Steve Mentz

I was asked recently for a list of Shakespeare and other early modern plays that I’m planning to see this upcoming season in New York. I decided to do a blog post in case other people would like to see what’s on my radar. I’m sure there are other things that I’m missing, and I welcome suggestions. Stay tuned for blog reviews!

Dec 2014

Tamburlaine (by Christopher Marlowe) at Theater for a New Audience, with John Douglas Thompson, one of our best young Shakespearean actors.

I’m going this coming Fri, 12/5.

The Tempest (Nella Tempesta), a multi-lingual & multicultural adaptation that includes assorted other writers besides Shakespeare at LaMaMa Experimental Theater Club in the East Village.
Run is 12/11-21; I’m going Fri 12/19.

Jan 2015

Titus Andronicus at the Shakespeare Exchange (a small new Shakespeare company)
Jan 22 – Feb 7; I’m going to take students around Jan 27.

Feb 2015

The Winter’s Tale at the Pearl Theater
Feb 10 – March 15. Probably take students on Feb 17 or 24.

March 2015

Cry, Trojans (Troilus & Cressida) by the Wooster Group at St Ann’s Warehouse
March 24 – April 18. I’m taking students on March 27.

Hamlet by Classic Stage Co
March 25 –

April 2015

April 14 – May 16, 2015 Tis Pity She’s a Whore (John Ford) Red Bull Theater

 

April 17 – May 2, 2015 Othello Titan Theatre Company (Queens)

April 24 – May 24 Two Gentlemen of Verona by Theater for a New Audience

 

May 2015

Dr Faustus by Christopher Marlowe, Classic Stage Co
May 29 —

Being in prison means the loss of many precious things, but Pericles encourages us to believe that all losses are not final… — Taconic Correctional Facility in Westchester

Along with students, colleagues, and friends, I braved the pre-Thanksgiving press and the crowds protesting Mike Brown’s killing last night to see Rob Melrose’s fast, brilliant, emotionally powerful production of Pericles at the Public Theater. Inside of two hours we had it all: riddles, incest, shipwrecks (two!), starvation, cannibalism, pirates, brothels, music, magic. The actors played multiple parts and navigated exotic geographies, transitioning from Antioch to Tarsus to Pentapolis to Ephesus to Mytilene with the spin of a table. The traveling show had just completed a tour of the five boroughs with a minimal set: a table, a book, a pillow, a few three-legged stools (useful in the jousting scene), eight actors. Out of these things grew an emotional urgency and force that stayed with me as I waited on my way home, watching a “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” protest march surge around my stationary car on E. 14th Street, wishing I had spoken to my students as clearly about this week’s injustice as Karl Steel did to his.

By the end of the night I was right there with Pericles, needing help to feel what I was feeling. How can a story I’ve read and taught dozens of times still choke me up?

Give me a gash, put me to present pain,

Lest this great sea of joys rushing upon me

O’erbear the shores of my mortality.

The play opened with Flor de Liz Perez, who would go on to play Marina in the second half, singing Gower’s opening lines. The song was a great way to enliven the four-beat couplets that pound out the play’s narrative interludes. The show’s a-cappella music was one of the particular joys of the evening; actors not currently onstage provided beats, and several scenes, in particular the jousting and dancing at Pentapolis, were wonderfully festive. Often many voices collaborated on Gower’s long speeches, adding speed and variety to the dizzying geographical movement of the play.

The double casting choices were intriguing. I’ve often seen Marina cross-cast with Antiochus’s daughter, so that the virtuous savior of the play’s second half trumps the incestuous temptress of the first scene. Melrose’s cast, by contrast, cast the charismatic Tiffany Rachelle Stewart as Antiochus’s daughter and as Thaisa, eager suitor to Pericles at her father’s court in Pentapolis. Bringing these two parts together allowed Stewart to play two different visions of female sexuality: enticing and dangerous as the incestuous daughter, forthright but still powerful as Thaisa. The lingering echo of Antiochus’s daughter clung faintly to rediscovered Thaisa in the play’s final scene in Ephesus, so that her play-closing lines to husband and daughter — she calls them “mine” and “mine own” — reunite the family while also granting dramatic power to the sexuality she has presented in multiple guises.

Instead of cross-casting Marina with the evil daughter, the play’s second-half heroine matched up with ancient Gower, the medieval poet-ghost who narrates the complex comings and goings of the play in the eastern Mediterranean. I love this choice, which renovates the ghostly narrator and also gently reminds us that it’s the young girl, not any of the kings, queens, or priests in the play, who controls the plot after its mid-way break. Marina confronts a murderer, pirates, customers and overseers of a brothel, a sexually eager governor, and finally her own melancholic and silent father. “Virginal fencing” is the phrase that lord Lysimachus, played with stately grace by Christopher Kelly, uses to describe her dialogue, and I was struck last night by the connection between her rhetorical combat and the chivalric jousting and dancing at which her father excelled earlier in the play. Marina is one of my favorite figures in Shakespeare because of her oceanic connections — I’ve called her Shakespeare’s Aquawoman — but in thinking about her crossed with Gower last night, it seemed to me that more could be said about how she bears the power of a literary tradition — the virtuous saint who cannot be corrupted — and also about how her varied and strategic rhetorical modes structure the second half of the play.

There were some other interesting cross-casting choices, including David Ryan Smith as Antiochus and Simonides, and also great comic work by Ben Mehl as the criminal trio of Boult, Leonine, and Thalliard. Raffi Barsoumian’s Pericles was wonderfully naive in the early scenes, and I was pleased to see him, after he has married Thaisa and reasserted his aristocratic idenity, find the fishermen who rescued him to give them their due reward.

Redemptive theater makes a nice pre-holiday treat, though the contrast with bitter realities was stark when I encountered the protest march after the show. The juxtaposition between Shakespeare and 21c politics reminds me that the Mobile Shakespeare Unit represents the furthest out-reaching effort of the Public Theater’s democratic vision, taking free Shakespeare to prisons and mental institutions and the outmost fringes of boroughs that don’t always feed at Manhattan’s cultural buffet. The poster from last night’s program shows pictures of the cast and audience members during the Mobile part of the run. “We are One Public,” proclaims the headline, and the page is filled with smiling faces and testimonials from places like the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility and the Park Ave Armory Women’s Mental Health Shelter. Whenever I’m tempted to think that Shakespeare is too canonical, or too white-male, or too whatever, I’m reminded by outreach like this of the positive value of literary culture. One thing we as teachers and Shakespeareans like to show show is how our rage for justice and love and redemption share space inside a cultural heritage that is also, then and now, encrusted with violence and injustice. (Rick Godden and David Perry have written eloquently about this subject today.) There is plenty of violence legible in that inheritance — last night the comic bluster of Marina’s near-rape had me thinking uncomfortably about the recent news from college campuses — but Shakespeare and literary culture remain places to teach awareness and to imagine responses. I was struck last night by the joy and awareness of this production.

I’d feel sentimental if I said this in my professorial persona, so I’ll let another New Yorker who saw this great Mobile Pericles this month have the last word:

You brought light to a dark place. — Riker’s Island Women’s Facility

My kids make fun of me when I say that I love seeing Shakespeare in other languages — some of my recent favorites have been in Dutch, Czech, and French, but I’m up for whatever I can find. I think it has to do with being released from cliche into experiment. In The Tempest last night, when that old saw about what dreams are made on gets translated into Korean, you can be pretty sure it’s not going to be the same as any of the other times you’ve heard it.

The Mokwha Repertory Company’s production of The Tempest, part two ofThe Tide is Rising, La MaMa’s three-part collection of fall Tempests, starts with a wonderful swirl of linen and music, a drum-structured storm-dance that presents the shipwreck as a collective performance of disorientation, with actors rising, staggering, falling, and dancing their way around a crowded stage. I loved the way the company’s minimal props — a drum on the balcony and white sheets flowing through everyone’s hands —  generated so much fluid motion and confusion. I think this scene is one of the hardest to perform, and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a production that really hits it just right, but the Mokwha company were pretty close.

I didn’t know anything about the company when I sat down in the Ellen Stewert Theater on East 4th St last night. The program notes say that they were founded in 1984 and employ traditional Korean techniques, which clearly include music, dance, and something quite close to martial arts. I found a little more about them online this morning, courtesy (of course!) of the brilliant Professor Huang, who brought students to see the company in DC in 2011.

I especially loved Youngkwang Song’s angry Prospero, who raged his way through several scenes that often, in more traditional versions (including part 1 of La MaMa’s grou, which I saw in the same theater earlier this fall), can be a bit flat or expositional. This was a Prospero who wanted to eat his enemies raw, and who only calmed himself slowly over the course of the play.

The task of reducing the magician’s rage fell to Wonjun Jo’s dancing Ariel, to a wonderfully goofy two-bodied Caliban, performed by Seungyeol Lee and Minji Lim as a conjoined twin, finally liberated at the end of the play when freedom became in style, and most of all (I thought) to Yeonju Jung’s wide-eyed, emotionally compelling Miranda, who I thought was the real heart of the play. Bantering with her father, oogling the lovely form of the sleeping Prince, playing with the spirit-animals, who roamed the stage with heads like ducks, mice, or pigs, this Miranda wormed herself wide-eyed into the play’s core. I’ve never seen a better performance of this difficult part.

That’s what you get for changing things up!

I’m very much looking forward to heading down to Louisiana to talk to the English and Environmental Studies Programs at Loyola tomorrow and Friday. I’ve not been down that way since 2010, when I was a guest of the Williams-Mystic Program and visited the bayou in Cocodrie, the oil-stained beach in Grand Isle, and very briefly New Orleans itself. I’m eager to see Loyola tomorrow, where the English and Environmental Studies are doing such amazing things. Surrounded by memories of Katrina, the BP oil spill, and the inexorable dissolution of the southern parts of the state, they have been building a program, that responds to what they call “Teaching at the End of the World,” as Chris Schaberg talked about at BABEL.

When I was in southern Louisiana in 2010, I heard fascinating presentations from three very different men on Grand Isle about their responses to the oil spill and to Katrina before that. I wrote up three blog posts: “David’s Dolphins” “Chris Hernandez and the Prisonhouse of Story,” and “Moose.” They make interesting reading four years later, as everything changes and stays the same.

My talk tomorrow will be about “Shakespeare without Nature,” with a strong emphasis on the preposition that both connects and displaces. Here’s the opening bit:

The two watchwords of today’s talk, “Shakespeare” and “Nature,” are both complex collective nouns with varied histories, some parts of which are more embarrassing than others. I’ll say plenty about both today, but I’m going to start with the uncapitalized preposition that links them, “without.” The “without” in my title captures my central point, or perhaps my central hope. I’m not quite willing to go as far as Michel Serres in expounding a “philosophy of prepositions” that claims that these little connective words represent the most important features of human language. But the innocent-seeming preposition indicates my desire to disassociate from once-accepted collective ideas about both Nature and Shakespeare. “Without” works in two directions, asking for revisions in our thinking about both capitalized nouns. To be “without-Nature” – imagine now that I’m pronouncing a hyphen between the words – means living in a nonhuman environment that cannot be happily rolled up into a comprehensible collective. That’s the eco-theoretical point I’m building on today. I imagine many of you are familiar with already, having hosted Timothy Morton here a little while ago. Being “Shakespeare-without” – you can hear the hyphen this time, right? – means bringing our engagements with canonical literature outside traditional seminar rooms, lecture halls, and stages. In both cases “without” signals a movement outside familiar spaces into disorderly systems. It’s about mucking around in strange places.

“Without” makes things fuzzy. It deterratorializes. It strips away Romantic ideas of Natural harmony and Harold Bloom-ist fetishizations of the transcendent Bard. Being without does not entail liberation from materiality or textuality, but instead requires a deeper burrowing into these things. To quote one of my favorite novelists only slightly out of context, “this is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into.” “Without” is the project of this talk. I’ll make some points about both Shakespeare and Nature along the way, but it’s the lever of “without” that does the work. This talk seeks a Shakespeare-without and a without-Nature. The idea in both cases is to go outside.

It’s been a ragged week of theater-going, as I continue to dig BABEL sand out from between my toes. Probably I had too much on my plate. The plan was to go see Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia on Wed night at Yale Rep, then to see Toneelgroep’s 5+ hour Angels in America at BAM on Friday, and cap it off with the Yale Drama School’s Master and Margarita last night in New Haven. Struggling with sleep debt and a sick child, I ended up batting about .500: we left Arcadia after the first act, despite liking it very much. I pulled the plug entirely on the late night in Brooklyn on Fri & cooked family dinner at home instead. But last night’s Master and Margarita in New Haven was utterly brilliant: the best play I’ve ever seen by Yale Drama School students in two decades (!) of seeing their productions. I wasn’t sure how Bulgakov’s sprawling, chaotic novel could work on stage — but it did, and I’m still reeling from it. Genius is a powerful thing!

I’ll take the three plays very quickly in order, though the last was the best.

Stoppard’s Arcadia was very well-done at Yale Rep, at least in the half I saw. Stoppard has a wonderful ability as a playwright to capture the excitement and irregular progress of thinking. This play, set partly in the Romantic era and partly in the 1980s on the same English estate, moves mostly through conversation — but it’s gorgeous conversation. I now wish that we’d stuck in out until the last scene, when the doomed tutor Septimus, who would become the mysterious Hermit of Sidley Park shortly after the play’s early-period events, and his doomed student Thomasina, who dies in a fire just before her 17th birthday, enjoyed a halting dance.

I’m very sorry I missed Toneelgroep’s Angels, but I just couldn’t manage the long night in Brooklyn on Friday. Olivia’s been home for a couple days with a bad sinus infection, and I needed to get home Friday.

I’m very glad, however, that we didn’t let our general exhaustion or Ian’s far-away soccer game Sat afternoon keep us away from the Yale Drama School’s amazing production of The Master and Margarita. As the only review I could find, in a local online site called the New Haven Review puns, the show was masterful in all ways: acting, staging, setting, costumes, lighting. A thoroughly professional and joyously entertaining evening. There was no way we were going home at the interval this time!

Watching the play bring Bulgakov’s massive novel, arguably the great triumph of early twentieth-century Russian literature, to the stage was dizzying. The novel is a rollicking comic satire, in which an urbane devil, named Woland but he also answers to Satan, comes to Moscow to perform a magic show and stage a Satanic Spring Ball. Woland’s  entourage, which includes a giant cat-demon named Behemoth, played with fantastic cat-mannerisms by Zenzi Williams, crosses paths with Bulgakov’s semi-autobiographical Master, a writer struggling with the Soviet system and with his play about Pontius Pilate and Yeshua (Jesus). Woland seemsultimately more interested in Margarita, the Master’s lover, who in order to save her beloved and redeem the play that the Master burns in a fit of rage, becomes a naked witch, and hosts the Devil’s Ball.

“Manuscripts don’t burn,” croons Woland, thereby restoring the Master’s burnt playscript and providing twentieth-century Russia with its most enduring literary phrase. The play like the novel celebrates the persistance of art, the joys and recklessness of creativity amid sorrow and oppression.

But the heart of the show for me was the Master’s painful and gorgeous portrait of Pilate, played by James Cusati-Moyer, as a man who recognizes Yeshua for what he is, knows that his political position in the Empire won’t allow him to spare the prophet, and with great reluctance condemns Yeshua to die. Pilate’s knowing cowardice, his refusal to sacrifice himself for justice in an unjust world, occupies the moral heart of the story. The Master’s cowardly burning of his rejected manuscript parallel’s Pilate’s choice. Pilate is, as the bad poet-turned-witness Ivan notes towards the play’s end, the Master’s “hero.” He gets rewarded the same way the Master does, with an ambiguous reunion after death with the beloved.

The figures who never sacrifice their principles and who smilingly accept whatever fate provides, Margarita in the Moscow plot and Yeshua in Judea, remain slightly opaque and inhuman. When Margarita, played by Ariana Venturi, becomes a witch and Satan’s consort, she performs several scenes entirely nude, as if no longer bound by human customs. The Master’s journey to Margarita parallels Pilate’s to Yeshua: both meet after death a person who has become a supernatural principle.

But the heart of the play (and novel) lies in the world, in Patriarch’s Park and in several Moscow apartments that become lairs for the Devil and his theatrical following. Woland dissects the hypocrisy of Soviet society. His strange alliance with Margarita represents corruption, compromise, and sacrifice, but also art.

Mick Jagger was apparently thinking of Bulgakov when he wrote the song, “Sympathy for the Devil” in 1968, soon after Bulgakov’s novel first appeared in English. This production in New Haven hit me with the force that rock’n’roll imagines itself to have.

What if Pilate is the central figure in the story? What can the procurator do when faced with the prophet but confined by the world?

The final scene of both play and novel relates that supernatural visions have faded from Moscow, surviving only in the full-moon dreams of the writer Ivan, who has been confined for madness. Once a month he sees Margarita emerge from the moon:

And then the moon bursts into frenzy, it tumbles streams of light upon Ivan, it splashes light in all directions, a moon-flood fills the room, the light sways, rises, washes over the bed. And it is then that Ivan Nikolayvich sleeps with a blissful face.

A moon-flood: that word on the final page of Bulgakov’s novel is as good a way as any to describe this wonderful show, adapted by Edward Kemp and directed by Sara Holdren. I wish the short run were not over so that you could all go see it!

 

 

BABEL in Santa Barbara surged over me like (the metaphor is unavoidable) a breaking wave. We happy BABEL-isiti swam through the white water together – in fact on Thursday morning before the first set of plenaries I bodysurfed Hendry’s Beach with a full dozen other conference-goers, a neoprene-clad advance party. For the past three days we rode the waves. On Sunday the foam dispersed us into the morning breeze.

My drive south to the airport Sunday morning with a carful of medievalists rolled time backwards, traveling across my own personal history on Pacific shores & then reaching farther back, swooping out from my body, across the sloping shoulders of wave after wave in the sunglitter. We passed familiar names: Carpentaria. Ventura. Point Mugu. Tarzana. Sepulveda. Santa Monica. Venice!

In one of my talks I lamented not having a whale’s throat to swallow oceans whole. The BABEL-fullness that has followed me home isn’t pacific in the historical etymological sense, in which Magellan misnamed the stormiest waters in the world for peace. Heading home today, I’m stirred up, turbulent, low on sleep. I didn’t manage three meals during any of the conference’s three days. I’m unsettled, and couldn’t scrub the sand and tar off my feet in the hotel shower.

My first talk positioned bodysurfing between experience and allegory. Those two categories swam, talked, drove, ate, and questioned with me all weekend. They’re organizing my espirit d’aeroplane now.

1. Experience is better than knowledge.

The heart of this conference for me was the time spent in the ocean. A hardy dozen scholars and artists, many of whom had never met before, gathered at Hendry’s at 7 am on Thursday, before the conference had officially started. We bodysurfed alongside two kids’ surf camps and inside a thick bed of kelp. In the surf I met Vanessa Daws, the swimming video-artist I found on Facebook via Michael O’Rourke & whose picture from the Lambay Swim inspired the four eco-swim poems I published last month. I’m glad we met in the water. Thanks to all our fellow surf-adventurers!

I went back each morning for pre-conference bodysurfing. Lowell Duckert, my partner in co-plenary adventures that also included a dawn plunge into the campus lagoon before the bodysurfing on Thursday, joined me Friday too. We had the gorgeous water to ourselves. No kids, and almost no kelp. The waves were big enough to give us a slight bounce when we plunged down their faces onto the flat water in front.

On Saturday I got to the beach right at dawn – around 6:30 – and bodysurfed solo for thirty precious minutes before being joined by Jeremy Gordon & Juliane Mora, part of a brilliant group of Indiana-based rhetoricians I met at the conference. At 7:30 one of my favorite people, Elizabeth Teare, who hired me for my first-ever teaching job in 1992 (?) in LA and later navigated the turbulence of grad school with me in New Haven, arrived for breakfast with her husband and daughter. We talked about the past, and weddings, and travels. So great to emerge from waves into personal history!

During lunchless breaks on campus both Friday and Saturday I swam with Santa Barbara’s Ocean Ducks, an open-water swimming group that Vanessa had made contact with before the confidence started. Both days BABEL-isti splashed alongside.

All told I figure that I spent over 4 hours during the three-day conference in the ocean. One-seventh of the total conference time? Not sure that’ll be an easy mark to beat!

Immersion was also a subject of the Thursday morning plenary, in which Lowell’s lagoons and my bodysurfing anchored an over-full relay of conference intros and talks by Benjamin Bratton (on the cloud) and a pair of great Pittsburgh-based poets, academics, and activists, Robin Clarke and Josh Zelesnick, who explored academic precarity. (Robin told me on Saturday that she’d successfully taught herself to bodysurf after listening to my talk and going to Hendry’s that afternoon: perhaps the best compliment I’ve ever received after a lecture!) During the session, I fretted as the clock kept insisting that we were going over time. When Robin and Josh started talking I stopped worrying.

My point about experience has to do with the inadequacy of intellectual analysis to capture the world’s dynamism. The split I felt all weekend at BABEL’s core wasn’t something that could be spanned or unified. Experience is not knowledge & can’t perform the movements and create the coalitions that knowledge generates. Experience is the thing that precedes. It’s not always easy to talk about, but I felt as if I edged toward it near the end of the talk. Or maybe what really got at it was Lowell’s insistence on wearing his wetsuit all day? A suit for a plenary, he said.

Experience describes the abundant physicality of immersion, the uncatagorizable sensation of all that water and all that power surging around and with you. It trumps knowledge because experience is always excessive, there’s always something left over, that grain of sand up your nose or the salt water that’s right now still in my ear and won’t drain until sometime, I don’t know, maybe tomorrow, so if I don’t answer when you’re talking to me in a crowded bar later, please know that it’s the ocean in my ear, not you. Theorizing experience is like freezing a flower: you can do it, but what you’re left with isn’t the same as what you were looking for.

2. Always allegorize!

I’m changing the phrasing of the second half of my big BABEL-idea, because I think that the exhorting imperative is more what I was hoping for. Allegory is action! Why not reach for those symbolic structures, flashing around us in the surf like silver fish? The last morning when we were bodysurfing at Hendry’s, Juliane pointed out a brown head bobbing in the swell nearby. The sleek creature stayed close as we all played in the surf. All seals are selkies, at least potentially.

Whether Spenserians, ecocritics, Material Collectivities, or surfer environmentalists, allegory is our shared practice. Every paper I heard at BABEL allegorized. I count 67 total talks in my itinerary, not including the sometimes-substantial introductions, the brilliant flash-exhibitions, and the Material Collective’s quite amazing Walk on the Beach, which, even though I ducked out in the middle of it to go swimming with the Ocean Ducks, was for me one of the great events of the weekend.

To allegorize ocean and beach means finding intellectual meaning in grains of sand – but that’s the easy part. The best sessions, for me at least, surprised with their allegorical velocities, their dizzying turns and dives. A splash, and then – floomph! – they’re gone.

I’ll attempt a hyper-compressed three-day narrative, with no apologies for its impossibility but anticipatory regrets for omissions. Come into the turbulence with me!

Thursday

From clouds onto strands pricked the not-always gentle knights, organizing and bodysurfing ourselves across lacunae, rock-ruling invisible pools but finally unable to cross the beached verge. We faced down inequitous dragons whose defeat may be impossible – but what is impossibility but improbability, as a mathematician might say, squared? Sea creatures didn’t block us so much as organize our #bottlesNbones so that we soaked in seismic aquifers, borrowing sun block from Chaucer at the beach. Where was Ceyx when we needed her? Wracked upon neighborly rocks?

Friday

After the morning’s surf I woke inside a zebrafish heart where all was endless and Greek. Dissolving our acidified shells past time limits was a good idea: it exo-skeletized empathy until we arrived, at last, at the impossible heart of the matter. Still enraged by time I returned to the strand and tried to read ocean scribbles in sand. Brilliance surrounded me. An aesthetic coward, I plunged into my familiar blue, leaving clothes and art history ashore. I was happy to find both still there when I came back. My meager contribution to the flash exhibition was an instant photo that did not develop, on which I wrote with a sharpie: “This is an attempt to photograph what water writes on shore.” With joy and trepidation I joined thirteen super-heroes of SCALE to ring the day shut: Subatomic cosmic ocean sand square? relativity intimate foot flash abyss global fear. Hearing the words still make me happy.

Saturday

Salt and sand clung to me during the last morning plenary as I thought about my grandfather, a 22^nd– (or something, I don’t really know) degree Shriner (is that the same as a Mason? I don’t know, and neither does Karl Steel, who’s sitting across the aisle from me on our flight back to JFK) in a hall whose geometry screamed under repeated temporal strain. I wanted more: more fishes and more drawings and Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s novels reaching out of Indonesia. When I spoke my assigned speculative part of Dear Climate, I wondered how Una & Marina know me so well that they could write my lines as an acute self-parody. Am I transparent, like water? “Blow winds, and crack your cheeks!” In Cute Shakespeare I found refuge and some discomfort. A mid-day swim affixed tar to my left toe that’s still there today as I fly over Grand Junction. (What an evocative name – don’t all conferences aspire to be that Grand Junction, that place of connection, that high desert town facing west?) Anyone who missed the revolutionary work of young scholars in the Sous les paves session organized by Justin Kolb missed that which must now be sought for. So many things I love were there: Marina, Spenser, surfing, saint-seductions, amphibians. But maybe my favorite object in the whole weekend was the word-rope in the Sea Changes session, superlatively organized by Jodi Enders and Ellen MacKay, which included my last (and sixth) speaking part. The rope was braided out of printed words on paper, words each of the six speakers had written and still love and had sent by email to P.A. Skantze. She twisted the pages into maybe 10’ of rope, on which we all hauled and sang out a work-chantey: “Haul away, sea changers!” All the talks were brilliant & provocative, but there was something special in the music of that shared worksong. Glorious – but not quite the end, as we convened one last time in familiar plenaric confines for somewhat uncontextulized hymns of surf-love, and a last enmeshment in early modern poetic seas. Impending ending, plus exhaustion and salt-chapped lips, smoothed over possibilities.

That’s not really all of BABEL 2014 – there is no “all,” only allegorical circulations. I am hopeful that the conversations will surface soon in multiple forms and media. I look forward to seeing them. The things that I spoke of – bodysurfing, beach-walking, Okeanos, weather-genres, beach-revolutions, salty language – have long fetches to travel before their waves crest. I hope my fellow conferees will beat me to publication.

I’m not always a big fan of long sub-titles, but this years BABEL-icious combination of “Precariousness, Risk, Forms of Life, Affinity, and Play at the Edge of the World” opened wide the voracious maw of this conference. If the silver tube in which I now travel above Colorado must mark a return from disorienting utopia – a return from the waves, from beloved California, from a briefly-opened space between and across – perhaps there are things we can take home with us.

I want the empathy that precariousness creates, the free-fall of risk, life’s formal variety, fluid affinities, and the evanescence of play on shifting sands.

I left early from all three nights’ parties, partly to be sure I’d get to the beach at sunup the next day and partly because my rocker powers are sadly diminished. As I fly over the Rockies and write, I’m conscious that, amid all the joy – puns & allegories always intended – and blazing imagination of BABEL, I’m looking forward to going home.

Toronto 2015 looms. Its non-biennial nearness appears (I’m sorry to admit it) a little forbidding. Its time will come, and be welcome. There is only one time after all, that time when all things happen. As the poet said about the iceberg: “now!”

 

 

 

 

I leave for the West Coast on Wed afternoon, just in time for the voracious whirlpool of BABEL 2016. Whenever I browse through the overflowing program I find something new I’m looking forward to: art installations! rooftop parties! epigraphs from Moby-Dick!

Having not been able to resist the wonders of the Calls for Papers, I’m going to speak five (!) times over the three days of the conference. I’ll be brief, don’t worry.

Here are some previews of the flood.

Thursday morning early I’m heading into the surf with some brave souls and neoprene as an immersive preamble to my 9:30 am Plenary talk, “Bodysurfing.” The talk will start with two mantras to guide my surf-theory and my BABEL-ing:

1. Experience is better than knowledge. (Samuel Champlain)

2. Everything is allegorical.

The next day I’ll meet the Material Collective just after noon for a Walk on Goleta Beach on the UCSB campus, which will lead into our double-session seminar/flash exhibition/presentation. A little piece of the CT Shoreline will travel with me.

I’m also going to serve as designated Flanuer for a 3:30 pm panel that afternoon on “Coastal Creatures,” which sounds excellent.

At 5 pm on Fri, I’m part of the overflowing SCALE Plenary session. My talk, “Ocean,” flows over 40,000km in just four minutes.

The hard thing about this thinking is scale. The great waters are too big, too close, and too flowing to hold in hand or mind. We have no whale’s throat to swallow them whole.

Saturday at 2 pm I’m chairing Justin Kolb’s panel, “Sous les paves, la plage!” — under the pavement, the beach! He’s kindly let me adapt his great CFP for my intro. He describes arriving in Cairo in May 2013 when the square was a beach.

When Tahrir Square became beach, its traffic circle was a vibrant democratic assembly, with possibilities and vulnerabilities that attend life on the edge of the world.

Last of all I’m contributing seven vocabulary words to Ellen MacKay and Jody Enders’s “Sea Changes” session on Saturday afternoon.

What if all our talking hasn’t been oceanic enough? I want to change our grounded terrestrial metaphors. What happens if we swap out terrestrial language for salt-water terms?

That doesn’t include plans for immersive adventures, breakfast Saturday with one of my favorite friends, plus hearing and seeing so many great-sounding talks and exhibitions that I don’t have space to list them here.

Flying home on Sunday morning I’m going to be pretty tired.

 

The part of my trip to France this past summer that I’ve still been meaning to write about happened underground. We went down into three famous caves: Pech Merle, Lascaux II, and the Gouffre de Padirac. Three very different sunless worlds.

One reason I’ve not gotten to writing these visits up is that Olivia, as part of the utterly brilliant travel journal she kept during our summer travels in Iceland and France, beat me to the pen (or keyboard). She’s agreed to let me quote from her descriptions here. Really I don’t have that much to add. She turns twelve tomorrow — 10/10/14 — and, doting Daddy though I may be, I’m amazed by her sentences.

I’ll take the caves in reverse order of our descents.

Cave #3: Lascaux II

We went into the replica, an artificial cave which was opened to the public in 1983. The famous cave drawings, often described as prehistoric equivalents of the Sistine Chapel, were overwhelmingly beautiful. Art historians estimate that there are over 2,000 figures in Lascaux, the majority of which have been painstakingly replicated in the replica cave. I’ll let Olivia describe what it feels like to look at them. I pick up in the middle of her journal’s entry on Lascaux, when she starts thinking about why the guide, who was deeply committed to a religious interpretation of the artworks, called it the cave of dreams:

That is why it was called the cave of dreams to me. I have talked of leaving the world of reality when I dream, and coming to rest on the shores of imagination where anything is possible. There in Lascaux, though I wasn’t sleeping, I left the world of reality.

In the world of dreams the bulls ran freely, and I rode on a stag’s back as it jumped for joy at having escaped the dungeons of truth to a place where anything is possible, and you can climb over the rainbow high into the ever-blue sky and when you climb down again there is a cauldron full of gold waiting for you. In that world frowns are hidden, and smiles permanent, and I ran wild with the animals of Lascaux for the afternoon.

Cave #2: Gouffre de Padirac

Our middle cave was artless. The Gouffre de Padirac is in the same region as many of the cave painting sites, but there are no surviving human traces in these wet caverns prior to the caves’ discovery in the late nineteenth century. It’s a massive limestone sink, with an underground river at the bottom which we crossed in gondolas on our way toward some amazing underground pools.

Olivia focused on the absence of humanity in that other-worldly space.

Do you ever get the feeling that you are in space floating among things that you don’t know, discovering things you didn’t know existed? That is what happened when I entered the Gouffre de Padirac.

Nothing else had ever trodden down these roads, breathed this air, and searched around with piercing eyes looking for secrets. I was brought back to the other cave with the paintings, clear marks of civilization before time. Here though, nothing touched this cave, no prehistoric creature had left its mark upon the wall, to be discovered, to be pondered over, to be admired. I was overwhelmed by the fact that the only living things in this cave were us. Nothing else, not fish, or insects, or other small creatures had ever breathed the fresh, cold air of the cave, nor seen the shining crystals within. I heard the whisper of the water moving quickly over

Looking up from inside the Gouffre

stones.

Cave #1: Pech Merle

The “other cave” was Pech Merle, a famous site of Neolithic paintings only about 20 minutes away from the lovely little village of St. Cirq-lapopie where we spent most of our two weeks in France. It was the first cave we visited, and one of the most intense art encounters I’ve had. Olivia called it the cave of lost time:

In the cave of lost time there is magic and power and forgotten wisdom waiting to be remembered. The cave dwellers left their marks upon the wall, and in the sparkling droplets of water secrets whisper, they laugh, they watch us as we pass, everything watches. They see us, but we cannot hope to see them, for man cannot penetrate that which is guarded in these caves.

Pech Merle

I could picture the cave people making the curves and spots and circles with the black and red pigments mixing, perfecting, making a masterpiece that was to be remembered, and stared at for millennia after it was made. Did he know then that people ages after his time would look upon it? Was that his idea, or was it for pleasure? I wish I knew, wish I knew the answers that were buried in tombs when the ice covered all of Europe, never to be found, not yet at least, but never is a strong word, we can always hope.

The handprint and the wounded man were us, showing that even thousands of years ago we were there, fighting for our place in the world. Thousands of years ago we lived, and breathed, drank and ate, looked upon the world with the same two eyes we do now. What we thought then was a mystery, a mystery that was partly solved by the great paintings of old that stood before me, in all their glory. They were more royal than Buckingham Palace, stronger than all the armies in the world, more beautiful than all the dresses of queens, because they were man’s mark on the prehistoric world that was secret to them and animals and that is all. They swim before my eyes still, days later, and from them people thousands of years ago smile and wave at me, saying a last unforgettable goodbye.

When we settled on the Dordogne as our family destination within France, I was especially focused on seeing cave art. The kids grumbled sometimes when I gushed about my reading list: The Mind in the Cave, Juniper Fuse, some amazing picture books. When I read Olivia’s words in response to the three caves, I know I was right to have been excited.

Art hits the imagination with the mysteries of presence and persistence, things that are right there in front of you and have endured through time. There once was a human — perhaps not necessarily, despite Olivia’s phrasing, a “man” — who put his or her hand on that cave wall and blew red ochre pigment out of a tube onto it to create a lasting image. That artist is known and unknown to me, just like my writer-daughter who lives and grows in my home and turns twelve years old tomorrow.

Happy birthday, Olivia!

The post-Sandy productions of The Tempest are rolling into the low-lying streets of downtown. La MaMa’s staging the play three different times this fall. Director Karin Coonrod frames the first production:

At the edge of time and space the TEMPEST is set against a rising tide of awareness….The TEMPEST takes us backwards and forwards, but its urgency is now.

My favorite part of this show was Liz Swados’s gorgeous original music, played unobtrusively by a trio near the back of the stage. (“Back” might not be quite right for this unconventional space — but they were unobtrusive, anyway.) Feeding off the ethereal sounds, the production expanded into song often. Familiar numbers like Ariel’s “Full fathom five” and Stephano’s scurvy tune were given new life. Song also burst out from less expected moments: Gonzalo’s “plantation of the isle” speech, with its extended quotations from Montaigne, was a show-stopper. Miranda crooned her “brave new world” line near the play’s end, to everyone’s surprise and delight. That’s one way to deal with a cliche! Trinculo, played by the wonderfully funny Liz Wiscan, delivered almost her entire part in a fantastic jazz-rap hybrid voice. “Yond same black cloud, yond huge one,” she taunted, “looks like a foul bombard that would shed his liquor!” Deal with that, storm!

Among the performers, the best bits were in the comic sub-plot. I’m a longtime fan of Tony Torn, the actor who played Stephano and who’s married to my St John’s colleague Lee Ann Brown. He rocked his part. Asking the band to strike up “Nobody Cares for Kate” when he first tottered onto the stage, Torn staggered and danced through the play with manic energy. The drunken butler shadows Prospero the magus, and the play’s structure insists that neither figure’s rule is as complete as either might wish. Torn’s Stephano managed to be both hilarious and touching, a drunk who seeks the orderliness that he can’t, finally, put his finger on. He and Wiscan’s Trinculo occupied the boozy, high-spirited heart of the show.

Slate Holmgren’s Caliban seemed a little shrill in his first scene, but blossomed during the drunken rebellion with Torn’s Stephano. Perhaps joyous servitude is more fun to play than bitter rage?

The production played with racial and gender tropes in casting the Italian aristocrats. Prospero, his daughter, and his brother were all of African descent, and while all the other castaways except Gonzalo were played by white men, part of the costume for every Italian aristocrat was white high heels. When Prospero re-dressed himself as “sometime Milan,” he mimed his pain on returning to civilized (and feminized) footwear. Every third thought would be his grave, but he looked as if he’d spare some bad words for his shoemaker.

Joseph Harrington, a teenage ballet star who played the lead in Billy Elliot on Broadway from 2010-2012, stomped, twirled, and danced Ariel’s way across the stage in combat boots. Miriam Hyman’s Miranda out-emoted Harrington’s Ariel, but the pair made an engaging combination, surrounding Reg Cathey’s Prospero with deep emotionalism and balletic flair.

It’s getting hard, these days, to play Prospero. Our sympathies flow to wronged Caliban and tearful Miranda. Ariel, Gonzalo, and even proud Antonio — played here with calm charisma by Earl Baker, Jr. — compel respect and fascination. But the wizard himself, with his impatience, paranoia, and fantasies of control, has become something of a problem.

Cathey didn’t help himself the night I saw the show, sometimes adding more feet than his verses would bear (“Dark backward and and the abysm of time”?). He leaned on his massive staff early and late, and in general didn’t match the other players’ emotional availability.

But maybe if I get back to the Ellen Stewart Theatre before Nov 2, he’ll do better. It was only a preview last Friday.

I’m looking forward to the other two Tempests in this trio also: a Korean version by the Mokwha Reparatory Company in November and Motus Theatre’s Nella Tempesta, which mashes up Shakespeare with Aldous Huxley, William Gibson, and Aime Cesaire, in December.

 

At a certain point in the evening last Thursday I found myself standing on West 19th Street speaking with Bruno Latour. I assured him that I loved his play. It was, I said, “perfectly intelligible.” (What a strange thing to say!) I told him that I especially enjoyed its “exploratory flash.” (?) My words seemed to make him happy. I know I was happy!

I went to “Gaia Global Circus” at The Kitchen, where a crowd of (I suspect) mostly academics — my post-play beer party was two professors and five grad students — marked the U.N. Climate Summit with a play.

The star of the show was the set: a large rectangular canopy filled the stage, on which were tied 50-60 large helium balloons, so that the whole apparatus floated. It could be raised, lowered, held at an angle. The balloons exerted enough lift that the structure would slowly ascend if left untouched, but for most of the action at least some of the corners were tethered to the floor or held by actors. The four actors, who assumed multiple roles in the performance, told us at the start that the canopy was vulnerable to changes in the local temperature, to gusts of wind, and to being pushed and pulled around by the people on stage. At the play’s end the actors walked into the audience holding the canopy by four ropes attached to the corners and held it over us, so that we filled it with our applause.

The canopy was the most powerful and resonant symbolic representation of “climate” I’ve seen: awkwardly large and ungainly, subject to human manipulation but not quite controllable, beautiful and unstable. In the Q&A after, Latour mentioned twice (I think) that he feels the biggest change in the age of global warming is coming to understand climate as an instability, not a constant. The big, beautiful stage-machine canopy represented slow change and instability.

(To my mind, btw, I think Latour’s phrasing, like Bill McKibben’s, exaggerates the felt stability of the pre-Anthropocene climate — but I’m not going to indulge my own ocean-fueled enviro-theories in this post!)

I was lucky to have gone to Gaia Global Circus with Henry Turner, not just because of his always excellent company at the show & during pre- and post- conversations, but also because he knows one of the directors, Frederique Ait-Touati, who was part of the team adapting Latour’s work for performance. (An early version of the play that I found on Latour’s website and read before the show is only tangentially related to what we saw on Thursday night. But it’s fun, if you want to look at it: KOSMOKOLOS-TRANSLATION-GB.) 

Frederique, a theater director, performer, and academic who’s written a great-looking book on early modern science fiction, spoke about transforming philosophy into theater. Latour commented on that in the Q&A also, in what I took to be his own celebration of the transformation of his work. “It’s not an argument,” he said, “but a dance.”

The show consisted of vignettes, passed among the four actors (two men and two women) in almost stand-up style. (Frederique told us that all four actors were trained in commedia del’arte, which made perfect sense.) They performed a series of roles, including Gaia herself under several guises, one of which was a somewhat naive American scientist named Virginia.

Alongside Gaia ranged a series of figures for human knowledge, including Sherlock Hood the “goody” scientist and TED, the “baddie” corporate apologist. Prophets of doom sang out: Cassandra from the Trojan War and the prophet Philippulus from Tintin. Frank Wolff, named after the bad-but-ultimately-redeemed astronaut from Tintin, presented the story of being born to a Russian cosmonaut in orbit, with a star’s-eye view of our blue planet. Noah put on a good show as he sought funding for the Ark. King Midas showed capitalism at work.

A couple of scenes stuck with me. Around the middle of the show, the actor who played TED took a turn as a UN leader — President Obama? Secretary Ban Ki-moon? — who, obviously exhausted, reported that at last the politicians had come to a resolution to which all parties would bind themselves. “We hereby resolve,” he said, clearly relieved to have something direct to report, “to sully the earth, and leave the cleaning up to our children.”

Not all the great lines were so grim. Toward the end of the ark plot, someone — not Noah, I don’t think, but I’m not sure who — imagined trying to build “an ark for staying, not going.” This vessel would be, another replied, the earth.

Other great elements weren’t verbal at all. In one scene two lovers met at a pier. They were ambushed by hundreds of plastic water bottles dumped on top of them, but they respond eventually by repurposing the bottles into art.

The last lines that I heard posed a question about the final celebration, in which the canopy covered the audience. “You don’t know,” someone said, “if you will marry the bride, or the cake, or the knife?”

The quick-paced and enigmatic movement from scene to scene didn’t lend itself to easy allegory. Some things seemed clear enough: we need more Sherlock Hoods, fewer TEDs, sympathy for Virginia/Gaia, and to listen to Cassandra/Philippulus. I loved the speed, urgency, and sheer beauty of the production, played out beneath 50-odd helium balloons pulling the canopy upward. The project wasn’t didactic but artistic, not an argument but a dance. Just keeping pace with it was enough.

Latour addressed the question of meaning obliquely in the Q&A. The object of the play, he said, wasn’t to figure out what to do about global warming. The object instead was to help us “to be up to the task.”

I’ve been mulling that phrase since Thursday night. What does it mean to be up to the task of global climate disruptions and an unstable environment? That we learn to match a disorderly world with complex art? That we don’t assume tomorrow will be like yesterday?

The play’s two-night New York run ended on Thursday, and they gave away the balloons to members of the audience. Mine was black, about four feet around, with a noticeable upward tug as I walked out of The Kitchen with it in my hand. I wanted to bring it home to my children, but I’m sorry to report that I left it overnight in the car. It burst with the temperature change.