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Tempest by Synetic

March 1, 2013 by Steve Mentz 2 Comments

Without doubt, it was the wettest shipwreck scene I’ve ever seen, in my many years of seeing productions of The Tempest. Probably the best, too.

stormplaySynetic Theater’s game is Silent Shakespeare, no words spoken at all, though Stephano did hum a sea chanty at one point. I’ve heard about this company for a long time, and almost got tickets to a staging of Don Quixote a year or two ago — but I must admit it was the flooded stage that drew me down to DC.  It’s been a great short trip, with a couple of half-days in the Folger reading piscatorial verse, and a happily-timed jaunt over to Foggy Bottom to listen to Will Stockton say brilliant things about Romeo and Juliet. But let’s not kid ourselves: it was the water, 4″ of it all over the stage, that punched my ticket.

When I got to the theater in the basement of an office building in Crystal City, they handed me a poncho to take to my seat. I’m glad I put it on, though it didn’t really  keep me dry.

Liberated from the text, the Synetic production made some interesting decisions about narrative arc. They opened with the arrival of young Prospero and a swaddled infant Miranda on the isle, guided by spirits and music from a piano that spouted an arching waterfall from beneath its waterlogged keys. The piano, perhaps the source of Ariel’s power, was the only prop on stage beyond the water itself. Ariel played it, Ferdinand scrubbed it, Caliban jumped on top of it, and the young lovers first glimpsed each other through the waterfall beneath which Miranda was hiding. Music and water together.

The splashing started with a Gandalf-v-Saruman style fight scene between Prospero and Sycorax, in the course of which he wrested a staff from her and stubbled her with it while I and the other Splash Zoners got our first taste of the water. Sycorax and her son dressed in red body suits, Caliban’s sporting horns, but when he prodded his mother’s still form after she’d been laid low by our hero, the feel of his character — here and elsewhere — was more puppy than devil. As Prospero learned his way around the island, freeing Ariel from imprisonment and looking after soon-teenage Miranda, Caliban, having no choice, slowly warmed to his mother’s killer. Before the Italian ship arrived they were a happy-ish quartet, with girlish Miranda leaping around the watery stage with Caliban.

Caliban with the body of Sycorax

Caliban with the body of Sycorax

The play told its story through broad, playful physical movements set to music: a few fights such as the one between Prospero and Sycorax, a few magical light shows, lots of music, but the most compelling set-piece in the early going was the hide-and-seek game between Caliban and Miranda that circled round and round her distracted father. Watching them, you knew what was going to happen — the water-soaked bodies, jumping, rolling, and leaping really could only lead one place, even if you didn’t remember the play’s backstory — but still, watching the game shift by degrees from chase to catch to run away and finally all the way to sexual assault was sadly inevitable. It never became overtly violent, though Prospero did lock Caliban in his cell when he interrupted the game. But clearly something was wakening — and then the Italians came.

The restructured narrative meant that the shipwreck that opens Shakespeare’s play became a mid-production high point  for Synetic, with a disorganized chaos of new characters spilling and splashing their ways onto the stage, kicking water high into the air, miming maritime labor, and generally having a great time. I’m always disappointed with productions of the Tempest’s shipwreck — it’s my favorite scene anywhere in Shakespeare, but so hard to get right on stage. But this show, with no words and even no Boatswain, got to the scene’s disorderly heart. This kind of fracturing is what happens when ships break and bodies get wet. The old rules about weather and politics and fathers and magic and theater start to pull apart. “We split, we split, we split!” — as no one said during this production.

Prospero learns his magic

Prospero learns his magic

I won’t say that the show went downhill from there, but as the familiar scenes flowed by, the performances were great but never really got back to the intensity and high-jinx of the wreck. For me, at least, that was the slipper top. How do you beat immersion? (By this time I was thoroughly soaked and grinning.)

Some smart stage bits followed, including a touching scene in which Miranda shows up with a set of keys to unlock Caliban’s cell — is all forgiven? — but then drops them in the water when Ferdinand strolls by. It turns out that Caliban didn’t need the keys, because the cell wasn’t really locked. The scene set up the orphan’s flight into the arms of a wonderfully drunken and later cross-dressed Stephano.

There were some interesting changes in casting — both Trinculo and Antonia were played as women, which added sexual tension to the drunkards’ reunion and seductive force to the usurpation of Milan. The performance of Ariel by Don Istrate was brilliant, playful and ice-hard at the same time, shimmering in silver body paint.

Don Istrade as Ariel

Don Istrade as Ariel

Perhaps because we’d seen him young and alone, struggling to care for his infant and ambushed by Sycorax, this Prospero was unusually sympathetic and non-tyrannical. In the end, his drowning of book and  staff (no place to bury anything on this stage) was elegiac rather than terrifying. I thought about Ovid’s Medea, but didn’t really see much of her.

The magic book itself, which looked like nothing so much as a waterproof MacBook in one of those faux-folio cases, ended up in Caliban’s hands as the ship rowed away. He gazed into its luminous pages, a hopeful, wistful expression on his face. Did he see something? No. Then the lights went down quickly, leaving him alone in the dark.

A great, wet, exuberant show, with a touch of sadness at curtain. It’s amazing what water can do, even now that it’s become almost a stage cliche — though I’ve never seen anything as fully immersed as this show before. The run closes March 24, and it’s quite silly for me to even think about a second trip to DC in that time, especially since I’ll be back in early April for an eco-event at MEMSI. But it’s tempting.

If you’re in or near DC before then, go. And sit in the Splash Zone.

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The Suit at BAM

February 3, 2013 by Steve Mentz Leave a Comment

Walking out of the theater after this brilliant, unsettling show last Tuesday night, I didn’t know exactly what had happened. Ben Brantly’s Times review had prepared me for a play that “breaks your heart” with a light and musical touch, but not for the pleasurable disorientation I felt.

The minimalist set, deftly managed by Peter Brook with clothes racks and hangers, as well as intricate lighting and inventive music, presented a semi-abstract vision of the South African township Sophiatown, which was soon bulldozed after the events of the play. With moving parts and jury-rigged partitions, it resembled a transparent, open closet, a window into confined lives and imaginations. Th Suit

The play had opened with husband and wife, Philomen and Matilda, slouching against each other on chairs arranged into a threadbare marital bed. It ended in precisely the same place, despite the intervening discovery of the wife’s adultery, the husband’s insistance that as penance for her infidelity she care for the suit her fleeing lover left behind, and the husband’s final public exposure of the suit’s secret after she has invited local guests, and a few lucky audience members, into their home to hear her sing.

During the play I kept thinking about how the meanings of adultery expanded and tumbled over themselves as the play went on, from the thin edge of disbelief that cracked open the love we’d seen on Philemon’s face in the opening scene, to a political allegory of life under apartheid, to the slow emergence of Matilda from frustration into art as she joins a “cultural club” and allows herself to learn to sing. None of these schemes quite captured the play’s rich ambivalence, the semi-Beckettian combination of abstraction and human desperation. It didn’t matter so much what the suit meant, which of the many meanings the play would finally settle upon. We were watching lives entwined with not-quite-knowable symbols, and never knowing, never settling, seemed perfectly fine.

suit-articleInlineSometimes one side of the meaning-whirlpool appeared to surface by itself, The peak moment of political allegory came when the play’s narrator, played by Jared McNeill, sang Billie Holiday’s  brutal song of lynching in the American South, “Strange Fruit.” His piercing, pure voice, unadorned, spoke to the entanglement of emotions and repression.

But that piercing protest, while perhaps the most stunning of the half-dozen songs performed, seemed to me to have been a sideways move away from the human center of the play. The transatlantic shift to pre-Civil Rights America globalized the story, but most of our attention remained on Philemon and Tilly, their see-through house, and his refusal or inability to let go of the suit and its explosive memory.

The ending mystified me — and not just me, I asked around and others were confused too — so much that I had to google the original story, by Can Themba, to be sure that the sleeping wife wasn’t going to wake up after the applause stopped. The story related a tragedy, though I wasn’t sure of that when I walked out of the theater. Philemon’s compulsion to remember, to expose, to force the suit back into view, had killed his wife.

Is is a problem that I wasn’t sure what had happened in the moment? Or might this ambiguity represent one of the stranger, fuller, more deeply integrated combinations of tragic loss and comic endurance that I’ve seen in a while? I do like a tragicomedy, if given my choice.

I’m glad I caught this one during its brief trip to Brooklyn.

Filed Under: New York Theater, Uncategorized

Shakespeare’s Globalization

January 24, 2013 by Steve Mentz 1 Comment

Starting a new grad course this evening with the above title. I wonder if the students will be disappointed that there will be more globalization than Shakespeare? Antony and Cleopatra and The Tempest, among assorted other literary and historical texts. But tonight, we’re starting with Charles Mann’s 1493 and his explanation of what Alfred Crosby calls the “Columbian Exchange”; with some discussion about the different valences of the terms “anthropocene” (which seems to be catching) and “homogenocene” (which hasn’t, but may be more accurate, and maybe more threatening); and eventually with some gorgeous maps — which probably won’t show up all that well in the blog. First, Wright-Molyneux (1599):

Wright map compositeAnd, of course, Waldseemuller (1507):

Waldseemuller_map_in_color

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Three Nows for Temporal Thinking

January 18, 2013 by Steve Mentz Leave a Comment

This post has been hanging around half-finished since the periodization kerfluffle some time ago. I’ll post it now as a place-holder for more thinking about that slipperiest of temporal modifiers, “now.” As in, right now, exactly now, this particular time — but that just-spoken now is gone & then, not now anymore.

Here are three quick literary markers (hatches?) for thinking the now —

1. Iago’s “now, now, very now” — an erotic, off-stage and unforgettable time, never visible but always happening. Rounding out the familiar line — “An old black ram…” — leads now down so many pathways of human errancy: sex, race, animals, the struggle for dominance…

2. Hardy’s world historical “Now!” from “The Convergence of the Twain”: “Till the Spinner of the Years / Said “Now!” And each one hears, / And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.”

3. Borges’s polytemporal “now” from “The Garden of the Forking Paths”: “Then I reflected that everything happens to a man precisely, precisely now. Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen; countless men in the air, on the face of the earth and the sea, and all that really is happening is happening to me…” (Labyrinths 20)

 

Filed Under: Shakespeare, Uncategorized

The Weather, Kayak Morning, and Bataille’s Peak

January 11, 2013 by Steve Mentz Leave a Comment

Being sick in the early days of 2013 has me behind in January’s writing, syllabus-making, and other chores — but before it gets too late I wanted to put some notes in on a few of the good books I read in the second half of 2012.

Lisa Robertson, The Weather

The Weather

A book of experimental poetry that I bought at Powell’s in Portland on the suggestion of Dan Remein (I think), this is a smart & unsettled look at how the weather gets under our skin and into our consciousness. A few notable lines —

Lurid conditions are facts (6)

My purpose here is to advance into / the sense of the weather, the lesson of / the weather (24)

Every surface is ambitious; we excavate a non-existent era of the human (30)

The word double is written on our forehead (39)

It is too late to be simple (76).

Roger Rosenblatt, Kayak Morning: Reflections on Love, Grief, and Small Boats

A very different feel comes from Rosenblatt’s memoir about kayaking near his home in Quogue and thinking about the recent death of his 38-year old daughter. This formless memoir has some very deft moments, esp when he’s paddling and thinking about water, culture, family, mortality. Sometimes he says things I very much agree with, like this: “Too much is made of the value of plumbing the depths. The nice thing about kayaking is that you ride the surface” (55). Also: “words mixed with water lose their bite” (54).
Kayak morning

I found this one via my friend John Gillis, author of The Human Shore, a great new maritime history that I’ll blog about soon. He suggest it to me after reading Rosenblatt’s comments about water and the English language:

So many references. A loose cannon. A drifter. Sea legs. The English language, it seems, is water based. Other languages too, I guess. The world talks to itself from the sea, ship to shore. I recently learned that ‘rival’ comes from rivers, or streams, meaning someone on the opposite side of the same stream. (71)

In places this book seems oddly willing to traffic in its own intimacy, to sell its insights in a way that perhaps lessons their value. But in places the writing rests happy with the spaces left open, in between —

Water is groundless. It has no basis, like art. It is the answer to no one’s question. I love the feel of it. (104)

Allan Stoekl, Bataille’s Peak: Energy, Religion, and Postsustainability

 I found this one too late to sneak a reference into my PMLA essay, “After Sustainability,” but it’s a smart & lively excursus into what might come after “fossil fuel humanism” (xiv). Bataille’s counter-proposal is an ethics of excess, for which the central problem isn’t hoarding energy but dissipating its excess: “so too in the future we can posit sustainability as an unintended afteraffect of a politics of giving” (142). “Ecoreligion,” in Bataille’s terms, requires a “sacrificial relation between humans, animals, plans — the ecosystem,” as well as “the recognition of the relatively minor position of  humanity, finally, in the concentration and expenditure of the energy of the universe” 178). Or, to put it more starkly: “The human community’s physical survival (through sacrificial consumption) in this model is the fundamentally unplanned aftereffect of a sacred ‘communication’ with the animal (179). Bataille's Peak

Some parts of this seem unnecessarily abstract, though the contrast between the automobile as figure of modernity — “In the car we do not need a body” (184) — and the bicycle as post-modern challenge to that system — “The cyclists body is little more than an open wound” (192) — brings the focus directly back to the visible world. What Stoekl calls “a regime of eroticized recycling and bicycling” (193) seems very much worth thinking and rethinking.

Filed Under: Books, Uncategorized

103.61 miles

December 31, 2012 by Steve Mentz Leave a Comment

That’s my yearly total in the water, according to my flog (fitness log), courtesy of the US Master’s Swim Program. Probably more than I’ve swum since high school, I think.

Best month was June = 17.65 miles

Worst was September = 3.94

My Progress for Go The Distance 2012

Month Total Distance
Jan 6.45 miles (=11,350 yards, =10,378 meters)
Feb 12.02 miles (=21,150 yards, =19,340 meters)
Mar 6.42 miles (=11,300 yards, =10,333 meters)
Apr 8.75 miles (=15,400 yards, =14,082 meters)
May 15.28 miles (=26,900 yards, =24,597 meters)
Jun 17.65 miles (=31,072 yards, =28,412 meters)
Jul 7.36 miles (=12,950 yards, =11,841 meters)
Sep 3.94 miles (=6,930 yards, =6,337 meters)
Oct 7.90 miles (=13,900 yards, =12,710 meters)
Nov 7.73 miles (=13,600 yards, =12,436 meters)
Dec 10.11 miles (=17,800 yards, =16,276 meters)
Total 103.61 miles (=182,352 yards, =166,743 meters)

Other swimming highlights —

Best swimming hole was in the Peneda National Park in Portugal, courtesy of Luis Barros.

PGNP swimming hold

 

 

Best long-distance swim was 4.4 miles across the Chesapeake Bay in early June.

 

Next year I’m thinking about some of the NYC Swim events, including the Little Red Lighthouse 10 k or maybe the Governor’s Island swim.

Filed Under: Swimming, Uncategorized

Prominent View

November 28, 2012 by Steve Mentz Leave a Comment

Prominent View

 

For details on how NASA made this image of the sun, see here.

Filed Under: Uncategorized, Weather Pictures

The Roman Tragedies

November 19, 2012 by Steve Mentz 4 Comments

The genius started with Virgilia. Virgilia!

Coriolanus’s Press Conference

She was lounging onstage before the start, as we all tried to figure out how it would work. The stage at the BAM opera house was deep, wide, and busy, full of modular furniture, couches, tables, and at least a dozen large TV monitors. The audience started out seated, looking up at a huge screen above the stage with a gnomic Dylan phrase on it. We also watched a digital crawl that provided translations from the Dutch and other useful facts — 297 minutes to the death of Cleopatra! — for anyone who could see it. Later, when we (the audience) took the stage we stood or sat or craned our necks looking at the action, or taking a break to order at the bars backstage right or left. I asked for a rum and tonic while Coriolanus was dismembered 20 feet away. The stage also contained make up tables for the actors on one side, and public email/twitter terminals on the other side. It got crowded, as the night wore on.

Before the opening curtain

Virgilia started it, before I knew who she was. She sat on the couch as the play opened, staring up at the imposing face of Volumnia, praising her warlike son on the big screen. All the war scenes in Corioles were compressed into strobe lighting, so the first time we see the hero upon his return from the battlefield, he’s caught between mother and wife. His words give priority to his mighty mother over the wife he calls “my gracious silence,” but this performance punctuates Virgilia’s tears with lingering kisses. The deep physical pull between the lonely dragon and the upstaged wife — Virgilia cannot control her husband the way his mother can — activates the agon between sex and politics that finally explodes, almost five hours later, with Cleopatra. During the show I thought these two parts were played by the same actor, but now that I check the cast list, Janni Goslinga played Virgilia and Chris Nietvelt played Cleopatra. The two performances shared an explosive mix of eros and warplay that sits near the heart of director Ivo van Hove’s vision of politics.

Lonely Dragon

Van Hove’s notes call the political vision of his production of these three Roman Tragedies “action in public,” and here the decision to open the stage to the audience — not really a new innovation, as the Village Voice notes — represents not just avant-garde dramatic play but an experiment in seeing what “free action” can mean in practice. Van Hove claims that Shakespeare “shows that politics is made by people.” His set designer and long-time collaborator Jan Versweyveld writes that the set for these plays “transforms the theater into a political conference.” Their show immersed all of  us in political news, with the the digital crawl quoting headlines from Gaza and tweets from the  audience, while a few of the on-stage monitors projected images of 21c century heroes during the show: Barack Obama during Coriolanus’s encounter with the people, Michael Phelps’s 200m freestyle triumph during the ascent of Julius Caesar, and John Edwards (!) when Antony heads back to Rome to marry his rival’s sister.

One of the best tweets on the #romantragedies thread, to which we were all encouraged to post tweets and pictures during the performance, noted, accurately, that the best part of van Hove’s high-concept theatrical flourishes was how well each one embodied the deeper metaphors of the plays. I read that sometime during the production and thought — exactly. That’s how the show worked  I’ll try to explain a few of these moments.

Coriolanus’s melt-down press conference, in which he denounces the manipulative Tribunes in front of a TV audience, was a study in anger. “You speak as a punitive god,” protest the Tribunes, at which the general rages further. His denunciation of the corrupt “two-party system” drew applause from the high-minded Brooklyn crowd, but I kept recalling the opening kiss his mother had prevented him from enjoying with his wife after the battle at Corioles. The military hero raged against all distraction, against anything that moved away from his solitary warrior self — but on this stage there was no single center, only competing forces, mothers, wives, children, Tribunes and Senators and even the talking head of Barack Obama backstage. Plus lots of extras, including me.

The political world eats up this kind of solitude — this is what I take to be the meaning of the implied connection between Coriolanus and Obama, though our President seems to have managed the dissolution of his solitude better than the Roman general. Aufidius, who appeared twice on stage being interviewed by a Roman TV station, the second time when his armies were outside the gates of the city, was impassive and implacable, biding his time before consuming his ally-enemy at last. In a play about political failure and consumption, Virgilia’s almost-silent stage-plea for a more feeling world cannot stand before her mother in law’s dictum: “Anger’s my meat. I sup upon myself.”

From the inchoate rage of Coriolanus the production moved seamlessly — no set change between the death of Coriolanus and start of Julius Caesar  — to the high-stakes competition of Brutus, Cassius, and Caesar. Playing Cassius as a woman and then later playing Octavius Caesar as a woman in the final play suggested the slow integration of the Roman political world, from the violent masculine prehistory of Coriolanus’s Republic to the quasi-matriarchal empire of Octavius that follows the death of Cleopatra. The middle play, Julius Caesar, highlighted its female characters with a great stage coup, in which the tete-a-tete scenes of Caesar and Calpurnia and Brutus and Portia were played simultaneously across each other, such that each actor appeared to be answering both conversations at once. Calpurnia, played by Janni Goslinga, the actor whose Virgilia had failed to re-claim Coriolanus in the first play, was no more successful here in keeping her husband from being killed, but she and Portia provided a powerful template against which the Roman super-heroes measured themselves.

But the show-stopper in the middle play, perhaps predictably, was Mark Antony’s funeral oration. After a measured, polished, really quite beautiful speech by Roeland Fernhout’s Brutus — I was sitting about 5 feet behind him at center stage — Hans Kesting’s Antony swaggered to the podium, looked at the audience (I watched via video feed, since I was behind him), picked up his notes, and threw them away. Then he slouched around to the front of the podium, fell down, and sat still for almost two minutes.

We stared in near-silence at his stricken face, and I was thinking about media resources. In most plays, watching from seats, you can’t see close facial expressions unless you’re in the front row. But the video screens enabled this production to use the emotional resources of the close up as well as the shared emotional power that only crowded theaters can produce. Antony drew us to him by sitting exhausted and quiet, so that when he took up the microphone — “Friends, Romans…” (the words were in Dutch, of course, which meant I mostly couldn’t understand them, though a few old Germanic roots carried through) — we were all with him. And then he did with rage what Coriolanus hadn’t been able to do: he brought all of us all along with him.

I don’t think my description can do justice to the rippling force and mania of the speech: Antony ran through the theater screaming his lines (in Dutch), he carried the body of Caesar back on stage, he marked up a photo of the corpse with a red sharpie (which almost hit me when he discarded it behind him), he spat and dripped and cried. He waved around the paper with Caesar’s will.  And we were all with him — because we were on stage, most of us, we were the plebeians. We were the ones who wanted the honorable Brutus to pay, the ones who, deep in our stomachs, felt that being reasonable makes a poor politics.

Before Brutus’s oration

A six-hour production needs multiple high-lights, and Antony’s funeral oration wasn’t the only one. I’ll hit two from Antony and Cleopatra: the night before the battle of Actium, and the death of Enobarbus.

Before the battle, on Cleopatra’s birth-day, she and Antony perform “one other gaudy night” (3.13) as an elaborate kiss-and-dance that fulfills the erotic promise that Virgilia had offered some 270 minutes before with her husband Coriolanus. The “soldier’s kiss” and the reunion of the lovers — Antony has spent a fair amount of the play thus far making and breaking a political marriage with Octavia, Caesar’s sister — gestured toward a theatrics of personal connection, one that didn’t care much about world-shaping battles just a few hours away. As we looked at their happy faces explaining to a furious Enobarbus that they would fight by sea, not by land, no matter what “absolute soldiership” Antony had on land, it didn’t matter that they were throwing away the world. The soundtrack was lovely late Dylan: “It’s not dark yet, but it’s, gettin’ there…”

Age cannot wither her

Even better, perhaps, was Enobarbus himself, played by Bart Siegers, who’d also been the inexorable Aufidius. Having betrayed Antony, returned to Caesar, and then had his treasure sent after him by his former master, Enobarbus runs mad. He also ran through the theater out onto Lafayette Ave. around 11:15 pm, howling and writhing his Dutch rage at the taxis and bike messengers. Again, it was both a great theatrical coup and a brilliant reading of the dramatic metaphor: the great Roman soldier, who knew to leave Antony because he knew Antony had ceased to be an effective leader, has found back in the Roman camp that the world of emotions and passion, of bodies and feelings, that he loved in Egypt has gone. So he ends up lying on cold pavement, with cars and pedestrians ignoring his madness, walking by him. So fares the feeling man in the cold Roman world. You taxis, you cyclists, you worse than senseless things!

I could go on about this show, talking about the brilliant bits of humor, as when Mark Antony almost forgets his new wife’s name, or the backstage hi-jinx, as when Octavia spilled a beer at the bar between scenes. But the full force of the production seems to me best captured by that image of Enobarbus on Lafayette Ave, crying out his pain to the uninterpreting streets. A brilliant metaphor for politics at an impasse.

“By sea, by sea!”

If and when Toneelgroep does Shakespeare’s Histories, 8 plays in 12+ hours, I’m buying a ticket to Amsterdam.

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Thwaites Glacier, Antartica

November 14, 2012 by Steve Mentz Leave a Comment

A Block of Thwaites

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Very Like a Whale

October 19, 2012 by Steve Mentz 1 Comment

“Shakespeare thought in pictures,” reports Mike Witmore in his oracular voice, and a swirling array of books, photographs, and objects that have grown out of that perception are now overflowomg the Folger gallery. I made a quick trip to DC last Monday for the opening of the show he’s co-curated with Rosamond Purcell, “Very Like a Whale.” Now I’m speculating about whether I can get back there before the show closes in early Jan 2013.

I knew what to expect because I taught an undergraduate class last spring using their collaborative book of photographs and Shakespearean snippets, Landscapes of the Passing Strange. The magic, as Rosamond explained to the audience in the Folger theater, is in the bottles. Her large framed photographs, which were on display throughout the hall, were all taken of the reflections of ordinary objects in these old mercury-lined glass bottles, which were originally used to store light-sensitive dyes. The results dance right up to and past the line between representation and abstraction: they are photographs, which is to say real visible things, but also changed, sometimes beyond recognition.

The book contains just the images and fragments from Shakespeare  but the show adds objects from assorted collections and from the Folger Library. Highlights include a case entitled “All the Whale’s a Stage,” which gets its title from an image of a man playing bagpipes on top of a massive cetacean body, a burned page of The Tempest from one of the Folger’s many Shakespeare Folios, an automaton (!), and many other things.

“Wood from Shakespeare’s house in the Caliban case,” claimed Rosamond during the curators’ talk. “From the property behind the house,” clarified Mike. Which led to a wonderful exchange in which Rosamond admitted her own identification with the poetic monster who finds scamels in the rocks, and suggested that Mike be cast as Prospero. 

After discovering the book at MLA back in Jan 2010, I built an undergrad Shakespeare course around these strange images during the fall of 2011, including setting up an exhibition of photographs at St. John’s and having Mike and Rosamond come for a memorable visit in October. The charge of these images is the strange push they give to your imagination as you look at them, the mobile and unexpected ways they ask us to reconsider Shakespeare’s language and the imaginative art of seeing. As I said when reflecting on the visit to Queens last year around this time, it’s good to share strange things.

That sense of radical play dominates the larger exhibition at the Folger right now. It’s a hard show to take in, especially on opening night when the hall is full of people to catch up with, meet, and congratulate. But when I stood there making academic small talk and looking at the automaton, or peering into the gorgeous array of books on objects in the “Wind” case,” I considered the larger project of putting such strangeness inside an academic institution. I remember my students being at first amazed, then a bit bewildered by the photographs in Passing Strange. But when we lingered in front of an image — I remember a great liquid desert portrait paired with lines from Antony & Cleopatra, which I did not see at the Folger Monday — things would swim into the imagination. The gambit is that such strangeness speaks to the same part of the mind that’s moved by Shakespeare, and it certainly works for me.

You could make a case that the Folger exhibition hall is overfull right now, with photographs and objects spilling out of every window-nook. But if you have all this wonderful stuff, why not give us excess of it, and more besides, and something else we’re not expecting?

If you can’t get to DC during the rest of the fall, here’s the mobile tour of the show. But you really should get there if you can.

 

 

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About Steve

Steve Mentz
Professor of English
St. John’s University
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