Sunday, July 23, 2006

Ghostlight Recommends

Remote
Kraft + Purver
"The further you are, the closer I feel to you. Stay away, please stay away..." Remote examines our attempts to connect while paradoxically maintaining a safe distance -- through the bizarre history of military experiments in psychic espionage, the mediation of intimacy through technology, and the dilemma of isolation vs. entanglement in the American psyche.

August 3 - 12 (Thur/Fri/Sat) @ 8 pm
CounterPULSE
1310 Mission Street

San Francisco
, CA
Reservations 415.435.7552


August 18 - 19 @ 8:30 pm
3LD Art & Technology Center
80 Greenwich Street
New York, NY
Reservations 212.645.0374
Part of Here's American Living Room Festival


Remote features Kraft + Purver's groundbreaking fusion of visual theatre, non-linear narrative and crafted interaction of live performers with live and recorded video. Blurring the lines between reality and projection (visual and psychological), Remote illuminates how detachment allows us the grace of perspective and the capacity for violence.

By Kraft + Purver; directed and performed by Sara Kraft & Ed Purver.

Friday, July 14, 2006

Curious Knots

There's a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists. In the West we become famous effigies as our books lose power to shape and influence...Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated.
Don Delillo, Mao II

Ghostlight Recommends

Rufus Corporation
The Rape of the Sabine Women
July 6 – Sept. 24, 2006
The Nasher Museum
2001 Campus Drive
Duke University
Durham, NC

Featuring Annette Previti, Walter Sipser, Jeff Wood, Helen Pickett, Sofie Zamchick and Nesbitt Blaisdell, Marilisa Chronea, Stergios Ioannou, Grayson Millwood, Fergus Baumann, Zach Zamchick, Katarina Oikonomopoulou, Rosa Prodromou, Antonis Spinoulas, Christos Syrmakezis, and Sotiris Tsakomidis.

Choreographer Claudia de Serpa Soares, costume designer Karen Young, composer Jonathan Bepler, musicians Geoff Gersh, Eric Hubel, Scott Moore, Bradford Reed & Craig Rodriguez. Special guest artists include Greek vocalist Savina Yannatou, German dramaturge Ricoh Gerbl, Greek film star Themis Bazaka, & director of photography Sergei Franklin.

Read more about Eve Sussman and Rufus Corporation here, here, and here (PAJ article is titled Fiction Against Reality, The Rufus Corporation). Interview with performers Katarina Oikonomopoulou & Walter Sipser here. See the Poussin here.

Mendacity

Mendacity. What do you know about mendacity? I could write a book on it...Mendacity. Look at all the lies that I got to put up with. Pretenses. Hypocrisy. Pretendin' like I care for Big Mama, I haven't been able to stand that woman in forty years. Church! It bores me. But I go. And all those swindlin' lodges and social clubs and money-grabbin' auxiliaries. It's-it's got me on the number one sucker list. Boy, I've lived with mendacity. Now why can't you live with it? You've got to live with it. There's nothin' to live with but mendacity. Is there?
- Big Daddy, Cat on A Hot Tin Roof
Just back from spending time with the fam...

Thursday, July 06, 2006

Lightness

The De Rerum Natura of Lucretius is the first great work of poetry in which knowledge of the world tends to dissolve the solidity of the world, leading to a perception of all that is infinitely minute, light, and mobile. Lucretius set out to write the poem of physical matter, but he warns us at the outset that matter is made up of invisible particles. He is the poet of physical concreteness, viewed in its permanent and immutable substance, but the first thing he tells us is that emptiness is just as concrete as solid bodies. Lucretius' chief concern is to prevent the weight of matter from crushing us. Even while laying down the rigorous mechanical laws that determine every event, he feels the need to allow atoms to make unpredictable deviations from the straight line, thereby ensuring freedom both to atoms and to human beings. The poetry of the invisible, of infinite unexpected possiblities - even the poetry of nothingness - issues from a poet who had no doubts whatever about the physical reality of the world.