"The closure of the Dunlop Arts Gallery, a small but vibrant gallery located in the Regina Public Library, has sent waves of shock and dismay through the national visual-arts community."(Globe & Mail | Entertainment | Fans lament closure of Regina gallery)

"Citing slow ticket sales, the Art Gallery of Ontario has closed its exhibit of works by Canadian artists, including the Group of Seven, until 2007. The cost-cutting move comes in response to a decline in revenue, a gallery spokesperson said. "(CBC Arts News | AGO closes Canadian exhibit )

:: note :: . . . the times . . .

"Nigel Jamieson: I think Kabuki actually isn't distancing at all, I think it's incredibly emotive theatre. I saw this woman who has to murder her son and she lays out all of the gestures, these incredibly slow gestures of all the tools she's going to have to do it by, and it's incredibly powerful. And I think the same with Mnouchkine's work. When a moment of intense emotion has these actors who have got these puppet operators behind them you know in the way their bodies just soar up - when you have these incredible élan or lift, and I feel my heart and emotions kind of soaring with that, I think that is exquisite art, it's no different from a great painting."

"What we're looking for is a heightening of life; we have the everyday life around us, and all art needs to heighten that so we experience things for this brief period of time more strongly, and I think that's what Mnouchkine's about, that's what Asian theatre and certainly circus and Commedia dell'Arte and melodrama and all those western forms are also incredibly rich."

"Adrian Kiernander: Mnouchkine sums it up for me when she talks about western theatre, the naturalistic kind of western theatre as being about actors hiding their emotions, concealing them, and it's all terribly subtle, and she talks about real theatre, the kind of theatre where she uses forms based in Asia as a way of exposing what's happening, the emotions, the states, rather than trying to conceal them."(ABC Arts online | Performance/Features | Theatre du Soleil : The Flood Drummers)

:: note :: . . . Leaving Bacchae I question artifice & theater of magic & the spectacle of visual image & the possession of a wide vision of theatrical mediums . . . nothing of the Euripides greek tragedy . . . thesaurus of artifice = intrigue, machination, manoeuvre, stratagem, tactic, feint, ruse, trick, wile, deceit, duplicity, guile, trickery . . . maybe exploring artifice does direct attention to the play of Euripides . . . still uneasy I apply what Brook describes as the "acid test" for theater -

"When a performance is over what remains? Fun can be forgotten, but powerful emotion also disappears and good arguments lose their thread. When emotion and argument are harnessed to a wish from the audience to see more clearly into itself - then something in the mind burns. The event scorches on to the memory an outline, a taste, a trace, a smell - a picture. It is the play's central image that remains, its silhouette, and if the elements are highly blended this silhouette will be its meaning, this shape will be the essence of what it has to say."(Brook. The Empty Space 152)

. . . (silence) . . . still doubting I exercise & reflect on the epic story as metaphor . . . Dionysus&Pentheus / order&chaos / arrogance&passion . . . (silence) . . . finding myself silent I accept with deep resignation the Bacchae as is . . . content myself by rereading the above transciption of a discussion on the work of Mnouchkine and theater . . .

"WE HAVE THREE TYPES OF MEMORY. The first one is organic, which is the memory made of flesh and blood and the one administrated by our brain. The second is mineral, and in this sense mankind has known two kinds of mineral memory: millennia ago, this was the memory represented by clay tablets and obelisks, pretty well known in this country, on which people carved their texts. However, this second type is also the electronic memory of today's computers, based upon silicon. We have also known another kind of memory, the vegetal one, the one represented by the first papyruses, again well known in this country, and then on books, made of paper."(Al-Ahram Weekly | Books Supplement | Vegetal and mineral memory: The future of books | Umberto Eco)

"Now we can understand the full meaning of Socrates' statement that virtue is knowledge. If a person knows what he is doing, then the life he makes for himself is one of the possible ways in which he could have lived, and so it defines by its actual character a conception of the good. If that conception of the good, which is thus implicit in his way of living, is a false conception, he is ignorant of the true good and his life is, in fact, a false choice. The virtuous man is the man whose life is in fact a choice of the true good, and since he is a conscious being he knows what he is doing; so that his life defines consciously the good as it really is. It is quite simply true from this point of view that virtuous action is knowledge of the good, or if you prefer it, of how to live properly. "(From The Philosopher, Volume LXXXVIII No. 1 Special History Issue | REASON IN ACTION | John McMurray )

the curse of MacBeth
a sword stuck in the grid
shards of glass fall shattering
freeze

"There may be value in learning to control distracting gestures and superfluous movement, but no player needs to strive to put themselves in to the music, because they are there anyway as the vessel through which the music passes."(Guardian Unlimited | Arts | Emotional rescues )

:: note :: . . . a superficial treatment to a complex & important issue . . . emotion is quite individual and deep and specific and alive . . . it is a rich source of energy . . . sometimes it is considered a pollutant . . . transformation into action . . .

criteria:
- the text is embodied & automatic
- the voice is physically supported
- an obstacle is encountered
- the work takes a shape through active listening
- an act of imaginative intergrity allows full participation

"He bases his adaptation on the knowledge that our bodies instinctively crave order, that from infancy on we try to control the world's scale and proportions. That's why the dwarfs and giants of folk tales are powerful; likewise the fantasies of Jonathan Swift and Lewis Carroll. (Not to mention the centuries of false claims that because women were smaller than men, they must be inferior to them.)" (NYTimes | Theater Review | 'Mabou Mines Dollhouse': Fun-House Proportions Turn Dominance Upside Down)

"Walk into a performance of a work about James Joyce's daughter, whose erratic behavior led her to be institutionalized for almost half a century, and you expect something a bit impenetrable. You get it at ''Cara Lucia,'' a dense but intriguing theater piece by the Mabou Mines troupe having its world premiere at the Here Arts Center in the South Village."(NYTimes | Theater Review | James Joyce's Daughter, Scars and All)

The Bacchae recounts the eternal human struggle between chaos and order, liberty and restraint, passion and reason.... At the end of The Bacchae, we are left with the image of a mother attempting to reassemble the pieces of her son's body that she herself has ripped apart. We, the audience are also left with a job of reconstruction. How can we understand this strange and violent story? What can it mean to us now, more than 2000 years after it was written? The Bacchae is one of our great theatre rituals and, as with all rituals, there are not true spectators. We all participate.

Greek Drama Director: N. Cadger

"The best way to judge the effectiveness of a democracy is to measure how it allocates the goods of the land: Does the government protect the commonwealth on behalf of all the community members, or does it allow wealth and political clout to steal the commons from the people?"(RollingStone : National Affairs : Crimes Against Nature)

a young man learns of his fathers death as he plays the ghost of christmas present
a middle aged women enters the hospital to cut out her cervical cancer and questions the source of all the anger
an even younger girl cries because she couldn't say goodbye to her grandmother who in fits of dementia claimed to hate her granddaughter
hell bound on the narrow stairs of a fire exit
a thousand porcupines cry in the darkness

How was your Day?

Quicklinks:

Globe and Mail : entertainment : Floating on the resale market

Guardian Unlimited Online : arts : Star of stage and screen

Financial Times.com : Arts & Weekend : Ar, music & theater : Dance: Ricercar/William Forsythe

:: note :: . . . art and business . . . stage and film . . . dance and theatrical space . . .

"In his 2003 Massey lecture, award-winning author and scholar Thomas King looks at the breadth and depth of Native experience and imagination. Beginning with Native oral stories, King weaves his way through literature and history, religion and politics, popular culture and social protest, in an effort to make sense of North America[base ']s relationship with its Aboriginal peoples."(cbc : ideas : massey lectures : the truth about stories)

:: note :: . . . listen to a great story teller . . .

"Dan Macallair, the executive director of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice in San Francisco, said the suspension is indicative of a national trend toward zero tolerance in schools."

""We're punishing kids for things that we adults never would have been punished for when we were that age," he said. "If we try to criminalize every comment that adolescents made, all our kids would be locked up.""(JSOnline > Milwaukee Journal Sentinel > School suspends teen for rap lyric)

(via Tellio II who adds "Comment: Zero tolerance+no constitutional rights for students=fascism")

"For Currin is quite simply on a no-lose ticket (a good hiding to everything): Bad Painting with quality technique. Keep the theorists chattering and the buyers salivating. Conceptually, he adds nothing to near-century old Dadaism. He is a fashionable footnote to Picabia. And technically? It is here that one has to despair, because of what the warped prevailing taste for Currin says about actual sensibility for painting of the past. If sub-Rockwellism actually looks to taste makers and key educators to be on some kind of parity with the art from the raided image-bank of history, if old-master technique is merely an abstraction to be referenced, like a brand or celebrity's name knowingly dropped, then we are in trouble."(artcritical.com > Curryin' Favor by David Cohen)

"If judgement is imagined as the hot faucet in a sink, then at the very least it will leak as soon as the cold is turned on (cold being the raw, primitive act of seeing). And, as the "institutional definition" would have it, it is the act of being looked at as art that makes art art. Actually, that very question, "Is it art?", ubiquitous in the experience of much innovative art of the last century, places ambiguity center-stage in the appreciation of modern and contemporary art."(Art and Cognition > interdisciplines > Ambiguity and intention by David Cohen)

Currin's thanKsgiving (2003), a comedy of manners, takes a satiric shot at all things American, depicting the national holiday of overfull plates and bellies as one of desperation.

have watched the geese leave for a month now but can trace their journy . . .

"Two key areas of the brain appear to respond to the pain of rejection in the same way as physical pain, a UCLA-led team of psychologists reports."

""While everyone accepts that physical pain is real, people are tempted to think that social pain is just in their heads," said Matthew D. Lieberman, one of the paper's three authors (with Kipling D. Williams and Naomi I. Eisenberger, study's lead author). "But physical and social pain may be more similar than we realized.""(context weblog : rejection affects human brain in same way as physical pain)

:: note :: . . . as an educator in contact everyday with youth this observation is validated each and every moment . . . social connection is a deep human need we so often ignore & neglect . . .

"If ye break faith with us who die. We shall not sleep"(Colonel John McCrae)

"Commenting on the initial success of Pather Panchali and Aparajito, Ray declared in 1958: "Personally I have been lucky with my first two films, but what is really important and exciting is not the immediate gain, but the ultimate vindication of the belief that I hold dearest as an artist: art wedded to truth must, in the end, have its rewards.""(WorldSocialistWebSite : Arts Review : Film Festivals : "Art wedded to truth must, in the end, have its rewards")

:: note :: . . . saw The Apu Trilogy, written and directed by Satyajit Ray this weekend . . . dvd just released . . . Pather Panchali (Song of the Road) , the first of the trilogy is truly remarkable . . . Ray with a precise eye allows the story to flow . . . each moment developes on its own terms the director follows doesn't manipulate . . . the story of each moment is determined by the impulse of the action or as Ray states in his essay "Making Films" in our films, their films : "the exploration of the truth of human behaviour and the revelation of that truth through the medium of actors."

"Turning down literary awards isn't easy. Writers may consider such gestures, but usually decide against, or are dissuaded by friends who say: "At least you forced the cretins to recognize real talent for once," or "You need the money." In Mr. Sonallah's case, it was $16,000 (U.S.) and he is an artist who never took a state arts job as a form of subsidy. In his speech, he said, "We don't have theatre, cinema, scientific research or education any more. We only have festivals, conferences and bins of lies.""(Rabble News > columnists > Comparing acts of dissent >by Rick Salutin)

:: note :: . . . the curse of festivals . . .

(The British Museum > Medicine Man > Body under attack)

"Ideologies are deadly when they are based on hatred. Growing up in the 1970s in Seoul, I was taught that North Koreans were our archenemy, all of them red devils with horns. Everyone at school had to participate in anti-Communism slogan and poster contests, and girls jumped rope to a song that went, "Let's kill off those Commies. / It's about time." I imagine North Korean children were taught to see the South in the same way."

"I hope I know better now, but the truth is, I really don't know how to regard North Korea and its people. Like most other South Koreans of my generation, I am stuck somewhere between that ridiculous, feverish hatred and familial sympathy, between the fear of North's nuclear threats and the burden that we need to confront this crisis in a sane, sensible way."

"Reading and translating the three short stories for this feature was, for me, the most intimate encounter I have had with North Korea, an experience that I hoped would allow me to get better acquainted with this unknowable other half. "(Words Without Borders > Asia > Ha-yun Jung How the Other Half Lives)

Robert Koch Gallery > Exhibitions > Jeff Brouws > Language in the Landscape

"Saskatchewan Arts Alliance asked our provincial political party leaders to articulate their position and measures they plan to establish to support the arts and culture sector. Of the registered provincial political parties written to, three responded to the questionnaire and the Saskatchewan Liberal Party provided its "Statement on Arts and Culture"." (Full Political Party Responses to Arts Sector Questionnaire : Saskatchewan Arts Alliance)

:: note :: . . . to the polls . . . am reminded of the phrase don't vote it only encourages them . . . but must . . . cynicism runs deep but not that deep . . .

"Declared unfit for human habitation, the "Zones of Exclusion" includes the towns of Pripyat (established in the 1970s to house workers) - and Chernobyl. "

"In May 2001, Robert Polidori photographed what was left behind in this dead zone. His richly detailed images move from the burned-out control room of Reactor 4 - where technicians staged the experiment that caused the disaster - to the unfinished apartment complexes, ransacked schools and abandoned nurseries that remain as evidence of all those people who once called Pripyat home."(Globalist PhotoGallery > Zones of Exclusion > Robert Polidori's Chernobyl)

"In teaching research writing, I begin with a bibliographic essay - a narratio of the chain of thought that a student must later insert their critique. I require that they avoid having a thesis until they understand the evidence. Then, as a thesis emerges into an argumentative paper, they must attract the attention of an audience (exordium), provide a logically consistent argument (argumentio), anticipate counter-arguments (refutatio), and suggest a course of action based on their thesis and the evidence. Writing first works to change ourselves, then it works to change others."(this Public Address > Pragmatic and Semantic Structures)

:: note :: . . . a wonderful clear statement . . .too many students suffer under pre-ordained structure . . . this emerging thesis is the work of creative energy . . .

Winter Sweat Lodge by Iryn

:: note :: . . . today was the last day of the summer lodge . . . four splashes of goodbye to a precious fall and four splashes to welcome winter . . . a Feast & Giveaway . . . the Long-Tailed Weasel, already white, scaled the tree behind the Lodge and flew gracefully after it's prey . . . many thanks and honour to the elders . . .