Title Role Research Articles

FIRST CROCUSES

2 8 Y F I R S T C R O C U S E S D O N A L D P L A T T They are the colors of my dead father’s Lenten chasuble, royal purple with one huge gold cross, as he celebrated the early Sunday morning mass. No, these crocuses are the colors of my first girlfriend’s striped panties as I groped her on the balcony of the Mahaiwe Theater. We were watching the Bolsheviks in Doctor Zhivago wait in silence with their machine gun under tall pines for tiny soldiers in white tunics to walk closer across a wheat field studded with poppies before opening fire. After the gun rasped out its hacking coughs, the Red Army battalion crossed the waist-high wheat field to find they had executed boy soldiers, students at St. Michael’s, a local military school. Golden the wheat field, purple theshadowsthatthetallpinescast.Redthepoppiesandthewhitetunics splashed with blood. Itwastoosweetcommunionwine,whitewafersonthegold-platedpaten my father held aloft and blessed, Behold the Lamb of God; behold him that taketh away the sins of the world. Sin of that machine gun stuttering, pronouncing its idiot, one-word sentence on the bodies of boys barely fifteen. 2 9 R David Lean, director of Doctor Zhivago, shot the movie mostly near Madrid in midsummer. He recreated Russian winter by buying hundreds of tons of marble from a nearby quarry. He had the stone ground down to a fine white powder and spread the snow that wouldn’t melt across five acres of a Spanish plain for a single cavalry charge. In the title role, Omar Sharif complained of David Lean, ‘‘He considers everybody on the set, everybody who is helping to make the film, as objects, rather than as people. They are the things that are making his film, and well, you can see how easy it is . . . to be terribly unhappy and rather hate him for it. I know that I have, at the end of many days’ shooting, felt terrible hate for him.’’ A son renouncing the father who gave him the best role of his career, who said, ‘‘He’s a very sensitive actor, and we happen to work very well together . . . And I thought I could get this Russian poet out of him.’’ Imperious father, who liked to say, ‘‘Alright, Omar, action!’’ but who told Sharif to let the other actors in Zhivago act. ‘‘You don’t have to play anything at all. They will all be better than you. You must never be wonderful at any shot or any scene that you are playing. I don’t want anyone to say that you are good. You will be normal, completely nothing. No acting 3 0 Y at all! But at the end, when people see the whole film, they will say you are good.’’ At the end of his life, Omar would admit, ‘‘I loved David Lean, and when he said this to me, it was an order. I never tried to act in the film. I was completely real.’’ At Varykino, Omar still looks out the frost-ferned window that thaws to a field of da√odils and birches waving in the wind. The balalaika plays. Omar looks and looks with wide, brown, sorrowing eyes that see nothing but a single da√odil that dissolves into Julie Christie’s face stunned to see Yuri enter the dusty library where she bends over an open book in shadow. Crocuses’ orange pistils are the size of my first girlfriend’s swollen clitoris beneath her wet, silk, purple panties striped with gold. Her breath’s sharp intake. It all comes back, but only for one moment. I’ve heard she manages a bank, is married, has three children. I do not want to spoil that hour in the dark by seeing her again. I won’t whisper her name. Life is unreal as an epic film fed reel by reel into an ancient projector that stutters, then breaks down. My father died from Alzheimer’s. He forgot everyone except my mother, who now is dead. One day I too will close my eyes, won’t see that this spring’s crocuses are all...

Editor's Foreword: Long Day's Journeys and Deposed Emperors

Might it be a register of our current cultural moment that several productions of Long Day's Journey Into Night—arguably O'Neill's darkest play—were performed this past year, four of which are reviewed in this edition of the EOR? Or that O'Neill's expressionistic portrait of a despotic ruler meeting his demise (The Emperor Jones) in the Irish Repertory Theatre's revival felt all the more poignant as our first black president left the White House after divisive elections? Or, when transferred across the Atlantic to the cavernous Armory, that Richard Jones's neon production of The Hairy Ape felt less like a period piece and more of a current snapshot of how the average Yank clashes with a culture obsessed with Fifth Avenue capital?It is precisely during times of tumult that we turn to great thinkers. With a country deeply divided since the election, works like 1984, The Handmaid's Tale, and It Can't Happen Here have risen to the top of best-seller lists. While O'Neill's dramas might not be among the must-read lists, they are certainly on the “must stage” list. For it is in the living room of Monte Cristo Cottage that we find insights into how families are torn apart; it is on the giant red throne that we find the possibilities—and limits—of tyrannical rule; and it is within the stokehole of a ship where we can see the sweltering labor for a chance to belong.Whether staged on Broadway, in Los Angeles, or within O'Neill's summer home in New London, Long Day's Journey Into Night was among O'Neill's most prominently performed plays this past year. Robert McLean recounts how the fine acting in the Palm Beach Dramaworks production resulted in one of the best Long Day's Journeys he has witnessed. The much-anticipated Broadway production of Long Day's Journey starring Gabriel Byrne and Jessica Lange delivered a raw and aching interpretation, with Lange giving a heart-wrenching portrayal of Mary Tyrone—and justly winning a Tony Award for Best Actress. On the West Coast, the LA production of Long Day's Journey featured a different—but no less stunning—pair of actors in the title roles: Alfred Molina and Jane Kaczmarek. With dramaturgical work by former EOR editor William Davies King, this production included projections of O'Neill's family and recordings of O'Neill reading poetry to bring the autobiographical elements of the play to life, as Jaime Leigh Gray's review reveals. But what could be more autobiographical than staging Long Day's Journey within the home in which Eugene grew up? Robert Dowling's review shows how the Flock Theatre for the first time brought the play to Monte Cristo Cottage, where the house itself became a character. Sitting just feet away from the actors, the audience felt the intimacy not only of the actors' work but also of references to New London life.New York's 55,000-square-foot Park Avenue Armory drill hall functioned as another kind of actor in Richard Jones's transfer of his London production of The Hairy Ape. With the “gritty and charismatic” Bobby Cannavale leading the ensemble as Yank, Ryder Thornton tells us, the production was significantly restaged to take advantage of the site-specific space. In contrast to the expansive Armory, the Irish Rep's tiny theater—not unlike the original Provincetown Playhouse on Macdougal Street—gave their revival of The Emperor Jones intimacy, demonstrating “that O'Neill is once again the playwright for another new American century, unmasking the appetites and transgressions that lie beneath the dream of empire,” as Kurt Eisen writes.Two deconstructed productions of O'Neill's dramas showed the desire to make new art and innovate, much as O'Neill turned away from the theater of his father. In an evening of one-acts (Recklessness and Now I Ask You) entitled O'Neill (Unexpected), the Metropolitan Theater Company subverted genre conventions, Zander Brietzke observes, playing the tragic Recklessness as comedy and Now I Ask You—O'Neill's only comedy other than Ah, Wilderness!—as tragedy. And Kurt Eisen describes the experimental nature of the Brooklyn-based Target Margin Theater in its fracturing of The Iceman Cometh under the title The Iceman Lab, in which different directors each took on one of the play's four acts.Whether deconstructing O'Neill's dramas with postmodern adaptations, enmeshing O'Neill's biography into the production, or casting Broadway stars in award-winning revivals, the slate of productions reviewed here reveals a need to wrestle with the challenges in front of us. We cannot afford to be crushed like Yank in a gorilla's cage, or be caged by the claustrophobic trauma of dysfunctional families. And we cannot afford to be complicit with despotic rulers. In this way, for our current moment, O'Neill is indeed unexpectedly relevant.

A footnote in history: Irving’s 1876 Othello

When developing a model for the functioning of costume in a theatrical performance, it is important to identify how the visual appearance of characters can help cement a successful production, by providing a place where the actors’ and characters’ bodies meet and are brought into harmony before an audience. Sometimes, however, the best places to test such a model, and therefore the performances most worthy of study, are not those where the production has been a rousing success but those in which the paradigm has not functioned correctly, resulting in a less successful occasion. In the study of historical theatre productions, such events often result in the production subsequently being denied a place in the visual and historical record of the actor and theatre involved, relegated to a footnote in their histories. This article takes as its starting point the premise, particularly relevant to the Shakespearean canon in British theatre, that an important element in an audience’s interaction with visual elements of a theatrical production, and especially the critical response, is the influence of prior expectation. Therefore, a necessary condition for the success of costume in such a context is not simply the functioning of dress within the performance moment but its harmony with the aesthetic expectations of audiences. In this respect, Othello, produced at the Lyceum Theatre in 1876 with soon-to-be actor-manager Henry Irving in the title role, provided a cautionary tale for an actor who eschewed the aesthetic expectations of contemporary audiences and a lesson in the influence of the visual on critical opinion that illuminates some of the pitfalls of theatrical costume design.

ОРГАНІЗАЦІЯ САМОСТІЙНОЇ РОБОТИ СТУДЕНТІВ НА КАФЕДРІ ВНУТРІШНЬОЇ МЕДИЦИНИ ДНІПРОВСЬКОГО МЕДИЧНОГО ІНСТИТУТУ ТРАДИЦІЙНОЇ І НЕТРАДИЦІЙНОЇ МЕДИЦИНИ

Мета дослідження – визначення основних напрямів покращення та удосконалення навчального процесу зі студентами з дисципліни “неврологія”.Матеріали та методи дослідження. З урахуванням провідної ролі самостійної роботи студентів під час засвоєння знань і умінь з неврології були розглянуті та вивчені робочі програми і методичні розробки до практичних занять.Результати й обговорення. Структура навчального процесу неврологічної дисципліни предметно інтегрована й орієнтована на дотримання логічної послідовності викладання та розділена на відповідні модулі підготовки. У новій Типовій навчальній програмі питома вага належить самостійній роботі студентів. У навчальному процесі використовуються два види самостійної роботи студентів (СРС), такі, як: аудиторні СРС, що виконуються на навчальних заняттях під безпосереднім керівництвом викладача й за його завданням; позааудиторна СРС, яка виконується в позааудиторний час за завданням і при методичному керівництві викладача, але без його безпосередньої участі, або ж при частковій безпосередній участі викладача при головній ролі виконавця-студента, – значно допомагає активізувати самопідготовку в засвоєнні знань з дисципліни.Висновки. Самостійна робота студентів – важлива складова освітнього процесу, що індивідуалізує діяльність кожного студента і може розглядатися одночасно і як засіб вдосконалення його творчої індивідуальності. Поліпшення самостійної роботи направлено на вдосконалення навчального процесу, його оптимізацію та інтенсифікацію, підвищення якості навчання, активізацію навчально-пізнавальної діяльності студентів та зниження аудиторного навантаження.

Engaging with Dementia: Moral Experiments in Art and Friendship

The box-office as well as critical success of the 2014 major motion picture Still Alice, starring Julianne Moore in the title role and based on the bestselling novel of the same name by the Harvard-trained neuroscientist Lisa Genova (Still Alice. Simon & Schuster, New York, 2009), marked an important moment in public cultural representations of people with dementia. Still Alice tells the story of Alice Howland, an eminent scientist whose increasing memory lapses are eventually diagnosed as early-onset Alzheimer's, and chronicles the transformations in her family relationships as her husband and three children respond to her decline in different ways. Alice's husband, her son, and her older daughter all respond by turning toward science, while her younger daughter Lydia seeks to engage her mother as she is now, and turns toward art and relationships. Taking Still Alice and the figure of Lydia as an entry point, I discuss arts-focused efforts to improve the lives of people with dementia, and draw upon ongoing interview-based research on the topic of dementia and friendship, to offer an account of some of the ways that people I have spoken with are actively experimenting with art and with relationships in the face of dementia. I argue that these efforts can be understood as "moral experiements," in the sense articulated by Cheryl Mattingly (Moral Laboratories: Family Peril and the Struggle for a Good Life. University of California Press, Berkeley, 2014). Although Lydia is a fictional character, her response to Alice's dementia points toward the kinds of moral experimentation that are in fact possible, and quietly being practiced, by ordinary people every day.

Opera Acts: Singers and Performance in the Late Nineteenth Century by Karen Henson

Reviewed by: Opera Acts: Singers and Performance in the Late Nineteenth Century by Karen Henson James P. Cassaro Opera Acts: Singers and Performance in the Late Nineteenth Century. By Karen Henson. (Cambridge Studies in Opera.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. [xvi, 264 p. ISBN 9781107004269 (hardcover). $102.00; (e-book). $79.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index. Opera has for some time now provided fertile ground upon which varied and multivalent approaches have been used, resulting in a dizzying array of provocative readings of the artform's cultural, sociological, and gendered force. When you think there are no more ways of looking at a blackbird, along comes a study that convinces you otherwise. Such is the case with Karen Henson's Opera Acts: Singers and Performance in the Late Nineteenth Century. Part of the Cambridge Studies in Opera series, this book is a persuasive narrative that focuses on a generation of singers in the last three decades of the nineteenth century, plotting their interactions with composers—in particular, Giuseppe Verdi, Georges Bizet, and Jules Massenet—and their impact on the creation of opera and operatic style. In the book's introduction, Henson sets out the methodology for her study, noting that "by the late nineteenth century singers were no longer creators but rather intermediaries, executants, faithful (or disloyal) interpreters" (p. 3), and invoking Verdi's opinion that this generation of singers "specialized in 'not singing'" (p. 4). Central to Henson's study is an understanding of the term physiognomy, a descriptive word, employed quite actively by French critics in the early-nineteenth century, referring to facial features or physical expression that are indicative of character. This is not to be confused with physiology, the science of vocal technique and the mechanics of singing. The shift of emphasis from the beauty of the voice—bel canto—to the visual—i.e. not purely the vocal—informed both singers and audiences about a character's particular motives and relation to others around them. Through this lens, Henson devotes four in-depth chapters to the fin-de-siècle singers Victor Maurel (1848–1923), Célestine Galli-Marié (1837/40–1905), Sibyl Sanderson (1865–1903), and Jean de Reszke (1850–1925). In the concluding chapter, Henson offers shorter evaluations of eight additional singers: Emma Calvé (1858–1942), Victor Capoul (1839–1924), Jean-Baptiste Fauré (1830–1914), Marie Heilbron (1849/51–1886), Paul Lhérie (1844–1937), Paola Marié (1851–1920), Edouard de Reszke (1853–1917), and Josephine de Reszke (1855–1891). The author devotes chapter 1 to the relationship between Verdi and the French baritone Victor Maurel, who created the role of Iago in Otello in 1887 as well as the title role in Falstaff in 1893. In the 1870s, Verdi began to take a much more strident approach to the authority of the composer, limiting the influence of singers and other personnel on an opera's production. In this approach, Verdi composed not with a [End Page 76] particular performer in mind, as he had earlier in his career, but for his pleasure, a stance that made him "indifferent to and supremely in control of performance" (p. 20). Rather than focusing on the singer as the motivating drive of the operatic experience, his emphasis shifted toward the "work" as a concept. Henson characterizes this move as an "anti-performing posture"—a distancing by late-nineteenth-century composers from the singer and from the "very idea of performance" (p. 20). Although Henson uses this concept as the basis for her argument, she and other scholars (James Hepokoski, in particular) note that it was not as rigid in practice as it was in theory. She argues that a distinctive feature of this period was the coexistence of an "anti-performing posture and a more performer-oriented reality" (p. 21). Maurel, for Henson, is a prime example of this coexistence. In order to provide a fuller understanding of the singer, Henson looks at Maurel's other (non-operatic) pursuits, including teaching, directing, writing, and publishing. In a number of his writings, Maurel openly engaged with and criticized Verdi. Ultimately these "extra-vocal" activities led to the composer "distancing himself from what he perceived as their excessive...

David Bowie is… L’homme qui venait d’ailleurs

As a contribution to the symposium on Cinema and Psychiatry, the author proposes to question the paradigm of the humanoid – here, an extra-terrestrial being. How strangeness, associated with difference and furthermore with psychopathology, especially in the psychoses, can be grasped through their representation in cinema? Living through moments of depersonalization and derealisation, Thomas Jerome Newton alias David Bowie in the title role of Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth (1974) is torn by dilemma – his irreductible strangeness is due to two irreconcilable and incompatible worlds – his planet of origin, Anthea and the Earth he fell to.

Signing Shakespeare: Staging American Sign Language in Cymbeline

By casting Deaf actor Howie Seago in the title role of Cymbeline (2013), the Oregon Shakespeare Festival offered playgoers new ways to see Shakespearean scripts and consider theatrical embodiment. The company’s 2013 bilingual production – presented in American Sign Language and spoken English – staged American Sign Language as a vehicle of British empire and military dominance. Deaf identity emerges as central to the play’s multinational consolidation. This article considers the production’s linguistic choices and challenges to audism: the notion that people are superior based on their ability to hear (or behave as if they do). Through a detailed overview of this Cymbeline ’s linguistic choices, overseen by Monique Holt, this piece highlights the production’s indebtedness to Deaf culture and contributions to anti-audist performance practices.

Some Japanese Shakespeare Productions in 2014-15

This essay focuses on some Shakespeare productions in Japan during 2014 and 2015. One is a Bunraku version of Falstaff, for which the writer himself wrote the script. It is an amalgamation of scenes from The Merry Wives of Windsor and those from Henry IV. It was highly reputed and its stage design was awarded a 2014 Yomiuri Theatre Award. Another is a production of Much Ado about Nothing produced by the writer himself in a theatre-in-the-round in his new translation. Another is a production of Macbeth arranged and directed by Mansai Nomura the Kyogen performer. All the characters besides Macbeth and Lady Macbeth were performed by the three witches, suggesting that the whole illusion was produced by the witches. It was highly acclaimed worldwide. Another is a production of Hamlet directed by Yukio Ninagawa, with Tatsuya Fujiwara in the title role. It was brought to the Barbican theatre. There were also many other Shakespeare productions to commemorate the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth.

Lear by Aribert Reimann, and: King Lear by Aulis Sallinen (review)

Reviewed by: Learby Aribert Reimann, and: King Learby Aulis Sallinen John Holland Aribert Reimann. Lear. DVD. Simone Young / Philharmoniker Hamburg and Chorus of Staatsoper Hamburg. With Bo Skovhus, Katja Pieweck, Hellen Kwon, Siobhan Stagg, Andrew Watts. Halle/Saale, Germany: ArtHaus Musik, 2015. 109063. $29.99. Aulis Sallinen. King Lear. DVD. Okko Kamu / Orchestra and Chorus of Finnish National Opera. With Matti Salminen, Taina Piira, Satu Vihavainen, Lilli Paasikivi, Jorma Hynninen. Helsinki: Ondine, 2015. ODV4010. $29.99. Of all the operas which never moved beyond the planning stage, Giuseppe Verdi’s King Learwill probably head anyone’s list as our greatest loss. Except for a forgotten work performed in 1937 by an obscure Italian composer with close ties to the Fascist party, no one seems to have taken on Shakespeare’s monumental tragedy until the last quarter of the 20 thcentury, when two composers of international reputation took it on – Aribert Reimann in 1978, and Aulis Sallinen in 2000. Reimann’s Learwas written for Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and first performed in Munich. Since that time it has received approximately thirty productions around the world, possibly unique for a post–World War II opera. The reason, however, is clear: Reimann’s score shows a dramatic sensitivity which is lacking in so many contemporary operas, and the title role is an outstanding vehicle for a star baritone. The dense orchestral textures are chosen carefully for each character and situation. The [End Page 598]music rages violently for such “bad” characters as Goneril, Regan, and Edmund, as well as the storm scene, yet the well-intentioned characters Edgar, Cordelia, and Gloucester are given music that is gentle and eloquent. Lear himself fits into both worlds but his final mad scene is as heartbreaking as anything in opera. The performance presented here was filmed at the Hamburg State Opera in 2014, and features Bo Skovhus in the title role. Skovhus is one of the top singing actors of our time, and he is in full command of the role. The rest of the cast rises to his level musically and frequently dramatically. Special mention must go to Andrew Watts as Edgar, whose role requires him to move from a traditional lyric tenor up into a vibrant countertenor head voice, a shift that he handles admirably. Siobhan Stagg is a moving Cordelia, and the other sisters are suitably nasty in their more dramatic soprano music. Stage director Karoline Gruber presents the work in modern dress on an abstract revolving set, respecting the text but adding a few touches such as the Fool lingering on stage for most of the opera, sometimes upstaging the principle action as he does in the final scene (the camera shifting focus to him does not help). While Reimann’s operas tend to be based on literary classics and preserve the shape and intentions of their sources, Sallinen’s operas are much more dramatically abstract, and in fact King Lear(his sixth) is the first to be based on a traditional drama. In writing his own libretto, Sallinen has said that he wanted to remove many of the purely narrative scenes and focus instead on the more poetical passages. As a result, several important scenes, such as the blinding of Gloucester, are omitted and merely described later by a Greek chorus of sorts. He has also eliminated the role of Kent entirely. The end result is less of a faithful representation of Shakespeare’s play than a free interpretation of some of its themes. The performance represented here was filmed in Helsinki in 2002, two years after the premiere, and with one or two exceptions, features the original cast, all of whom have worked with Sallinen previously. Bass Matti Salminen in the title role can only be described as monumental. If his is not the subtlest dramatic performance, he clearly establishes himself as the power center around which everyone else revolves. Jorma Hynninen as Gloucester gives the most thoughtful performance and is genuinely moving. The more villainous characters come across as comic grotesques although Jorma Silvasti as Edmund works the hardest to make his character less of a stereotype. Musically, cast and conductor are in full command...

Barbara Hannigan: Concert Documentary by Barbara Hannigan, and: Lulu by Alban Berg (review)

This semiannual column presents reviews of significant video releases of interest to the field of music and to music libraries, as well as occasionally providing review essays. All genres of music in all video formats will be covered, with a preference given to those in DVD. All Web sites accessed 30 September 2015. Barbara Hannigan: Concert Documentary. DVD. Barbara Hannigan / Mahler Chamber Orchestra. Directed by Michael Beyer and Barbara Seiler. [Leipzig]: Accentus Music, 2014. ACC20327. $24.99. Alban Berg. Lulu. DVD. Paul Daniel / Orchestre Symphonique de la Monnaie. Directed by Krzysztof Warlikowski. With Barbara Hannigan, Natascha Petrinsky, Frances Bourne, Tom Randale, Dietrich Henschel, Charles Workman, Pavlo Hunka, Ivan Ludlow, et al. [Paris]: BelAir Classiques, 2014. BAC109. $29.99. Known for her vocal prowess and remarkable musicianship, Canadian coloratura soprano Barbara Hannigan demonstrates, in these two DVDs, that she is as comfortable performing Ligeti's works as Mozart arias, but also just as comfortable conducting an orchestra as she is performing daring renditions of Lulu, on pointe, or Mysteries of the Macabre. The Concert Documentary DVD comes out of the 2014 Lucerne Festival and features the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. The program includes: Gioachino Rossini's Overture to La scala di seta; Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Vado, ma dove? O Dei!, Un moto di gioia, and Misera, dove son?; Gabriel Faure's Pelleas et Melisande, op. 80; and Gyorgi Ligeti's Concert Romanesc and Mysteries of the Macabre. The 2014 release of Lulu was filmed during the 19 and 26 October 2012 performances of the opera at La Monnaie in Brussels, under the direction of Krzystof Warlikowski and baton of Paul Daniel, featuring Hannigan in the title role. Hannigan's performance of Ligeti's Mysteries of the Macabre is the highlight of the Concert Documentary DVD. Ligeti's Mysteries, three arias from his opera Grand Macabre (1974-77/96), was prepared for soprano and piano in 1992 by the composer and arranged by Elgar Howarth. Hannigan has made a name for herself with her twist on Mysteries, documented on this DVD by her experience as conductor, vocalist, and actress. The program as a whole highlights Hannigan's vocal color and agility, but her Ligeti is a must see for vocalists or audiences interested in a performance representing the highest understanding of the intimate details of this masterpiece of twentieth-century music. This DVD offers an important look at what it means to be a versatile musician; Hannigan excels in conducting Ligeti's littleperformed Concert Romanesc (1951/rev. 1996) along with performing and conducting Faure, Mozart, and Rossini. For those who like to get to know performing artists, the documentary portion of the DVD, I'm a creative animal, provides footage of Hannigan discussing her background; views of her as a working, practicing, and a teaching musician; and scenes from her rehearsals at the 2014 Lucerne Festival as a conductor and as she prepared to perform Unsuk Chin's Le Silence des Sirenes in the same summer. …

Working on the role –Richard III

Working on the role –Richard III The author describes the contexts for working on the title role of Shakespeares Richard III. He points to specific stages in working on the role: familiarising oneself with the original text and associated literature (research), creating the character (concealing intentions, plans and emotions from other characters in the play, the characters internal struggle, perceiving psychological truths); developing relationships with the director and other actors; the use of scenography, costumes, lighting and music to create characters for the stage, considering the meaning of translation and rapport with the audience.

Searching for the Composer's Role in Peter Eötvös' First Creative Period (1963–1989)

SEARCHING FOR THE COMPOSER’S ROLE IN PETER EÖTVÖS’ FIRST CREATIVE PERIOD (1963–1989)* ANNA DALOS IN DEINER ROLLE LACHT DIE KUNST SICH SELBST AUS.” This quotation is taken from Peter Eötvös’s Radames of 1975.1 It is how the German theater director instructs the singer of the double figure Aida and Radames using long German philosophical and methodological explanations to facilitate interpretation. The sentence has symbolic significance for all who try to understand the first creative period of Eötvös’s life as a composer. One can even say that every word of the quotation can be understood as a key idea of the works written by him before 1990. His compositions aim at interpreting the concept of art —“Kunst” as the Germans would emphatically call it—playing with such means as humor and self-irony, and querying constantly the artist’s role in the creation of works of art. Eötvös’s chamber opera demonstrates almost didactically the impossibility of the development of artists and arts. Such development is not only hindered by the double gender of the title role (Aida and Radames in one person), but made unviable by the despotism of other “ 94 Perspectives of New Music artists involved in the production of a performance. Theatrical functioning kills the chance of the consummation of art. The same parable manifests itself in Harakiri. There is always something that disturbs the reception and the performance of the ritual: the translator of the Japanese text deprives the ritual of its artistic character and desecrates it at the same time. Peter Eötvös emphasized in an interview that Harakiri represents the artist and the imitating dilettante.2 Dilettantism undoubtedly plays a significant role in destroying art; Eötvös’s statement is, however, misleading. Eötvös rather questions the possibility of art today. Adorno’s oft cited and misinterpreted statement—after Auschwitz poetry could no longer be written—shouldn’t be brought into conjunction with Eötvös’s self-related question. It rather refers to his own music and probes into the question whether he is able to create works of art at all, and if so, what does a work of art mean in reality. Eötvös’s compositions represent the search for ways and means after the loss of artistic innocence, and are in this sense exceptionally reflective works. As a composer, he followed an absolutely different path from his Hungarian colleagues. In his case the period of searching for the proper way, for finding himself—moreover, for the composer’s role in this new artistic era—lasted long. My study aims at pointing out the context and the background of this very personal experience. Little is known about Eötvös’s composition studies at the Budapest Academy of Music. He started studying at the Academy aged fourteen, first as a student of János Viski, later of Ferenc Szabó.3 Though Eötvös is willing to give interviews, he is reticent about his lessons with the two noted professors. The Kodály pupil Szabó, who was a convinced communist and a leading figure of Hungarian musical life between 1947 and 1956,4 retired from public life after the uprising in October 1956 and only kept his post of teacher of composition. Unfortunately he was not really successful in his capacity as a teacher, particularly when compared with his fellow professor, Ferenc Farkas. Szabó’s music is characterized by the light neo-classicism of the thirties. It seems that Eötvös cannot have learned anything from him. This is the reason why the young composer turned to other sources of inspiration: film music and incidental music for the stage.5 His first known composition, Solitude, was written in 1956 for children’s choir and reflects the young boy’s proficiency in the traditional Kodályian way of thinking. Composed five years later, the composition Kozmosz shows a change in the direction of his interests. The work of the seventeen-year-old composer is a naive, almost unreflective piece in which he documents Gagarin’s space flight and Searching for the Composer’s Role in...

“Let me twine / Mine arms about that body”: The Queerness of Coriolanus and Recent British Stage Productions

“Let me twine / Mine arms about that body”:The Queerness of Coriolanus and Recent British Stage Productions Michael D. Friedman Coriolanus is queer. I mean to assert, by this statement, that Shakespeare’s play portrays masculine erotic desire in a way that defies traditional categories of sexual identity.1 The play not only challenges heteronormativity by offering several examples of homoerotically-charged dialogue between male characters, but it also contests homosexual identification by including declarations of heterosexual desire by the same male figures.2 The full erotic natures of Caius Martius and Aufidius cannot be confined within the strict parameters of conventional hetero- or homo-sexuality, and yet the stage history of the play, since the mid-twentieth century, reveals repeated attempts to fix what Shakespeare has portrayed as fluid; to stamp as either gay or straight a wellspring of eroticism that defies stability and binary classification. To illustrate this point, I will draw upon material from six British stage productions of Coriolanus that appeared after 1958, when, as James C. Bulman notes, Britain’s Lord Chamberlain relaxed his veto upon the discussion of homosexuality on stage (39). Three of these productions are connected by their casts, as well as by their treatments of male sexual desire. Tyrone Guthrie’s staging at the Nottingham Playhouse in 1963–64 has been generally acknowledged as the first major production to incorporate a homosexual bond between Coriolanus, played by John Neville, and Aufidius, depicted by a young Ian McKellen. Two decades later, McKellen graduated to the title role in Peter Hall’s 1984 production at the National Theatre, which featured Greg Hicks as Aufidius. Their performance incorporated various homoerotic elements, but it stopped short of depicting the two men as homosexuals. Hicks then ascended [End Page 395] to the part of the Roman general opposite Chuk Iwuji as his Volscian nemesis in David Farr’s 2002 RSC production. In this version, Coriolanus did not display a palpable sexual attraction towards his enemy, and all of the production’s homoeroticism emanated solely from Aufidius. The three remaining productions that I will examine here share no cast members, but they do correspond to individual examples within the first set of performances in their attitudes toward the representation of male sexuality. Like Tyrone Guthrie, Gregory Doran, in his 2007 RSC production, depticted Martius and Aufidius as homosexual lovers. Josie Rourke, whose Donmar Warehouse production, which opened in December of 2013 and was broadcast to cinemas around the world by NT Live in early 2014, emulated David Farr by portraying a one-sided eroticism between a homosexually-inclined Aufidius and a heterosexual Coriolanus. Finally, David Thacker’s 1994 RSC staging featured a mutually homoerotic relationship between the two foes that resembled the one in Peter Hall’s production, but Thacker’s version did not exhibit the same striving toward binary categorization of sexuality that is evident in interviews with McKellen and Hicks about their rehearsal process ten years earlier. In fact, by representing the erotic relationship between Coriolanus and Aufidius in an intentionally ambiguous manner, Thacker’s production, among those examined in this essay, comes closest to capturing the queerness of Coriolanus. Before Tyrone Guthrie directed Coriolanus, he developed a reading of the play based on now-discredited psychoanalytic theories of the origins of homosexuality, an interpretation that he later embodied upon the stage. As R. B. Parker observes, “Extrapolating from Freud’s connection between overmothering and the narcissistic idealization of other men, Tyrone Guthrie concentrated his […] production at the Nottingham Playhouse on a homosexual attraction between Martius […] and Aufidius (126). In an essay entitled “On Producing ‘Coriolanus’” published in the Laurel Shakespeare edition of the play (1962), Guthrie seized upon Coriolanus’s obsession with Volumnia as the underlying cause of his eroticized bond with his Volscian enemy. As Ian McKellen recalls, Guthrie gathered his cast together on the first day of rehearsals and presented this analysis of the play without revealing its author: “I’m going to read to you this introduction to an American edition of Coriolanus. I agree with every word of it.” This short essay concentrated on Coriolanus’s heroism, under-pinned or undermined by a mother-fixation. His archrival Aufidius was a...

FROM TEXT TO SCREEN: CELLULOID HELENS AND FEMALE STARDOM IN THE 1950s

This paper investigates the visual recreation of Helen in the medium of cinema by using as case studies two runaway productions of the 1950s:L'amante di Paridestarring Hedy Lamarr andHelen of Troywith Rosanna Podestà in the title role. Examination of features such as costumes, makeup and hairstyle shows that in the former film Helen's representation is informed by and seeks to capitalize on Lamarr's status as a queen of glamour, equating Greek royalty with Hollywood royalty. The analysis of the second film explores further the homology between ancient and modern celebrity on screen and in extra-cinematic discourses, and shows how Podestà's stardom was built on and remained anchored in Helen's iconicity.

Malononitrile: A Versatile Active Methylene Group

The title role of malononitrile in the development of Knoevenagel condensation of organic synthesis and their new findings are explored in this review. The active methylene group of malononitriles is very important attacking part in the heterocyclic conversions and also having a great potency towards several microbial and biological systems.

Malononitrile: A Versatile Active Methylene Group

The title role of malononitrile in the development of Knoevenagel condensation of organic synthesis and their new findings are explored in this review. The active methylene group of malononitriles is very important attacking part in the heterocyclic conversions and also having a great potency towards several microbial and biological systems.

The Walls around Us by Nova Ren Suma (review)

Reviewed by: The Walls around Us by Nova Ren Suma Deborah Stevenson, Editor Suma, Nova Ren The Walls around Us. Algonquin, 2015 319p ISBN 978-1-61620-372-6 $17.95 R* Gr. 9-12 At Aurora Hills Secure Juvenile Detention Center, there’s Amber, in for manslaughter (an abusive stepfather died in a slightly too convenient car fire), one of the forty-two the institution can contain. Outside, there’s eighteen-year-old Violet, dancing the title role of the Firebird and headed toward Juilliard. Between them there is Ori, Violet’s long-time best friend and supremely talented fellow dancer; after a horrific crime behind the ballet school, Ori was sent to Aurora Hills and became Amber’s cellmate. As Amber’s and Violet’s narrations alternate, it becomes clear that something strange and supernatural happened—or is happening—at Aurora Hills that’s bringing the two stories together, and that there’s more to the terrible event three years ago than Violet’s admitting. Suma craftily sets the two stories against one another, moving between Violet’s fiercely grounded account and Amber’s hauntingly destabilized one, enticing readers to figure out how the pieces go together; it’s clear right from the opening that something is off-kilter at Aurora Hills, so the uncertainty is gratifyingly disturbing. Hints of the truth about the crime intensify in Violet’s narrative but remain oblique (“You can’t ever blame someone for putting herself first,” she thinks coolly), but surprises still remain right until the end. Readers who loved the author’s spooky but redemptive 17 & Gone (BCCB 3/13) and who are looking for something a little more vengeful will curl up happily with this. Copyright © 2015 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Masking and Unmasking in Verdi's Falstaff: (Meta)Theatrical Tour de Force in L'Opéra de Tours

Gilles Bouillon's tour de force mise en scène of Verdi's opera Falstaff moves on the premise of ‘ Tutti gabàtti!’ (‘We are all fools’), heightened by the stage presence of a large reproduction of Ensor aux masques to underscore the idea of ‘the hypocritical face behind the mask’. The director emphasised theatrical naturalism to create living space and conceptual abstraction to engender an association of ideas. Given that in Falstaff, as Verdi affirmed, the impact is on notes and words, Bouillon enabled the soloists to function simultaneously as actors. Under Bouillon's direction, Falstaff turned out as the title role should be in performance: ‘rounded but never weighty’.

Embodied Femmes Fatales: Performing Judith and Salomé on the Modernist German Stage

In Max Reinhardt’s theater productions of Wilde’s Salome (1902–03) and Hebbel’s Judith (1909–10), the lead actresses, Gertrud Eysoldt and Tilla Durieux, presented embodied femmes fatales on the stage. This article examines how these performances both enacted and contested the patriarchal, antifeminist paradigms central to the femme fatale fantasy. In the dynamic dramaturgical matrix of the modernist theater—including the author and text, director, production and design elements, performers, and viewers—the actress in the title role asserted a substantial degree of authority over her individual part and in the play as a whole. Analysis of these performances thus reveals some of the ways in which women actively intervened in the production and reception of the femme fatale in the early twentieth century and uncovers new dimensions in the conflicted feminist potential of the figure that are unique to the dramatic theater.