Ghostlight Recommends

Godfellas
San Francisco Mime Troupe










Previews
Saturday, July 1 at Precita Park, Bernal Heights
Sunday, July 2 at Dolores Park, Mission District
Live music 1:30 pm, Show 2 pm

Premiere
Tuesday, July 4 at Dolores Park, Mission District
Live music 1:30 pm, Show 2 pm

Tickets are free. Pass-the-Hat donations after the show.
Full summer schedule here or call 415-285-1717.

Written by Jon Brooks, Christian Cagigal, Eugenie Chan, & Michael Gene Sullivan. Music and Lyrics by Bruce Barthol, Amos Glick, & Pat Moran. Performed by Velina Brown, Christian Cagigal, Lisa Hori-Garcia, Keiko Shimosato, Michael Gene Sullivan, & Victor Toman.

Better Living Through Fiction

Willem Dafoe

I think all the characters I play are basically me. I believe under the right circumstances we're all capable of anything, and that acting allows the deepest part of your nature to surface- and you're protected by the fiction as it happens.

from Why Act In Theater?

Babylon Heights

Oz
Munchkins

Orgies
Suicide
1935 Hollywood

What more could one ask for? - MT

Babylon Heights by Irvine Welsh and Dean Cavanagh opened this week at the Exit Theater in San Francisco. James Reese, a founding director of the San Jose Stage Company, directs. Produced by Blackburger Shows and Christie Ward.

June 14 - July 1
Wed - Sat @ 8pm
$20 general, $15 students. For reservations or info: 415-249-9332.

Exit Theatre
156 Eddy Street
San Francisco, CA

"The first job of a writer is to be honest," he says. Transgression, he believes, is all relative in a world in which rebellion is commodified as music, fashion and video games: "To genuinely transgress is actually quite difficult."

Interviews with Welsh here and here.

Toute Bouge

Jacques Le Coq

Toute bouge. Tout é volue, progresse. Tout ricochette et se reverbere. D'un point a un autre, pas des ligne droite. D'un port, a un voyage. Tout bouge, moi aussi! Le bonheur el le malheur, mais le heurt aussi. Un point indecis, fous, confus, se dessine, Pointe de convergences, Tentation d'un point fixe, Dans une calme de toutes les passions. Point d'appui et point d'arrivee, Dans ce qui n'a ni commencement ni fin. Le nommer, Le rendre vivant, Lui donner autorite Pour mieux comprende ce qui bouge, Pour mieux conprende le Mouvement.

Everything moves. Everything develops and progresses. Everything rebounds and resonates. From one point to another, the line is never straight. From harbor to harbor, a journey. Everything moves...as do I! Joy and sorrow, confrontation too. A vague point appears, hazy and confused, A point of convergence, The temptation of the fixed point, In the calm of all the passions. Point of departure and point of destination, In what has neither beginning nor end. Naming it, Endowing it with life, Giving it authority For a better understanding of what moves A better understanding of what Movement is.

Interview with Simon McBurney here.

Butoh Image

Thanks, Mic.

Ghostlight Recommends

Banana Bag & Bodice at the Ontological Theater

The Sewers
A conjuring act: an entire, albeit, tiny village (pop. 3) mysteriously appears one night in a theater. All the children are dead. An acid plant in a barnshack. A triangular shaped love tryst. This show is a tour de force by manipulation.

June 30 - July 3, July 6 - 10,
July 13 - 16, July 19 - 22 at 8pm
St. Mark's Church, 131 East 10th Street at 2nd Avenue
New York, NY

$17 adults and $12 students available here or call Theater Mania at 212-352-3101.

Written by Jason Craig. Arranged by the ensemble: Jason craig, Rod Hipskind, Jessica Jeliffe, Dave Malloy, & Heather Peroni. Direction by Mallory Catlett and Rod Hipskind. Set Design by Peter Ksander, Lighting Design by Miranda Hardy, and original music by Dave Malloy.

More about BB & B here. Brooklyn Rail interview with Jason Craig here.

Theatre of Yugen Presents
Nature Theatre of Oklahoma

Raw Egg

A multi-media performance exploring the relationships between humankind, technology and nature in an attempt to find a path towards balance.

June 28 & 29 at 8pm

NOHspace
2840 Mariposa @ Florida Street
San Francisco, CA

$15 or $10 Students & Seniors. For reservations call 415.621-7978.

Featuring violinist Markus Hawkins, video artist and sculptor Tobias Tovera, and dancers Chi-Jen Hung, Colleen Tani Nakamoto, Denise Ho, Hsiu Mei Ho, Iu-Hui Chua and Youki Kato. More about the company here.

Fate and Terror

James Agee

Above all else: in God’s name don’t think of it as Art. Every fury on earth has been absorbed in time, as art, or as religion, or as authority in one form or another. The deadliest blow the enemy of the human soul can strike is to do fury honor. Swift, Blake, Beethoven, Christ, Joyce, Kafka, name me a one who has not been thus castrated. Official acceptance is the one unmistakable symptom that salvation is beaten again, and is the one surest sign of fatal misunderstanding, and is the kiss of Judas.

Really it should be possible to hope that this be recognized as so, and as a mortal and inevitably recurrent danger. It is scientific fact. It is disease. It is avoidable. Let a start be made. And then exercise your perception of it on work that has more to tell you than mine has. See how respectable Beethoven is; and by what right any wall in museum, gallery or home presumes to wear a Cezanne; and by what idiocy Blake or work of even such intention as mine is ever published and sold. I will tell you a test. It is unfair. It is untrue. It stacks all the cards. It is out of line with what the composer intended. All so much the better.

Get a radio or a phonograph capable of the most extreme loudness possible, and sit down to listen to a performance of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony or of Schubert’s C-Major Symphony. But I don’t mean just sit down and listen. I mean this: Turn it on as loud as you can get it. Then get down on the floor and jam your ear as close into the loudspeaker as you can get it and stay there, breathing as lightly as possible, and not moving, and neither eating nor smoking or drinking. Concentrate everything you can into your hearing and into your body. You won’t hear it nicely. If it hurts you, be glad of it. As near as you will ever get, you are inside the music; not only inside it, you are it; your body is no longer your shape and substance, it is the shape and substance of the music.

Is what you hear pretty? or beautiful? or legal? or acceptable in polite or any other society? It is beyond any calculation savage and dangerous and murderous to all equilibrium in human life as human life is; and nothing can equal the rape it does on all that death; nothing except anything, anything in existence or dream, perceived anywhere remotely toward its true dimension.

Beethoven said a thing as rash and noble as the best of his work. By my memory, he said: “He who understands my music can never know unhappiness again.” I believe it. And I would be a liar and a coward and one of your safe world if I should fear to say the same words of my best perception, and of my best intention.

Performance, in which the whole fate and terror rests, is another matter.

James Agee, Let Us Now Praise of Famous Men

Under the Weather

Sorry to slack off on the posts, seems I've caught a heinous stomach bug from the kiddies. Petri dishes! I've said it once, I'll say it again. Kids are petri dishes! But I love both of mine. It's been quite a bonding experience to have the whole fam sick. We're lounging around watching lot's of Fraggle Rock dvds and drinking apple juice.

What's Happened to Us?

Parabasis posts Eduardo Machado's speech from earlier this week.

Here are a couple of excerpts:

Excerpt 1.
When someone tells me, "We are not interested in your play, it's about Cubans, what do we know about Cubans?" What do you know about Russians, Germans and the Brits? But you do them. I would prefer you told me the play was not good enough.

Or, during my play "Broken Eggs," when a producer said to me, "Since the bride's family is Cuban we should just get really tacky costumes on fourteenth st."

Or "Listen Eduardo when they commissioned the play, they heard your name and they were expecting Carmen Miranda... You gave them Ibsen." Who knew a comparison to Ibsen could be a put down?

I have given every piece of my existence to my plays. I have compromised and sacrificed to be a part of the theater. But when I hear things like this I hear the message underneath. You are not one of us. You don't belong here.

Excerpt 2.
What kind of theatre is it that asks whether or not it should censor itself. Is that even a question? And I am not just blaming New York Theatre Workshop, "Rachel Corrie" is just the most recent example. I am blaming all of us. Myself included. Even if I wanted to say everything all at once. I feel the wall. I know the words I dare not utter. Even in this speech.

What's happened to us?

Lorca died because he opposed the fascists in his community. If Ibsen's producers would have thought about their community the characters in "Ghosts" would not have had syphilis. Nora would have ended up staying home. And not slamming that door. What is going on?

I don't feel we are brave enough. I feel the theatre that I see for the most part is watered down.

It's getting ugly out there. Let's show it as much as we can on our stages.

And I beg you let us stop being afraid of the audience. They are supposed to be afraid of us.

Mikel Rouse & Glenn Gould

Mikel Rouse
Check out the interview under Listening.
Interview here.

Glenn Gould

The Idea Of North (excerpts from Gould's Radio documentaries)

Excerpt from Glenn Gould: A Life in Pictures

Gould's essay: The Prospects of Recording

Solitude, Exile and Ecstasy
Theme and Variations in Words and Music

A radio music-drama devised by Bruce Charlton


So why Rouse and Gould? It's a way of pointing at a destination. The vocal quality - rhythmically, poetically, and dynamically are relavent to what I'm trying to achieve in my own writing, but also get at the underlying force of my directing - a sense of musicality that I'm aiming for.

We read Hanke's Offending the Audience in the studio yesterday. Regardless of the controversy surrounding his political affiliations, we find it a worthy piece to contemplate. The text requires the actors to deliver their lines with a sustained presence. Vocally, they maintain a neutrality towards the text; they do not get in the way of the words, of the wordplay. Meaning is always already there. It accumulates. The actor is a transmitter, a radio.

Questions:
What do the words do?
And what of the audience? What is an audience?
What cultural context is specific to 1966 Germany? In what ways does that context anchor the play to a specific time and in what ways is context immaterial?

Tempo & Rhythm

Tempo
If you listen in the New York theatre you will very commonly hear actor after actor take the tempo of his speech from the speech that has just been spoken. And so it happens sometimes that for a whole scene the tempo of all the speeches have about the same measure. I doubt if the average producer ever thinks one way or the other about the subject.

But the vitality behind dramatic art makes it necessarily true that every part has in itself its general tempo, its time-pattern; and the same is true of every single speech. What is true of visual design is true for the ear also: that every section of the play is a time-centre in itself, to which surrounding parts are related; all these centres in their turn are related to larger centres and so on.

A study of tempo by our actors would help mend two of the worst faults on our stage, monotony and lack of speed. And the achievement of more variety and speed would help to clear away the idly imitative, the realistic clutter now so much in the way of the art of theatre. And finally a study of tempo leads to better diction, to more flexible characterization, and to a sharper impress of the dramatic pattern involved.

Rhythm

Art is a process of expressing one part of life in terms of another. An architect expresses the life of his dreams and ideas in terms of his life with visual solid forms. A singer may pour into sound his erotic experience. For this reason it is true that art is not art at all except in so far as it is alive. The characteristic of the living is that it never is at rest but is a perpetual rhythm of change. A moment approaches its most complete establishment, it arrives, but even as it arrives it is breaking down into what comes after. Save for this rhythm toward and from itself, it would be dead; it is alive only in this relative life. The same holds true of all movement on stage; all of it derives from an unbroken rhythm of the actor's thought, and is alive only within a rhythm of the body that from the actor's entrance to his exit is continuous.

Stark Young, Theatre Practice