Red Shoes Research Articles

Anna Christie

Anna Christie

Soon She Will Be Forty

Age 8The big kids have long legs and white-toothed grins. Beautiful and frightening; she loves them, she fears them. the big kids, easy in their confidence and power, their casual cruelty, their gestures of kindness that mean everything.She totters on roller skates, determined. she does not hold onto the side. Fear wraps its tongue around her, a tentacled spike from heart to head. she has never skated before, but she will not hold onto the side. she falls. she will not cry. she will not cry. Fear's tongue is coated in slime.One foot in front of the other, staggering, falling, a tunnel that goes round and round. she rams into the wall, the whumph against her chest like a hug, only better, safer. she turns and looks at the rink with eyes that aren't tunneled by fear. the big kids, the kids with white skates and fancy clothes, black skates with purple toe stops. so skilled, so confident.She dreams that one day, if she works hard and practices, maybe she could be like that. skilled, skating like it's flying, in beautiful skates that aren't rental beige, skates that dance and sing. their long legs are magic.Hope balloons, and pops just as fast. she will never own a pair of skates. she will never be one of the beautiful people.This is the truth.Age 20dancing at the club. sweat on vinyl. Body aching. Red wine to soothe the sting. dancing until she doesn't have a body anymore. Bored kissing, at least the tongue piercing gives her something to play with. stick with it long enough to be polite, then back to the dance floor, feet on fire but she doesn't care. dance like her red ankle boots are the real red shoes, like her skin has wings and the music can take her anywhere.She is the truth.Age 32Her back is stiff from hunching in front of the computer all day, shifting seats to slouch in front of the computer all night-frozen meals aren't too bad these days. she should get out more, but the clubs are too crowded, the music sucks, and the kids are just plastic mannequins. they've lost the soul the club once had. sometimes she misses Kendo, she misses her senpai and kohai, but she doesn't miss the creep her sensei turned out to be.She doesn't like answering the phone. she ignores party invitations; she's too tired and they're just doing it to be polite. Her hands are cold all the time and in winter she can't feel her feet.Alison knows her best. Comes to the door, so she can't escape. i have tickets; we're going out.And with Alison there, breathing becomes easy. Her body remembers the ritual of war paint and short skirt. she teases up her hair, sucks hard candy that makes her tongue blue. she tucks a hipflask into her cleavage; tequila's smoke curls around her ribs and strokes her muscles.The crowd is huge. she's surprised by how normal most of them look. Age six to seventy, oldsters, hipsters, hippies, dinks, twinks, tourists, mundanes, femmes, goth boys, industrial girls, and seahawks fans. A newborn wears earmuffs and sucks on the breast of a gothabilly in a three-piece suit while his other mum stands in line for tepid pBR.They don't punch each other in roller derby, not anymore. no pillow fights, no penalty wheel with recreational flogging, and this track is f lat, not banked.The whistle blows, skaters line up, collide, scramble around the track and she has no idea what the fuck is going on.It's chaos and her body is overwhelmed by the juddering crowd and piercing whistles. it's chaos and there's a jammer, the one with the star, pushing her way through the pack. it's chaos and the lead jammer forces her way through the pack, one, two, three times, scoring points with every pass. it's chaos and the red team is trying to slow it down while the black team is speeding it up.It's fierce players stepping on to the track, teeth blackened by mouthguards. it's jostling for position, escaping a trap, grabbing a goat, eating a baby, good clean hits, and C'Mon ReF! …

Music in the shadows: noir musical films

Smoke. Shadows. Moody strains of jazz. Welcome to the world of films, where tormented antiheroes and hard-boiled musicians battle obsession and struggle with their music and ill-fated love triangles. Sultry divas dance and sing the blues in shrouded nightclubs. Romantic intrigue clashes with backstage careers. In her pioneering study, Music in the Shadows, film noir expert Sheri Chinen Biesen explores musical films that use film noir style and bluesy strains of jazz to inhabit a disturbing underworld and reveal the dark side of fame and the American Dream. While noir musical films like A Star Is Born include musical performances, their bleak tone and expressionistic aesthetic more closely resemble the visual style of film noir. Their narratives unfold behind a stark noir lens: distorted, erratic angles and imbalanced hand-held shots allow the audience to experience a tortured, disillusioned perspective. While many musicals glamorize the quest for the spotlight in Hollywood's star factory, brooding noir musical films such as Blues in the Night, Gilda, The Red Shoes, West Side Story, and Round Midnight stretch the boundaries of film noir and the musical as film genres collide. Deep shadows, dim lighting, and visual composition evoke moodiness, cynicism, pessimism, and subjective psychological points of view. As in her earlier study of film noir, Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir, Biesen draws on extensive primary research in studio archives to situate her examination within a historical, industrial, and cultural context.

"You Must Remember This": The Lives of Others and the Cinematic Imagination

The lives of others won most of top European and international film prizes between 2006 and 2007, including seven Lolas and an Oscar, but it has also been heavily attacked by some critics both for its sympathetic portrait of a Stasi officer and for its misogynistic portrait of a faithless, drug-addicted actress (e.g., Porton; Foundas). The monstrous Gerd Wiesler, critics have argued, is magically transformed into the Good of Georg Dreyman's novel after his sudden exposure to theater, poetry, and music, and vulnerable Christa-Maria Sieland (Mar- tina Gedeck) must be sacrificed to film's central love story, that between Wiesler (Ulrich Muhe) and Dreyman (Sebastian Koch). In my view, much of this negative criticism implicitly acknowledges that Lives is tremendously suc- cessful at authentically recreating East Ber- lin of 1980s. The film captures bleak- ness of architecture, cuisine, and fashion in such unnerving detail that reviews insistently demand that film deliver docu- mentary accuracy. too responded to film's authenticity and found its recreation of East Berlin had visited in 1983 uncanny and unset- tling. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck took pains to film on location in rare streets that had not been transformed after fall of Berlin Wall. He refined palette of film to capture sense of color in German Demo- cratic Republic (GDR), so that greens stand in for blues and orange-browns replace reds (von Donnersmarck, Interview on DVD). Visually, film strives for quality of documentary.But The Lives of Others is not a documentary. Although he researched his subject thoroughly for four years, von Donnersmarck's understand- ing of character, his interest in relationships, and his belief in transformative power of art do not come from history, but from an educa- tion in classic Western cinema. We do not fault Casablanca (1942) or Rome, Open City (1945) for being sentimental. We do not blame The Red Shoes (1948) or The Third Man (1949) for being overblown. Instead, we celebrate these films for courage of their sentimentality and hyperbole. And von Donnersmarck's first film is an homage to his cinematic heritage. The per- formance of Martina Gedeck cannot be divorced from iconic performances of Ingrid Berg- man, Alida Valli, Anna Magnani, Moira Shearer, and Julie Christie on which hers is based. And an awareness of Wiesler's cinematic anteced- ents complicates any simple reading of him as a good man.These antecedents have been largely over- shadowed by ideological critiques of Lives. Anna Funder, author of Stasiland, an ex- traordinary book about life in GDR, fears that Lives is fostering a new form of Ostalgie.Groups of ex-Stasi are becoming increasingly belligerent. They write articles and books, and conduct lawsuits against people who speak out against them, including against German publisher of Stasiland. . . . The system demanded such loyalty . . . that most ex-Stasi are still true believers. A story such as Wiesler's plays into their hands as they fight for their reputation. (Funder, Tyranny of Terror)Funder admires Lives: I think film deserves its public and critical acclaim. It is a superb film, a thing of beauty. But it could not have taken place (and never did) under GDR dic- tatorship. . . . No Stasi man ever tried to save his victims, because it was impossible. We'd know if one had, because files are so com- prehensive (Tyranny).Whereas Funder argues that von Donners- marck is taking brutal fact and turning it into narrative, argue exactly oppo- site. Von Donnersmarck's particular achieve- ment is using his cinematic influences-almost all of which are fantasy narratives-and trans- forming these into a film that many critics have misread as an attempt at documentary real- ity. Yet an intertextual reading that accounts for these fantasy narratives can do much to shatter this misperception. …

'Red shoe sole' can constitute a valid trade mark

'Red shoe sole' can constitute a valid trade mark

Infinity and Me (review)

Reviewed by: Infinity and Me Elizabeth Bush Hosford, Kate . Infinity and Me; illus. by Gabi Swiatkowska. Carolrhoda, 2012. 34p. Library ISBN 978-0-7613-6726-0 $16.95 E-book ed. ISBN 978-1-58013-997-7 $12.95 R 6-10 yrs So innocuous-looking a symbol, that recumbent numeral eight. But for the little girl Uma, pondering the deep night sky (during a bout of sleeplessness brought [End Page 147] on by the excitement of a new pair of red shoes), the concept of infinity is elusive, intimidating, and even a little bit scary. The next day she asks classmates, relatives, and acquaintances how they would express their understanding of infinity, and their range of answers, from sensible to poetic, provides the child—and readers of any age—a way to master the idea. For Grandma, infinity is a family extending limitless generations into the future. For Uma's friend Samantha, it's a racetrack you can drive around forever. For the school cook, it's endless divisibility: "In your mind . . . could you cut that tiny piece of noodle in half forever?" Uma's own attempt at imagining infinity begins with something she'd like to do forever—have recess—and ends with the vague worry that eternal recess might be a paradox: "If there's no school before recess, and no school after recess, is it really recess anymore?" Uma admits that these thoughts make her head hurt, and her pleasure at having Grandma notice and compliment her new red shoes brings her (and audiences') musings back down to stable, solid, comforting Earth. Swiatkowska's imaginative artwork combines the free-wheeling, slightly eerie absurdity of Monty Python animations, the formality of nineteenth-century decorative patterning, and the playful nerdiness of Leonardo da Vinci-styled inventions. For math and language arts teachers in search of curricular common ground, 8 marks the spot. Copyright © 2012 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

People, the ghosts down in North-of-the-South aren’t see-through, and: I’m moved by her, that big-nippled girl

People, the ghosts down in North-of-the-South aren’t see-through, and: I’m moved by her, that big-nippled girl Diane Seuss (bio) People, the ghosts down in North-of-the-South aren’t see-through They don’t wear nightgowns or whisper or singor want hazy things from the ones of us who are living.They have skin, bones, people. They’re short in statureand they don’t walk through walls. They come in our houses by kicking down doors, wearing porkpie hats and smokingthose My Father cigars. Yellow sweat stainson their sleeveless undershirts, my people. I’m surethere are other kinds of ghosts other places, sad angels wearing bloomers and fanning their wings,but here their faces are made of gristle and their eyesred from too much Thunderbird. They want to stealour valuables, mess shit up, drop a match and burn down the house. I don’t know any other way to say it,people. They walk right into our kitchens without being invited,tracking mud, lifting the fish by the tail out of the fryerand stuffing it in a cloth sack the color of a potato just pulled out of the ground, and if there was a potatopulled fresh out of the ground they’d take that too.Their pee sizzles when it hits the floor. They don’t hearprayers or heed four-leaf clovers. We have to give our bodies to the task. I mean we push back, people.Harder than day labor. Harder than shoving a bullout of the cow paddock. Two bulls. We have to sayleave my goddamned house. Go, motherfucker. My fucking house. Shouting while pushing, like breech birth,or twins. They slap on that corpse-smelling aftershaveand come calling, holding a bouquet of weeds. They wantour whiskey, our gravy, our honey, our combs, our bees. [End Page 199] I’m moved by her, that big-nippled girl with the diminutive vulva. Sometimes when I wipeafter peeing I say the phrase “cow lips” out loud. Irefuse, these days, to romanticize myself. That girl, her red shoes. If they’d been high heels I would haveordered her out into the rain, but they were scuffedflats with a black vinyl abstraction lolling over the top like the innards of a poppy or an oversize houseflyrubbing its hands together. Her nipples were huge.It’s liberating to say that. Having noticed it, why not say it? Some will take umbrage. But when I say“ordered her out into the rain” I mean “extracted herfrom my imagination.” Does that help? My hair smells like oven cleaner. My tongue is pale; there’ssomething wrong with my spleen. The girl’s nipples,the size of flying saucers. Her hairstyle from 1964, the year my father died. Lace stockings and elbow-length red gloves. Jade earrings shaped like my body.Stop saying that she could be my daughter. I could be my daughter, my daughter’s daughter. I havea dead bone in my leg, and eight screws, which haveno structural purpose. They’re symbolic; one for each screwup. I’ve brought my hands to my mouth to tampdown the ruthless tears. Mine are elongated, my tearsnot my tits, like El Greco’s penitent St. Peter. How can I say this so you can begin to understand? Her stance,frontal. Her nipples, emitting their own light, twoasymmetrical baptismal grottoes. The slant rhyme [End Page 200] of her stomach, slender but without muscle tone,punctuated by an off-center belly button, a period’speriod. Her vulva, unassailable. No bigger than a sphinx moth, with just a wisp of hair over the lips,like the mouth of a little mute puppet. It reminded meof an envelope of mouse-colored curls that fell out of the Book of Psalms that time I turned to the Biblefor solace. The faint loops of hair were mine, secretedaway by my mother from my first haircut at the hands of her father, a barber. My name on the envelope,the hair like a dead shrew...

Hollywood on the Danube: Hungarian Filmmakers in a Transnational Context

Exile, emigration and displacement have marked the trajectories of Hungarian filmmakers over the past century. Michael Curtiz, the Korda brothers—Alexander, Vincent and Zoltán—André de Toth, Emeric Pressburger, Vilmos Zsigmond, Miklós Rózsa, Peter Lorre, Géza von Radvány and other talented artists have crossed borders, cultures and languages, creating such classics as Casablanca, Somewhere in Europe, The Red Shoes and The Lost One. The legendary sign posted in Hollywood studios read: "It is not enough to be Hungarian, you have to have talent, too!" Accompanied by film extracts, rare footage, personal interviews, archive photographs, and documentary materials, my presentation explores the transnational odysseys of these Hungarian directors, producers, cinematographers, composers, actors and screenwriters whose artistic contributions became an indispensable part of international cinema, suggesting that the challenges of emigration may also offer opportunities for critique, self-examination and artistic creativity.

“I’m still who I was” creating meaning through engagement in art: The experiences of two breast cancer survivors

PurposeThe aim of this feasibility study was two-fold: i) develop lifelike torsos of two breast cancer survivors using innovative sculpting material and; ii) shed light on the meaning women give to the experience of breast cancer after viewing their sculpted torsos. MethodsThis collaborative initiative between nurse researchers and artists was situated within phenomenological inquiry. Two breast cancer survivors shared their bodies, as models, and stories of their cancer journey and the experience of modeling to create life-sized torsos of their bodies. Key resultsThe participants articulated embodied knowing as each shared experiences of connectedness and relationship which culminated in the emergence of four core themes: The Landscape of Breast in Cancer; Red Shoes: The Re-claiming of Self; Liberation: towards an embodied self; and, Scars: Re-authoring Life. ConclusionsActive engagement in art through the use of one’s body has the potential to open the door to healing, the generation of meaning and a reaffirmation of self.

The Red Shoes: Islam and the Limits of Solidarity in Cixous's Mon Algériance

The Red Shoes:Islam and the Limits of Solidarity in Cixous's Mon Algériance Anne Norton (bio) "My Algeriance, in other words: to depart not to arrive from Algeria" testifies to Cixous as exile and refugee. Cixous is more uprooted than she knows. She has been torn from a place and a heritage by violence. She has been torn from those who might be her people. This deracination is an artifact of colonialism in its late stages, haunting the postcolonial. That which is severed in her divided France. Cixous knows she has been torn from Europe, from the heritage that belonged to Northern European Jews. She does not seem to know that she has been torn from Algeria, robbed of the heritage of Andalusia and the Maghreb, separated not only from Algeria, but from Algeria in France. If she does not value the loss, it is no less a robbery. If she accepts, or has been taught to welcome the separation, she is no less wounded by it. Cixous's essay "Mon Algériance" reveals this severing. In reading it, I hope to show how it might be repaired. "Mon Algériance" was not presented, as it is in the United States, as a rather rarefied work in theory, but as an intervention in French cultural politics. The essay was first published in Les Inrockuptibles.1 Les Inrocks is a journal of politics and culture, publishing pieces on music, visual arts, and commentaries on politics and current events. It regularly features by significant intellectual figures. Cixous's article appears in Les Inrocks as a theorist's postcolonial memoir, speaking to the continuing debates over Islam, Muslims, and what Paul Silverstein has called "Algeria in France."2 Americans would call it the work of a public intellectual. When Cixous published this account of her relation to the Algerian, France had already seen unrest in the banlieux of Paris. Mathieu Kassovitz's acclaimed 1995 film La Haine (Hate) had made solidarity, alienation, police brutality and discrimination visible as conditions of immigrant experience. France continued to consider its colonial past, and the legacy of torture in Algeria. Benjamin Stora's La gangrene et l'oubli: la mémoire de la guerre d'Algérie was only the latest of his works to address the tangled French relation with Algeria and the Algerian.3 The question of the politics of memory was very much to the fore. A month before Cixous's article appeared, Eduardo Galeano wrote in Le monde diplomatique, "As the years pass and we change the memory of what we have lived, seen and heard changes as well. And often, it happens that we place in the memory what we want to find, like the police during the searches."4 Cixous's essay speaks to each of these: to the question of the rioting alienated chebab of the banlieux; to France's fraught colonial past; and to the temptations of memory. One might, following Bourdieu, read Cixous's postcolonial memoir as an instance of the trials peculiar to one "dominated fraction of the dominant class." One might, following Memmi, read it as another instance of the futilities that attend the "colonizer who refuses." One might, following Derrida, remain silent. I hope to read the testimony of the Algérienne sleeping in Cixous, and recover for her a solidarity that overcomes, albeit partially and imperfectly, the divisions of sex, religion and ethnicity in contemporary France. It is a reading she resists. Cixous's account of her birthplace among the Arabs, among the Muslims, in the Maghreb begins in an echoing disavowal. She writes of "My Algeriance, in other words: to depart not to arrive from Algeria."5 She is not Algerian, Algérienne, une Algérienne, jazriyya. She departs. She has never arrived. She speaks in other words than theirs. Cixous's title, "Mon Algériance" claims both domesticity and dominion. The title is possessive. Mireille Calle-Gruber reads "allegiance" "alliance" and "riance" in Cixous's "Algériance." The word can then be read as a benign, smiling linkage of the political and the personal, of alliance, allegiance and an object of familiarity and affection.6 Cixous, however, refuses a home...

<i>The Vikings on Film: Essays on Depictions of the Nordic Middle Ages</i> (review)

* The Vikings on Film: Essays on Depictions of Nordic Middle Ages. Ed. Kevin J. Harty. Jefferson: McFarland & Co., 2011. Pp. 236. This collection of fourteen essays is first scholarly anthology to examine cinematic representations and re-imaginings of Vikings and their exploits. The book's editor, Kevin J. Harty, an English professor and Arthurian expert at La Salle University, has previously published extensively on the reel Middle Ages--a term he coined. The project is partly inspired by Andrew Wawn's 2000 study The Vikings and Victorians: Inventing Old North in Nineteenth-century Britain. That work explored term as masking a wildly elastic variety of different constructions of Vikingism which were far more reflective of Victorian attitudes about race, nationhood, gender, and class than they were historically accurate evocations of Viking age. Representations of Vikings on film and television over past century likewise more tellingly mirror cultural and commercial horizons of their filmmakers, financiers, and target audiences than they do anything else. As Harty's introduction points out, film representations of Vikings are nearly as old as medium itself, and a spate of Anglo/American early silent short films emerged in early twentieth century. The first known Viking film is Great Britain's The Viking's Bride (1907), followed by American studio Vitagraph's The Viking's Daughter, Story of Ancient Norsemen (1908) and The Last of Saxons (1910), both directed by James Stuart Blackton. Thomas Edison's company produced The Viking Queen in 1914. As far as we know, prints of these one and two-reel silent films have most probably perished, victims of neglect and notoriously vulnerable nitrate stock they were shot on. The book's first essay focuses on 1958 classic Hollywood epic The Vikings, an iconic popular work that still remains most widely-known Viking film over a half century later. A color photo of producer-star Kirk Douglas as maimed, one-eyed warrior Einar graces book's cover. The Vikings was a product of Hollywood's wide-screen sword-and-sandal cycle of 1950s and early 1960s. Directed by Richard Fleischer, it featured an all-star cast led by Douglas, Tony Curtis, Ernest Borgnine, and Janet Leigh. Jack Cardiff's super-saturated Technicolor cinematography (with location shooting in western Norway and Brittany) and composer Mario Nascimbene's score (and its stirring three-note fanfare) also contributed to film's popularity and durability. The film even spawned a short-lived TV series, Tales of Vikings, produced by Douglas, which aired for 39 half hour episodes during 1959-60. Kathleen Coyne Kelly's essay here integrates theorists like Metz and Baudrillard into her discussion of scopic tropes in film. She also documents correspondence battles pitching Hollywood's self-censoring Production Code Administration (PCA) against United Artists and Douglas' own company Bryna Productions over elements of violence and sexual innuendo in script that are quite tame by today's standards. The next essay explores 1964 British-Yugoslavian co-production The Long Ships, starring American actors Richard Widmark, Sidney Poitier, and Russ Tamblyn, and directed by British Jack Cardiff (whose storytelling skills did not nearly match his cinematographer gifts as one of film history's greatest colorists in Powell and Pressburger's The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus). Donald L. Hoffman jocularly titles his essay Who's Coming to Plunder? as a sly wink to Sidney Poitier's black saint persona in progressive 1960s films like Stanley Kramer's interracial marriage comedy-drama, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967). In his analysis, Hoffman gives a sharp post-colonial reading to this quest narrative of Vikings battling Moors over a fabled golden bell treasure. Leading man Richard Widmark chose to play lead Viking, Rolfe, for roguish comedy while Poitier gave a Shakespearian Othello-like gravitas to his role as Moorish chieftan, El Mansuh. …

Lek som musisk kommunikasjon

Through her own practice-led research into interactive theatre for children in the performance, De Røde Skoene (eng.: The Red Shoes, Hovik 2008), and critical reflections on theories of play, Lise Hovik proposes a concept of play as communicative musicality. This form of play works as a “rhythmical transparency” between the performers’ improvisations and children’s (re-)actions. She presents play heuristic as a possible resource for the development of theatre for the youngest children.

"Gender within Gender": Zanele Muholi's Images of Trans Being and Becoming

"Gender within Gender": Zanele Muholi's Imagesof Trans Being and Becoming Gabeba Baderoon Before I knew about transgender, I called it gender within gender. —Zanele Muholi, 2011. In her keynote address to the "African Same-Sex Sexualities and Gender Diversity" conference in Pretoria, South Africa, in February 2011, Desiree Lewis pointed to Zanele Muholi's photograph Ms. D'vine I as exem plifying the Utopian possibilities of queer liberation. With Lewis, we observe the complex and playful textures of Ms. D'vine's self-possessed performance of gender in the photograph, her waist draped in beads woven in the colors of the South African flag, a brightly decorative yet slightly stiff necklace around her neck, and the sole of one of her bright red shoes worn through. The setting of long grass marked by discarded plastic bags in which Ms. D'vine poses at first recalls then unsettles an image of rural Africa by testifying to the continent's urban realities. Lewis notes that this vivid and "emphatically queer" image "blurs markers of tradition and modernity ... and defies the usual emphasis on violence, on health, on statistics" that reduces African sexuality to an instrumental litany of deficits and disease. Instead, in Muholi's photograph Ms. D'vine observes no requirements of authenticity and no strictures on self-expres sion and, therefore, to Lewis, appears "entirely free, dethroning] normal ity, heteronormativity, and homonormativity."1 In her camp persona, Ms. D'vine consciously inhabits a marginal and original space, rather than a Feminist Studies37, no. 2 (Summer © 2011 by Gabeba Baderoon 390 Gabeba Baderoon 391 pragmatic and respectable one, and thereby embodies the promise of freely imagined possibilities for the self. This possibility of a radical playfulness and the Utopian promise of pleasure and self-invention in Muholi's photography continues a strong theme in recent African feminist and queer of color writing on sexuality.2 It is particularly striking because of the pall cast over debates about gender and sexuality in Africa by the charge that "homosexuality is un-African," an accusation that extends to expressions of diverse genders, because sexu ality and gender are often conflated in such views. No matter how often historians, sociologists, and other scholars show convincing evidence to the contrary, the trope that varied genders and same-sex sexualities in Africa are corrupt practices imported from the West is stubbornly invoked by conservative politicians, as well as religious and civic leaders, to strategic effect, as their claims to represent authentic African culture often deflect attention from issues of governance.3 Gender variance is obscured by such ideas about sexuality in South Africa. The country's history of slavery, colonialism, and the institutional ized racism of apartheid have generated a profuse and often damagingly interwoven set of assumptions around sexuality, gender, and race. The stigmatizing of queer sexuality is entwined with the assumption that people who are lesbian or gay are actually anatomically distinct or simul taneously female and male-bodied.4 The conflation of sexuality, sex, and gender has also had an impact on trans people, who are often assumed to be homosexual, a fact that has spurred much transphobic violence. In contrast to these narrow frameworks for public discussions of sexuality and gender, the notion of gender diversity posits that gender expression ranges across a broad spectrum—one can, for instance, be a masculine woman or be a person who used to be a woman and is now a man; the sex assigned to one's body can be distinct from the gender one expresses; and gender is distinct from sexuality—that is, although they form a part of the lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender/intersex (LGBTI) community, not all transgender people are lesbian or gay. Despite the prevalence of constricted ideas about gender, perceptions have started to change. This is evident in some promising signs: the work of the respected South African nongovernmental organization Gender 392 Gabeba Baderoon DynamiX, which is entirely devoted to transgender issues in Africa; the publication in 2009 of Trans: Transgender Life Stories from South Africa, a collec tion of autobiographical writing by trans people, and the earlier 1998 auto biography, From fuliet to fulius: In Search of My True Identity...

Kate Bush, The Red Shoes, The Line, the Cross and the Curve and the Uses of Symbolic Transformation

In Kate Bush’s 1993 album, The Red Shoes, and her film, The Line, the Cross and the Curve, she engages with the symbolism of The Red Shoes fairytale as first depicted in Hans Christian Andersen’s 1845 fairy tale and later developed by the Powell and Pressburger film (1948) of the same name. In Bush’s versions of the tale she attempts to find a space of agency for the main female protagonist in a plot structure over-determined by patriarchal narrative and symbolic logic. I will argue that it is through her own use of mystical symbolism — the Line, the Cross and the Curve — mediated through the deployment of ritual magick and kabbalistic ritual — that she breaks the ‘spell’ of the red shoes story where the main female character can escape the gender specific ‘curse’ of the red shoes.

Red Shoes: Linking Fashion and Myth

What is it about red shoes? Conjuring multiple images and responses like black or blue shoes never could, red shoes connect literature, fashion, and dress through meanings that are uniquely personal yet resonant across wider cultural and social groups. These symbolic meanings of red shoes are powerful, partly because they are encountered in childhood stories, partly because they are reiterated by fashion, which capitalizes on and reinterprets these meanings, and partly because we can choose to wear them, contributing both to their vitality and our self-image, in ambiguous but evocative ways. Red shoes are never neutral. Glass slippers are quite different, being never obtainable in the material world, and also somehow lacking as a metaphor for wish fulfillment, which is suggestive when we consider the content and intentions of their stories. The red shoes by Hans Christian Andersen and the much older story of Cinderella with her glass slippers demand commitment from their wearers to a course of action, one leading to wild and willful dancing which ends in terrible suffering and death, the other to union and recognition. Both red and glass shoes have a place in our shared childhood libraries and in the wardrobes of our imaginations. Their stories are about desire, envy, transformation, and sin, so have a clear relationship with the impulse and character of fashion. By exploring these themes I hope to discover more about the symbolic meanings of these shoes, and their links through myth to fashion, style, and the self.

Exis-tensions: Surviving theRed ShoesSyndrome in Margaret Atwood'sLady Oracle

As the earliest and most sustained of Atwood's attempts to examine the potentially deadly conflict between a woman's artistry and female identities, Lady Oracle has often been read as a text that must necessarily be considered alongside Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's influential film, The Red Shoes. Yet absent from previous analyses is a discussion of how this conflict is perpetuated though the female artist tradition, and how Joan Delacourt's habitual overeating indicates her self-destruction, rather than her self-empowerment, in the face of conflict. Moreover, while Joan's obesity aligns with the self-harm anticipated by what Atwood terms ‘the Red Shoes syndrome,’ her projecting her creative talents onto alternate identities can be read as a dissociative survival strategy that, for a time, permits her to maintain her divided identity as a woman artist. keep silent and avoid red shoes, red stockings, dancing. Dancing in red shoes will kill you. Atwood, Two-Headed In [the Victorian Period], a woman writer was a freak, an oddity, a suspicious character. How much of that sentiment lingers on today, I will leave you to ask yourselves … Atwood, ‘The Curse’

Exis-tensions: Surviving the Red Shoes Syndrome in Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle

As the earliest and most sustained of Atwood’s attempts to examine the potentially deadly conflict between a woman’s artistry and female identities, Lady Oracle has often been read as a text that must necessarily be considered alongside Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s influential film, The Red Shoes. Yet absent from previous analyses is a discussion of how this conflict is perpetuated though the female artist tradition, and how Joan Delacourt’s habitual overeating indicates her self-destruction, rather than her self-empowerment, in the face of conflict. Moreover, while Joan’s obesity aligns with the self-harm anticipated by what Atwood terms ‘the Red Shoes syndrome,’ her projecting her creative talents onto alternate identities can be read as a dissociative survival strategy that, for a time, permits her to maintain her divided identity as a woman artist.

500 Clown Macbeth (review)

Reviewed by: 500 Clown Macbeth Regina Buccola 500 Clown Macbeth Presented by 500 Clown at The Steppenwolf Theater, Chicago, Illinois. June 14-July 29, 2007. Directed by Leslie Buxbaum Danzig. Set by Dan Reilly. With Adrian Danzig (Bruce), Paul Kalina (Shank), and Molly Brennan (Kevin). Things that you need to know about 500 Clown Macbeth: first, there are no clowns. At least, not in the sense of full-facial greasepaint, oversized red shoes, and twirling bow ties. Second, the cast consists of three people-Molly Brennan, Adrian Danzig, and Paul Kalina-not 500. Third, the savvy theatregoer will recognize very little of Shakespeare's language from the Scottish play, though the casts' kilts pay homage to its original setting. The threesome is also significant, since the piece opens with the trio sharing among them, one word at a time, the dozen lines of the play's opening scene, beginning: "When shall we three meet again?"(1.1.1), concluding with a gleeful marching cadence as they repeat over and over again in unison, "Fair is foul and foul is fair" (1.1.10). Theatrical convention-Shakespearean or otherwise-goes out the window from the opening moments of the performance. As electronica by The Propellerheads plays, the audience assembles in front of a stage set only with a three-tiered scaffolding of metal and plywood. Brennan, Danzig, and Kalina enter from the rear of the performance space. At the Steppenwolf in summer 2007, they emerged from the light and sound booth to climb in, like rambunctious monkeys, over the audience, through the light rigging, eventually hopping down from the catwalks into the aisles. As they made their way to the stage, they clambered [End Page 182] Click for larger view View full resolution Adrian Danzig as Bruce, Paul Kalina as Shank, and Molly Brennan as Kevin in 500 Clown's production of Macbeth. Photo by Michael Brosilow. [End Page 183] over the seated audience members, Kalina at one point straddling a befuddled theatregoer with a foot on each of her armrests as he adjusted his disheveled kilt. Though they may not look like circus clowns, Brennan, Danzig, and Kalina are highly trained in clown, circus arts, and physical theatre, and display these skills with panache over the course of the performance. The two nods to conventional clown aesthetics in the show are the punked-out hairstyles and hair-colors of the cast, and their ears, which are painted solid red. In a post-show discussion after a performance at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center of the University of Maryland in College Park in December 2006, Danzig explained that the red ears "emphasize that the troupe is ever alert, listening for cues from the audience." Their names are apparently unrelated to 500 Clown Macbeth itself, but to the process of developing their performance personas, since the character-names have proven portable into their other ventures, 500 Clown Frankenstein and 500 Clown A Christmas Carol. The actors both are and are not portraying the central characters from these familiar narratives, and their clown names seem to allow them to detach the roles they play from themselves, and to avoid identifying with any specific character in the original piece of literature. 500 Clown Macbeth has been staged repeatedly since it premiered at Charybdis Multi-Arts Complex in Chicago in 2000. The now defunct Charybdis, which billed itself as an "artists' playground," was the perfect place to debut the cursed Scottish play with three clowns taking all of the major roles, performing on a rickety tri-tiered scaffolding-a playing space masterminded to fall apart by designer Dan Reilly. According to its Mission Statement, 500 Clown aims to deploy "circus arts, improvisation, and action-based performance to produce theatre that catapults the performers into extreme physical and emotional risk. The work shifts the audience from passive to active observers and creates a charged environment that celebrates the unpredictable power of the moment." The physical risks to the performers are clear; during one early performance, the scaffolding completely collapsed mere minutes into the show. It took several moments for the technicians running the lights and sound to realize that this particular accident had happened accidentally...

The King's Two Teeth

Hyacinthe Rigaud's famous swagger portrait of Louis XIV in full regalia presents 'Louis the Great' at the height of his powers, framed in an ostentatiously theatrical setting. Painted in 1701, displayed at the Paris Salon in 1704, the work dazzles the viewer with sumptuous ceremonial display.1 Crown, sceptre, great sword of state, and heavy, fleur-de-lisee ermine robes evoke the putatively timeless nature of the French monarchy. The king's posture is unfazed, relaxed, mildly disdainful. He inverts the royal sceptre playfully as though it were a walking stick, or a child's toy or the swagger-stick of a military commander; the gesture magnifies rather than diminishes his grandeur. Strongly featured are his sculpted legs, which the chronicler, the due de Saint-Simon, a far from sycophantic aficionado of court life, adjudged the finest he ever saw. They painstakingly replicate the pose which Louis, as a young man, had adopted when dancing as Apollo in court ballets as his own Premier Dancer, at a time when the Sun King was in the ascendant.2 The king's lofty and impassive gaze, almost dictating reverential obeisance from the humble spectator, emerges from a body polished, primped and more than a little prettified for the occasion. The calf muscles are scarcely those of a sextuagenarian: especially one often crippled by gout and habituated to being pushed round in a wheelchair. The red heeled courtier shoes lift the ruler well above his scarcely impressive five foot three inches. The copious curls of a towering black wig obscure the fact that Louis was precociously bald. And the unruffled forehead displays a ruler with scarcely a care in the world even though when it was painted Louis was embarking with heavy heart on what would be his last, ruinous war, the War of Spanish Succession (1701-14). Yet in this mythologizing and mendacious portrait which seeks to erase the passage, even the existence, of time, one feature stands out and shocks for its stark naturalism: hollow cheeks and wrinkled mouth reveal a ruler with not a tooth in his head.

Softcore as Serialized (and Feminized) Featurette

The softcore serial (or “softcore featurette”) is a prolific sexploitation subgenre spawned by the early-nineties popularity of Red Shoe Diaries, Zalman King's late-night Showtime program. Like Red Shoe Diaries, the softcore serial is an elaborately feminized and aspirational form with a pointedly “postfeminist” sensibility. Though this subgenre is also a self-consciously apolitical form structured by double standards and essentialist stereotypes, contemporary feminists have nevertheless been increasingly inclined to condone it, a trend that may dovetail with a larger postfeminist receptiveness to traditional ideas of femininity. This article proposes that the softcore serial and its (post)feminist reception are most usefully framed as the product of three overlapping cultural contexts: the histories of postfeminist cultural production, of American sexploitation cinema, and of premium cable programming.