of our living in a social order with other human beings. Physicians and health professionals in particular live in a moral order, with obligations incumbent on them by virtue of the needs of those who seek their help. Acknowledging that there are scoundrels among professionals, those motivated solely by self-interest and not in the service of others, we recognize that there are certain demands that health professionals cannot escape. Specific moral obligations are imposed on them by virtue of their relationship with patients or clients. This relationship is shaped by the clinician’s promise and expertise to heal and by the imbalance that naturally exists between a person in need and a person who seeks to provide treatment, answers, and comfort in relation to that need. Whether one understands those obligations as allegiance to conscience, allegiance to God, allegiance to society, or a more direct allegiance to the patient or client, the obligations are present. PROFESSIONALISM IN THE PSYCHOTHERAPEUTIC RELATIONSHIP

Teasing Out Clues, Not Kooks

Teasing Out Clues, Not Kooks

Cooking with all five senses

Trick your dinner guests into thinking you're a master chef by manipulating all their senses, says Catherine de Lange

This Girl's Got Your Back: A Review of Girls on Top

This Girl's Got Your Back:A Review of Girls on Top Natalie Harrower (bio) If you didn't get to see Soulpepper's sold-out run of Caryl Churchill's Top Girls in 2007, or the award-winning remount with the same cast in 2008, then this film will make you wish you were better at booking your theatre tickets in advance. Or, more accurately, it will make you wish you had been a part of the production itself. For the duration of its snappy and engaging fifty-two minutes, Girls on Top, directed by Cassandra Nicolaou for Fighting Fish Pictures, is a pure celebration of theatre's emotional power and the heightened bond that actors create with one another when the story fits and the cast just clicks. Generically, Girls on Top is a documentary about a theatre production, and, as such, it will be of wide interest to theatre and drama educators and to students considering a career in the arts. It includes scenes from the rehearsal room, and the viewer can implicitly trace the progression of the rehearsals by noting the subtle accumulation of costume pieces and performance "polish." The film takes us into the director's home for interview snippets about her motivations for mounting the play and also travels backstage to watch the actors' preparations and pre-performance rituals. The camera operates unobtrusively with no visible authorial intervention, which creates a feeling of immediacy and intimacy: we are there, as silent observers, as the actors face each stage of the process. The delivery of these stages is sharp and economical. The film knows its focus and keeps that focus front and centre. We hear only from people directly involved in the production, we learn about the actors' experiences both onstage and off, and the film steers clear of discussions about the production's design, technical requirements, or marketing approach. This is a film about theatre actors. At times, the film also offers a meditation on Western feminism and women's lives from the early 1980s until the present, mirroring the preoccupations of the play text. When it was first produced in 1982, Top Girls was notable both for its direct uptake of issues faced publicly and privately by working women, set against the backdrop of powerful individualism and Thatcherism, as well as for its experimentation with formal convention, seen in the scripting of overlapping dialogue and its nonchronological act structure. Having Soulpepper produce the play, director Alisa Palmer argues, grants it the status of "classic," lifting it out of its sometime designation as a dated piece of experimental feminism. In the feminist spirit of including both the domestic and public lives of women in its purview, the film interviews the actors about their careers and private lives and enters some of their homes. At one point, Liisa Repo-Martell, who plays Angie, introduces us to her preschool daughter and reflects on what it means to play a troubled teenager at this stage in her career. Her own journey as a mother has added a new layer to her professional decision-making process. Click for larger view View full resolution Cara Pifko doing her warm-up ritual before the dress rehearsal. Video still courtesy of Cassandra Nicolaou Click for larger view View full resolution Cara Pifko and Ann-Marie MacDonald prepare in the dressing room. Video still courtesy of Cassandra Nicolaou As Palmer tells us, the play succeeds in putting women's lives and concerns on stage, but even while embracing this focus, she questions the play's variety of feminism because its outlook for women seems so bleak. Instead of helping one another, Palmer continues, the play's characters ultimately create more problems for one another. The first act, which is meant to celebrate Marlene's promotion at work, is instead marked by a series of revelations about personal and professional losses by the fantastical set of historical dinner guests. Patient Griselda and Lady Nijo both reveal how they had children taken away from them, Pope Joan recalls the moments leading to her death by stoning, and Isabella Bird mourns the loss of her dear sister. The second and third acts, set in the...

Offline: If I were a rich man

This was my first fund-raising dinner. The event—at a US research-intensive institution—was small and highly choreographed. There were 14 of us, of whom 7 were billionaires. Those who were not billionaires—and I was one of those—were carefully briefed. There is a strict hierarchy to the rich. The wealthiest—and he was so very wealthy (although his impending divorce was about to make him considerably poorer)—sat at the head of a narrow dining table. He led the evening, even though the Dean of the School was the official host. As explained in the 10-page memo each of us were given in advance, he was to ask me a question during the salad course. The question was scripted. I was to answer (he wanted to know my answer beforehand so that he was not surprised by my reply). Then we would exchange polite remarks over the fish course, before he would wind up the evening with wise conclusions over ice-cream and coffee. I had been given a list of talking points several weeks before, extolling the unparalleled virtues of the university, which I duly memorised. The goal of the evening was modest by American standards: just $2 million a year for 2–3 years (one dinner guest had given $50 million some years ago). I got into the spirit of the evening. After several glasses of white and red wine—I was anxious to do well—I recall saying something about how universities were good at ideas but not very good at delivering results, and that no one in their right mind should give a cent without being damned sure about what they were getting for their cash in return. The very rich man at the other end of the table seemed gratified by this sentiment. In his closing comments he stressed the importance of measurement, accountability, and execution. We parted on good terms. The Dean, surprisingly, forgot to say goodbye.