In which our Diva's DVD collection is growing again
Earlier this week I finally saw Agora, an extraordinary film that I didn't have the opportunity to catch during its brief visit to US cinema screens. I'd wanted to ever since I read about it at Women & Hollywood, both because I will happily watch Rachel Weisz do pretty much anything and because Alejandro Amenabar previously directed The Others, which is for my money the best haunted-house film ever made.
Agora, of course, is a completely different kind of movie, but no less beautiful, meticulous, or thought-provoking. It's one of those movies that make me thankful I don't have the mental wiring that makes people get huffy about storytellers taking dramatic license with history, because it's highly unlikely (though, as their astronomy consultant points out in the behind-the-scenes material on the DVD, not wholly implausible) that Hypatia of Alexandria actually hit on all the principles featured in the film. (I'm not even touching the anachronistic charge of "witchcraft," which made even me wince a bit, even while putting me in mind of my beloved Dangerous Beauty.) But oh, how magical to watch her grapple with those ideas, beginning with the soul-shattering leap of faith represented by the heliocentric model of the heavens -- coming to grips point-blank with the realization that we are not at the center of the cosmos -- and leading inexorably to letting go of the "purity" of the circle and placing Earth's orbit on an ellipse. Even more fascinating, she reaches the solution we know is correct (and know must be coming; if there's a conic section on the mantelpiece in Act 3, you know it'll be fired in Act 5! *g*) through the prism of the knowledge of her time, and therefore deduces a rather different model for "why" than that which Johannes Kepler bequeathed to us 1200 years later.
If the preceding paragraph has made your eyes glaze over, don't let it stop you from watching the movie, because it's not really about the science. It's about Hypatia's passion for the science. Which, if you look at the posters and most of what was written about it when it came out, is fairly obvious.
Then a funny thing happened, and it seems to have happened in the U.S. distribution phase. First, there's the redesigned-for-American-market DVD cover. Then the synopsis on IMDb, and the one on the DVD envelope from I got from Netflix, tells us that it's about a slave named Davus who, among other things, falls in love with his mistress. The Netflix synopsis doesn't even name her.
Now, I'm the first to agree that Davus' journey in the film is as rich and complex as Hypatia's, and I'll definitely be keeping an eye out in the future for more from Max Minghella, whose performance absolutely makes it a compelling journey to follow. I'd certainly go as far as to call him a second lead. But Davus is not the center of the film. He's one of several men in Hypatia's orbit, none of whom is her lover (albeit not for lack of trying), which is even more baffling to the Hollywood mindset. She is explicitly described by several of the creative team in the documentary material as the sun at the center of the film's cosmos, and I can't imagine watching the film through and not coming away with that impression.
The other thing I find a bit depressing (albeit unsurprising) is the amount of commentary I've seen that interprets the film as anti-Christian. The comment thread on on the trailer on YouTube has voices both agreeing with and offended by the perceived condemnation. But there is no such condemnation. There is a great deal said about how bringing religion into the political mix makes it that much easier for human beings to rationalize their own abuse of power.
Have there always been so many people who don't know the difference between the two? Certainly in the fifth-century Alexandria of this film, that would appear to be the case. And that's the larger tragedy, above and beyond the death of one brilliant and committed woman.
In which our Diva is thoroughly disgusted, but also hopeful
Earlier this week, I tweeted: Andrew Wakefield made a fortune by lying, without regard for harm to others. Last I checked, the word for that was "sociopath." That's pretty much all I have to say on the topic. It will be years before we'll be able to calculate the damage done by the falsified study linking vaccines to autism, if indeed it ever stops posing health risks and lining the pockets of a whole legion of quacks preying on desperate parents.
Also in the last few days, there's a lesser-known (and let's pray he stays that way) sociopath by the name of Kenneth Tong tweeting an endless stream of hardcore pro-ana propaganda and touting an alleged "size zero pill" that will make everything all better. Never heard of him? Neither had I. Apparently he was on Big Brother for about seventeen seconds before getting booted for threatening a housemate. This post on the blog "A Very Public Sociologist" sums up quite well which rock this individual crawled out from under, what makes him tick, and why paying any attention to him plays into his greedy little hands.
That last is why I hesitate to mention him at all, but I've come to the conclusion that it's important for a variety of reasons. I still refuse to link directly to anything of his, and have in fact set him to "blocked" on both Twitter and Facebook. Not that he would notice or care, but my hope is that a wave of users doing so will be noticed by the services in question, which are unfortunately unlikely to ban him regardless of at least one e-petition calling for it. (Not linking to that either, not because I don't agree with the sentiment, but because they don't work. Spend your energy elsewhere.) Unfortunately, I have no doubt that they regard him as nothing more than "controversial," and will continue to allow him a forum for what is nothing more nor less than hate speech. (If you don't understand why that phrase applies, spend an hour or two at Kate Harding's "Shapely Prose" archive. I used to add "and try not to say anything too ignorant while you're there," but then I stopped because it was fun to watch her take such comments apart. Unfortunately, she appears to have gotten burnt out on that -- and I don't blame her a bit -- but the archive remains a valuable resource.)
When references to him first popped up in my Twitter timeline a few days ago, my first thought was that it was some misfired attempt at "ironic" hipster misogyny, following the current trend in (so-called) humor of spouting things so outrageously, offensively bigoted that surely no one could take them seriously, so we must know the speaker is joking! That's apparently how you're supposed to tell that it's funny, and if you don't laugh, well, you must be the humor-deficient one. (Hint: No.)
I've since come to the conclusion that, while he might end up claiming retroactively to be up to something like that (see also: "It was a social experiment!"), there's nothing remotely so clever going on. Just some guy who may or may not understand, but certainly doesn't care, that he's doing very real harm just to get attention. And make no mistake, there is harm. Every single thing he's saying amplifies the tape already playing in the background for any woman who lives in our society, and which tyrannizes the lives of those living with eating disorders.
It may be a mixed blessing (due to the aforementioned giving him attention), but it's still cheering to see the virtually unanimous disgust in response. From high-profile figures like Rihanna and Simon Cowell, from less famous but still influential people like Being Human star Sinead Keenan and Doctor Who composer Murray Gold, and from pithy private citizens like this and this and many more. Like British educator Philip Edmundson, who's gone beyond the single-tweet statement to begin building a counter-campaign of sorts, including a link to this eloquent and heartbreaking blog post about just what it is Tong's comments are enabling.
Twitter is full of call-to-arms hashtags (enumerated and retweeted by the Kardashian sisters): #stunningnotstarving, #nosizezero, #curvesaresexy, #curvesarebeautiful. While I support the sincerity of those using all of them, I'm personally only using #stunningnotstarving, as I find the others problematic for a couple of reasons: #nosizezero denies the existence of the minority (however few) who are very small but healthy, and the last two are more positive but still imply a bit of exclusion. A woman of any size and shape can be stunning and not starving, so that's one I can take to heart.
What's sad and infuriating is that it took absolutely no effort for Kenneth Tong to seize his pathetic little bastion of power, because the structures are already in place. Every word he's tweeting is part of the basic formula women get from every direction every day they live in our culture:
What you weigh is how you look. How you look is whether you're wanted. Whether you're wanted is what you're worth.
So we can ignore Tong and his blatant "if you're not thin you fail at life" (by a definition of success at life that seems to consist entirely of whether you sleep with celebrities) all we want, but the message will still be there, and in more insidious forms. I'm not immune. Neither are women of my acquaintance who, even while expressing their disgust with Tong's comments, had the courage to admit he affected their food choices that day.
Which brings me to the good news: Long before this creature crawled out from under his rock, the opposition was in place. And it's gaining momentum. In the BodyHeart Campaign, which also came to my attention via Twitter, thanks to Dollhouse star Miracle Laurie. In the Viola Project, bringing out the power of young women through the power of Shakespeare's words. In the increasing public awareness of the extent to which fashion images are retouched and manipulated, which is just beginning to build into a backlash. In the documentary Superskinny Me, in which two British journalists discover firsthand the destructive consequences of the "race to size double zero" even under close medical supervision. And now in the stream of tweets calling Kenneth Tong out on his douchebaggerie, and the fact that they vastly outnumber the heartbreaking ones -- every single one accompanied by an avatar depicting a perfectly attractive young woman -- asking him where to get his magical miracle pill. (My money's on some of those being sockpuppet accounts designed to feed into the publicity machine, which is that much more disgusting, but might also mean that many fewer victims falling for his flimflam.) Edit: Thanks to long-time friend Mandy, who brought my attention to this amazing community of Harry Potter fans, who focus on a different real-life "horcrux" (the word for a type of curse in the HP universe) each month, and who happen to be discussing body image this month. Serendipity!
This issue is nothing new. It's not the first time I've blogged about it, and it won't be the last. It'll be back the next time the camel's back breaks, and I trust you'll bear with me.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a nice healthy dinner to cook. All that misogynist claptrap is making me hungry.
Song for Today: I know I've named Saving Jane's "One Girl Revolution" before, but I can't think of anything more appropriate or inspiring. Raise your hand!
P.S.: If I ever say to you, individually, that you're beautiful, you're gorgeous, you're anything wonderful I happen to feel like calling you? I'm not blowing smoke. I'm not just trying to make you feel better, or making empty noises to puff up your self-esteem. I'm saying it because I believe it is true, pure and simple. Contradict me if you absolutely must, but know that your energy would be better spent trying to teach a pig to sing. :-)
In which our Diva is never quite sure where she picked them all up
On a shelf in my spare room closet, there are four hatboxes full of vintage hats, mostly from the 50s and 60s. A few belonged to my grandmother. Several more (and two of the hatboxes) came from a friends' parents' garage sale a few years ago. And there are a couple I honestly don't remember how I came by.
I seem to accumulate metaphorical hats in much the same way.
I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't love to have a higher proportion of gigs where I'm simply an actor. Where I can give all my energy to showing up and playing my character, confident that all the other details are someone else's job and that someone else is doing it. But that's just not the career I get (at least so far), and mostly I'm okay with that. Though occasionally I think I should have kept my big mouth shut before it uttered "I could..." *wry g*
Of course, if I haven't learned to do that by now, I don't think I'm going to. Way back in 1994, when arts organizations having websites was just a novelty, I put together the first one for Rosebriar Shakespeare Company, my second home for most of the ten years I lived in Columbus. A couple years later, I did the same for BalletMet Columbus, where my then-day-job was in an unrelated department of the admin office. Appropriately for a nationally-respected company, they've long since moved on to a far more sophisticated and professional site than I know how to design.
Which didn't stop me from opening my big mouth when Elgin Opera's need for an updated and integrated web presence became more obvious every time I tried to plug an event to my plugged-in social circle. Mind you, I can't complain about that one since (a) we got an infrastructure grant this year to pay me for it, and (b) at the end of a frustrating few months, I now know how to make Joomla do a number of things I didn't previously know how to make it do. Yay, knowledge!
For Scarlet X, I actually could have gotten away with just being an actor. And I could pretend that's what I'm doing, pretend it's a better-endowed project where a very small team isn't trying to do the work of a much bigger one. But you know what? They are, and they deserve credit for it. I'm not the only one stepping up to the hyphenate plate to make this thing happen. This weekend, that meant a bit of copywriting for the website (coming soon!) and promo materials, and discovering that capsule character descriptions (60 to 70ish words) are harder than they look. Still, I was here, I'm decent at slinging words around, and this way we're closer to having a website I can send you to. Everybody wins!
And then, every once in a while, a project happens because I'm a dyed-in-the-wool DIYer who can't keep her volunteering hand from shooting into the air. That would be Resonance, where my rather eccentric and eclectic mix of skills, interests, and thought processes happened to converge in just the right way at the right time to land me on a bus going some very cool places indeed. (About which I still can't really tell you anything, but there are a bunch of people doing a bunch of stuff that will start bearing fruit soon. Promise!)
There are stories to tell, stories I believe in. And when they need more from me than just acting, they feel that much more mine, that much more like home. I'll take that trade.
From writer/director Travis Legge and the whole Plastic Age Productions team. Not content with being up to his eyebrows in final post-production on Travis' debut feature Raymond Did It, we shot this short just last weekend, and the crack team had it completed and online for Christmas morning.
I love these people. And you're pretty darn cool too! Have a very merry Christmas, and/or a blessed (if belated) light-filled winter holiday of another tradition.
Or rather, the weekend before it. To wit, shooting this heartwarming tale of holiday togetherness:
If I thought a camera could capture what I see looking out my window right now, I'd snap a photo. Snow and fog, just at the edge of twilight. Magical. But I think a photo would just end up looking dreary. So ephemeral, these things.
I saw Black Swanthe other day. Like pretty much everyone else, I was blown away. Like Roger Ebert, I almost immediately wanted to rewatch The Red Shoes, something I haven't done in several years. That's partly because, though it's one of my all-time favorite films, it is -- for some of the same reasons as Black Swan, albeit not as intensely -- not always easy to watch.
(Here's where things get a bit spoilery, despite my best efforts to avoid it. If you haven't seen Black Swan and want to avoid preconceptions, stop reading and come back later. The post will still be here.)
As Ebert's review notes, Black Swan harks back to The Red Shoes in ways large and small, almost certainly deliberate, and not least among them the ending. There's a critical difference, though: The Red Shoes' Vicky Page has a life -- romance, interests, independence -- and the film follows the domino effect of choices she makes to sacrifice all of that on the altar of her art. Black Swan's Nina Sayers, as the film makes painfully clear within the first few minutes, has never had such a life. She seems barely conscious that such a thing is even possible; her entire world is the theatre, the apartment she shares with her mother, and the subway ride in between.
In a way, Vicky has been fragmented into two characters: Nina and rival (?) newcomer Lily. I put that question mark there for a reason, one that I'm not seeing discussed very much. There's rumination aplenty on Natalie Portman's performance, complete with deconstruction of the sociopolitical ramifications of what she put her mind and body through to achieve it. There's commentary on the creepily controlling mother and domineering artistic director. And all that is undeniably interesting, and I could get into it, but I'd mostly be saying stuff that's been said elsewhere.
What I haven't run across, what I'm finding myself thinking about more and more in the day and a half since I sat staring, slightly stunned, at the closing credits, is this: Lily is the "black swan," the glamorous, insidious threat, because the drama playing out in Nina's mind -- and everything we see is through Nina's eyes -- requires it. And the more I think about it, the clearer it becomes to me that not only is Lily ill-cast in the role, but that she is in fact the one and only person in Nina's world who is not trying to co-opt her life.
To the extent that we can separate the actions of the real Lily from the hallucinatory construct who sometimes wears Lily's face and sometimes Nina's own (and there's a point or two where that remains ambiguous), the worst we can say is that maybe she wouldn't be making such an effort to befriend Nina if Nina weren't the freshly-anointed star. But it's also perfectly possible that she really just sees a colleague who's lonely, terrified, and in desperate need of a friend.
Lily's no angel, and we may well disapprove of her casual attitude toward drugs and sex. But while the "girls' night out" seems wild and utterly out of control from Nina's (and therefore the audience's) perspective, it doesn't take much thought to realize that she can't be doing that every night. She shows up reliably to work, dances well, seems to get along with pretty much everyone.
There are repeated assertions in the dialogue that Lily is charismatic and sexy because she's slightly "dangerous." This serves the point Thomas is trying to make about what Nina needs to bring to her Black Swan (and I find it curious that Odette and Odile are never referred to by name, but that's a ponder for another day), but I'm not convinced it's accurate. Lily is confident, healthy, secure. In a circus of extreme personalities, she's the unlikely poster girl for "everything in moderation." A concept so utterly beyond Nina's grasp that, through her increasingly fractured lens, it makes sense for Lily to be out to take away everything she has... which, at the end of the day, is pathetically little.
Nor does Lily have any need to do so, and it's this that Nina is particularly unequipped to understand. The shape of the drama requires that Lily be named the alternate. But it says something else, too, something that gets overlooked but which is critically important in my world: She has achieved a level of professional success very nearly on a par with Nina's without sacrificing the rest of her life. (Whether she did it without resorting to the casting couch is an open question, answerable only by knowing the sequence of events outside of Nina's perception and whether a particular event within her perception actually took place.)
The myth sold to Nina all her life, the one that's been romanticized in fiction as long as we've had fiction, is that true art is possible only through sacrifice to the point of abject misery.
It's a lie. You can be an artist and be happy. Lily is living proof, embedded directly in this latest iteration (and, to a great extent, subversion) of the classic storyline.
As for the other principal figure required by this play of archetypes, the tyrannical, abusive genius pulling the strings? He's a lie too, not because he doesn't exist but because he isn't necessary or excusable. And there are clues in the characterization of Thomas that we're meant to take some subversion away from that too. It's not as clear, maybe, but I don't think it's an accident that it's Lily -- that same voice of moderation -- who states matter-of-factly that he's a prick, and voices directly to him her concerns about how he runs his rehearsals. (Worth noting here are the stories Natalie Portman has been telling in interviews, about how Darren Aronofsky attempted to play her and Mila Kunis -- who've been close friends for years -- off as rivals, keeping them separate in ballet training and telling each that the other was "looking really good." But there's something in the amusement with which Portman relates this that makes me think Aronofsky knew perfectly well they would get together and compare notes, and that the whole thing was an oddly ironic game for all parties.)
Both of these myths -- told over and over again, and widely taken as truth by audiences -- are incredibly dangerous and damaging if an artist takes them at face value. Yes, we absolutely have to take risks. We have to sacrifice personal defenses and let strangers in where we fear to admit even those we love most. But there's a contract on both sides of that transaction, that the place we're taking that risk -- the studio, the stage -- will form the boundary of the storm, and that it need not rage beyond that boundary to wreck the rest of our lives. We have to trust those riding out the storm with us.
No genius, no results can excuse betrayal of that trust. There is no result that cannot be equally effectively achieved without such a betrayal.
All of which has tangentially reminded me of one of the reasons I adore Slings and Arrows, the acclaimed Canadian TV series about a beleaguered fictional Shakespeare festival. At the center of the series is artistic director Geoffrey Tennant, who knows a little bit about risk and loss in the name of art. That'll happen when you fall off the metaphorical tightrope and have a psychotic break in the middle of a performance of Hamlet, precipitated by failure of the two most critical strands of his net, his director and his girlfriend.
Seven years (the first several of them institutionalized) later, he winds up back at the same festival, inheriting in midstream the direction of another Hamlet. His Ophelia is a curious character named Claire, whose presence in the company despite her glaring lack of ability is never explained beyond "I think she's someone's evil niece." No one likes this woman, nor is there any particular reason they should. She's pretentious, gossipy, and smarmily duplicitous. If there were ever a situation where the audience would forgive a fictional director for launching a tyrannical tirade at a fictional actress, this is probably it.
Geoffrey does eventually reach his breaking point with her, and this is what he does:
Keep your spoiled-brat Lermontovs and Thomas LeRoys. I'm not impressed. This, my friends, is how the grownups do it.
In which our Diva is settling in for a long winter's homework session
If you're keeping score, you know I have three very different women living in my head this winter. One died 148 years ago, nine years younger than I am now. One is nearly 400 years old, and has lived most of that time under a curse and in the midst of violent circumstances. One... well, she has to wait a bit longer before you hear about her. All require me to brush up my knowledge -- ranging from decent to cursory to nonexistent -- of several very disparate subjects.
I love research. It's a running joke (albeit not a thigh-slappingly funny one) that if I couldn't be an actor, I'd want to be a dramaturg. For which, of course, there's even less demand!
Part of it is just that I'm a geek, and the bottom line is that I like to know stuff. But that's just a happy coincidence that meshes well with my firm belief in building as complete a mental foundation as possible of who a character is and the world she inhabits, so that by the time I actually step on stage or in front of the camera, I'm free to just go. To push the technical stuff (hit this mark, say these words, don't lisp around the fangs) to the back of my mind, connect with the people and events in the scene with me, and let the character live her life as honestly as can be.
It sounds utterly simple, and when it's really right, in that moment, it is. It's the stuff leading up to it that's complicated. All that stuff you hear about with the mysterious-sounding names -- sense-memory or substitution or Laban movement work or Linklater voice technique or whatever -- is just building a toolbox for making it that simple when it's time to do what we came here to do. We learn them and drill them and integrate them into our bodies and minds, with no shortage of conscious thought and effort, so that they'll be available when they're what we need and when the last thing we want to have to do is think about them.
It's like anything else: You make it look easy, because in that moment, it is. It's everything leading up to it that wasn't so much.
Doing my job right means, among other things, actively contributing to the misconception that it isn't really work. Chew on that one with your Cheerios. ;-}
Edit: Thank you to StudiesinLight for reminding me of the how this last notion played out in the comic strip 9 Chickweed Lane. It involves a ballet dancer rather than an actor, but the principle is the same (though the public is somewhat aware of the physical rigor of dance, and thus slightly more inclined to comprehend it with the label "work"), and is summarized nicely in this blog post, albeit with the blogger drawing a stereotype-reinforcing conclusion that makes me roll my eyes.
In which our Diva is polishing her holday repertoire
Yesterday I was asked on Formspring what was the most challenging song I've learned to sing. I answered that it was a tossup between the Gounod Ave Maria and "The Finer Things" from Jane Eyre, but as I think about it, it's really no contest. That Ave Maria just fills my heart and makes me cry every time, if it's sung right.
And oh, it's that "sung right" that's the kicker. The deceptively simple melody -- based on a keyboard exercise from Bach's Well-Tempered Clavichord -- leaves the singer completely exposed, with nowhere to fudge in the slightest on breath control/support and placement. Its tessitura calls for the most support, smoothness, and control right across the passagio of my particular lyric soprano voice.
In less technical terms, there's a killer ab workout going on that the audience (ideally) never sees.
You can sing it without feeling like you've done fifty crunches, and it may very well even be pretty, but there'll be something missing. (I'm looking at you, Hayley Westenra, much as I love a lot of your stuff. Though you get closer than some.) But when the mind and body and heart are in tune, and the natural instrument is Kiri Te Kanawa's, you get this.
I haven't sung it since the Elgin Opera holiday party last December, when I had a little bit of a support issue (there's only so much I can convince those gut muscles to do what I tell them when they want to clench up because I'm cold) that led to a little bit of a pitch problem, but made my mom cry anyway. December has rolled around again, and I'm singing at Villa Verone on the 5th and the 19th, so I'm working on getting it back up again.
All my adult life, the word "resonance" has been very personal in a rather literal way -- all about the bones and spaces in my body and head, and how sound spins inside them and out into a performance space. As you can see in my previous post, my relationship with the word is growing, to encompass not just the exciting project I've gotten involved in but the principle of physics that gives the project its title.
Which is, of course, the exact same thing as that personal sense I started with. The continuum of microcosm to macrocosm, in scientific or mythic terms, has always been a fascinating concept to me, and a mental image that winds through all my creative endeavors in one way or another. So when I ran across this awesome Flash toy illustrating the scale of the universe, I thought it was the coolest thing I'd seen all month. You might or might not be as childishly gleeful about it as I was, but you should definitely check it out and play with it. Slide the control and see what those words you've heard for units -- and maybe some you've never encountered -- look like in clear, cartoony color.
I've been pulling it up to play with at least once in a day, just because it makes me smile. And in a weird way, it'll be in my mind when I'm directing breath and muscle and magic to resonate from the small spaces in my body and out into the restaurant.
Song for Today: Self-evident, of course. My all-time favorite recording is Michael Ball's. It's not perfect, or even necessarily the closest to the ideal I have in my head (and there is a very clear ideal in my head, one that no real singer has ever quite sounded like), but my emotional attachment to the piece began with his performance on the 1990 holiday album recorded by Broadway and West End performers as a benefit for Save the Children. It's interesting to me that my ideal is a purely classical soprano, but I prefer Ball's rendition to those of straight-up operatic tenors.
Dunno what that means. But I know what I like and how it makes me feel, and that's knowledge of value too.
In which our Diva alliterates, ruminates and collaborates
In modern popular culture, our modes of storytelling, and of talking about stories, place a high premium on the element of surprise. We're all about the twist, the stunning revelation, the "everything changes." Creators of hotly-anticipated projects pile safeguard on safeguard to keep their story details under wraps, the spoiler mill works even harder to get the scoop on leaks, and some fans eagerly snap up those leaks while others are hard-pressed to avoid them.
With all this going on, it's hard to remember the twist isn't everything. (Even when people think it is. I seem to be the only person on the planet who liked The Village on other merits and didn't care that I saw the "twist" coming a mile away.) Not every story is "ruined" if we know or can easily guess what's going to happen. Sometimes it's just as rewarding to watch how it gets to a place we fully expect.
And sometimes it really does matter. Sometimes there's a mystery, a puzzle, a picture best built gradually, piece by piece. When you're part of telling that kind of story, you get really good at keeping your mouth shut, at keeping track of what you're allowed to tell whom and when.
For the second time this fall, I've been all cryptic lately about a new endeavor. The cryptic will be with us for a while, but I can at least stop typing Sooper Sekrit Project. (As amusing as that may be, if only to me.) Resonance isn't a whole lot shorter, but it does sound cooler. And, courtesy of a serendipitously-timed email I wasn't even sure anyone was going to read, I'm now part of its development team.
For the moment, that's all I can really say. But I was excited about the possibilities of the project before I was ever in contact with anyone involved in it, and now I've found them very much kindred spirits. I'm in, not quite on the ground floor, but certainly the first floor, of something that promises to be pretty huge. Perhaps more to the point, it's something I can't wait to see, and I get to help make it happen. Does it get any better than that?
Lots to do in the coming months, but before you know it we'll be asking: Will you help?
In which our Diva follows a flower through a labyrinth of meaning
This week marks Armistice Day, more commonly referred to as Veteran's Day here in the US, and Remembrance Day in the UK, where its specific reference to World War I tends to be more noted than here. Digital poppies have been scattered through my Twitter feed for a week or more, adorning the userpics of Brits and Canadians, many of whom are presumably also wearing fabric ones in real life.
I didn't know until I was an adult that the tradition originates with John McCrae's poem "In Flanders Field," and it wasn't until a couple years ago that I learned of the alternate tradition of wearing a white poppy, signifying hope (specifically for peace) rather than sacrifice.
All I knew when I was a kid, living in England from ages 7-10 when the Air Force stationed my dad at RAF Lakenheath, was that the British poppies came out around my birthday and were manufactured completely differently from the wire-and-crepe-paper ones I was familiar with thanks to the American Legion.
Legion and VFW poppies come out for Memorial Day (end of May, for those not in the US), which originated with the Civil War, but which in my lifetime has tended to emphasize WWII. Perhaps especially in my experience, which included, at age 5, riding in the Memorial Day parade, on the back of a red convertible generously decorated with those crepe-paper poppies, as Poppy Queen for my WWII-vet grandfather's Legion post. It was quite the day for a little girl already inclined to show off, and I still have the red pageant-style sash, long white dress, and little white gloves. (Tangential factoid: I was quite small for my age until age 13, at which point some weird biochemical switch flipped and I shot up a whole foot over the next five years. Both dress and gloves -- which I clearly remember wearing for Easter and Memorial Day that year -- look impossibly tiny now.)
The American Legion figures prominently in many of my memories of Grandpa W. I even have my original membership card for the Legion Auxiliary, issued shortly after my birth, when I was among the first granddaughters admitted to the organization when the eligibility rules changed. The point was rendered moot within months, when my dad's number came up and he became a Vietnam-era veteran, eligible for Legion membership himself.
The poppy-wearing tradition, at least in my adult lifetime (probably earlier, but I have next to no frame of reference for the civilian world during my childhood), isn't as ubiquitious in the US as in Britain and Canada, a fact that surprises me over and over again. (It shouldn't by now. It gets harder every year to find a Legionnaire to buy one from.) It happened again this morning, in a Twitter exchange with film writer Neal Romanek, an American living in London who was mystified by the poppies all around him this week until it was explained to him today. And, though almost exactly two years older than I and the child of a Vietnam vet himself, he wasn't aware of the American poppy tradition at all.
As a small child, I was perennially puzzled by the Wicked Witch of the West using a field of poppies as a weapon to stop Dorothy and her friends from reaching the Emerald City. "Something with poison in it," she crooned to the captain of her flying monkeys. I'd never seen a real poppy before we lived in England, but I knew they existed, and I knew some plants were poisonous if you ate them, so that potentially made sense. But just walking across a field putting everyone to sleep? I have a vague recollection of asking my mom about it, around the same age as my pretend-royalty-for-a-day experience. I don't remember what her explanation was, only that I didn't really understand it. In retrospect, I suspect she was at a bit of a loss for something that would make sense without recourse to L. Frank Baum's turn-of-the-century vantage point, when opiate-based medications were still freely available but their hazards widely known. Fifteen years passed between the publication of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and John McCrae's battlefield composition, and it's the latter that invokes the common European wildflower rather than its potent cultivated cousin.
None of which I knew when we moved into our housing unit at Lakenheath, with a lawn that was covered with tiny daisies in spring and early summer, and with wild poppies in late summer and fall, so thick that friends and I would run through them over and over again toward an imaginary Emerald City. That profusion is the image invoked by Sir Thomas Henry Hall Caine in his account of the famous opening of Lizzie's grave to recover the poems DGR had buried with her seven years before: "fresh poetry and new poets arose, even as they now arise, with all the abundance and timeliness of poppies in autumn." Even so, as Stephanie Pina notes in today's blog post on LizzieSiddal.com, the choice of metaphor is striking in reference to Lizzie, for whom the cultivated opium poppy, processed into laudanum, brought relief, addiction, and finally death.
It would be half a century later, on the other side of the war whose technology irrevocably changed what war meant in Western culture, that those colors would come to denote the hope and sacrifice I mentioned at the top of this post. What they meant to DGR when he conceived the painting(s) is open to interpretation and debate. Beata Beatrix is often referred to as his tribute or memorial to Lizzie, but the more I think about his repeated execution of the design, the more it feels like an attempt to make peace with her spirit. Metaphorically speaking. (Or mostly; there are those seances with the Brownings to consider.)
But it's the inside of Lizzie's head I'm trying to explore these days. There's only so far I can or should try to puzzle out Gabriel's too! (It was a pretty scary place for a while there. I don't envy him inhabiting it.)
Song for Today: When I bought Sting's Dream of the Blue Turtles, my teenage mind was completely blown by the lyrical continuum from WWI's "lost generation" to the modern lives destroyed by the drug trade. Today, 25 years later, war and the drug trade occupy the same space, where opium cultivation appeases the Taliban and puts food on the family table.
Insighful, thought-provoking post over at Hoyden About Town on Ophelia, violence, and what is and is not in the text:On Ophelia, Who Never Got to Be a Hoyden: There is no indication in the text that Hamlet harms Ophelia physically in this scene, no stage direction and no line that specifically requires such an action for it to make sense. If anything the text suggests a Hamlet who is trying to remove himself from Ophelia’s company, not run her to ground. He says ‘farewell’ three times, as well as repeatedly saying ‘go’, ‘go to’ and ‘go thy ways’. Nevertheless, the scene is often staged with Hamlet tipping over from verbal abuse of Ophelia into physical.
In which our Diva wonders how the heck that happened
Halloween down (and much fun -- my first one in this house without a show, so I finally got to hand out candy and freak out the neighborhood kids as Zombie Tinkerbell), Election Day nearly done, and birthday just around the corner! This fall has flown.
Realized I forgot in my last post to mention one of my favorite moments in the Divine Comedy reading. In Canto 26, where we encounter Ulysses and Diomedes, Virgil turns to Dante and says, essentially, "They're Greek. Better let me do the talking." Seriously, I'm barely even paraphrasing there. I was sitting next to Racole Fisher, Storefront Shakespeare's executive director, and we looked at each other and (silently) cracked up. And nobody else seemed to get it! Yes, even in the Eighth Circle of Hell, there are geeky giggles to be had.
This coming Sunday I'll be back at Villa Verone with fellow Elgin Opera singers for our periodic casual cabaret evenings. Not sure yet what other Sundays I'm going to do, but we have six of them coming up: all through November and December, with Thanksgiving and Christmas weekends off.
Meanwhile, I'm hunkered down and bundled up (getting chilly out there, and trying to keep the ol' gas bill under control), making slow but reasonably steady progress on the Lizzie project and doing various electronic housekeeping. Promo materials for Scarlet X are in the works; I'm excited to see and share them. And as always, there are other potential projects swirling in the offing, and I'll keep you posted as any of them solidify.
I know that winter is inevitably on the way, but I'm holding tight to fall, with a little assistance from another animation Daryl made from the "Cemetery Girl" photoshoot. Enjoy the pretty leaves while we got 'em!
Or most of one, anyway. First there was the reading of excerpts from the Divine Comedy, in the original Italian by classical actor Gian Paolo Poddigue and in the Longfellow translation by Storefront Shakespeare artistic director Nora Manca, who directed me as Titania last summer. I arrived to the reading a little late -- Benedictine could use a few campus maps! -- catching the first (English) pass through Canto V just as Dante and Virgil met Francesca da Rimini. I'd have been disappointed to miss that, not just because I didn't want to walk in on Nora's performance any later than I had to, but because the wallpaper on both my netbook and my Office of Doom computer is Rossetti's three-panel watercolor illustrating that very passage. (Perfect for a widescreen monitor! Lizzie's self-portrait works better on the 4:3 monitor on my home desktop.)
Something I read recently (can't recall at the moment what it was; I've long since passed the point where all the research sort of runs together in my head) asserted that DGR missed the point, that Paolo and Francesca weren't really in love, but just gave in to momentary lust, and were actually being punished by being trapped together in the second circle with the rest of the lustful. I thought at the time that that didn't seem quite right, but it had been too long since I encountered what Francesca actually says. Which certainly doesn't sound to me like it tracks with this person's opinion, whether in Dante's words or Longfellow's translation! Maybe they didn't like the idea of true lovers being damned just because of that pesky adultery thing?
I got to meet Gian Paolo briefly after the reading, and attempt to chat in my poco poco Italiano, but it's a bit too poco for much of a chat. It's enough to follow a bit of poetry with context or, better yet, a translation fresh in my head, so it was a lovely evening all in all.
In a similar vein, on Saturday I scored a side-by-side edition of Vita Nuova on clearance at Half Price Books for two bucks. \o/ Hopefully the translation is better than the one I picked up a few years back, which I was unable to read due to its being BORING AS LINT, and which went in the donation pile after three attempts. Of course, if this one isn't better, I can jump to the Italian for a challenge. It joins the gorgeous blank book, bound in red paisley brocade, that I picked up there on my last trip for Lizzie-related jottings and sketches. It's been christened with a few of the former, but I haven't quite attempted the latter yet. It's been ages and ages since I was drawing regularly, and I need to get back in the habit.
The final bit of serendipity came this morning on Twitter, when I unexpectedly heard from Lucinda Hawksley. She's the author of the biography of Lizzie that languished on my Amazon wishlist for about four years before I happened on Stephanie Pina's interview with her on LizzieSiddal.com, and discovered that it was available under an(other) alternate title. I was having a brief conversation over there the other day about the one-woman show project, and guess the mention of Lizzie's name came up on Lucinda's radar. So chalk up another interested -- and interesting! -- party looking to see what this thing becomes. Keeping me honest and keeping me working!
In which our Diva appears on a talk show in a very small, very cute car
Life has been so busy recently, I completely forgot about this until I looked at Derek Dow's blog this morning. Live From Sour Apple is not actually live (as you can tell by our summery attire!), but was recorded in "Sour Apple," as Derek christened the Fiesta he drove as one of the promotional agents Ford selected in a nationwide competition. Sour Apple has returned home now, but Derek's clever talk show lives on, with a number of installments still on the schedule, featuring a variety of Chicago entertainers and creative folk.
He's a dizzyingly busy guy, seizing every opportunity for an up-and-coming filmmaker that comes his way, with his biggest project right now being a master's degree at USC Film School. Looking forward to seeing him become a big-name director!
With the blessing of creator Derry Sexton, I'm excited to announce that I'm playing the vampire heroine known as Scarlet in the upcoming urban-fantasy webseries Scarlet X.
As it turns out, I'm one of the final pieces put into place, so last week was a whirlwind of wardrobe shopping, learning lines, and going straight into filming with a cast that has already been working together for a while. (A long while, in some cases. Derry first conceived this universe in 2002, initially as an animated project, and has been workshopping the live-action version for several years, with a good chunk of the same team.) I'm grateful that they made me feel welcome as I jumped in with both feet.
Luckily for the circumstances, this first webisode initially establishes some of the key relationships of the series, notably between Scarlet and the young girl with the Great Big Destiny whom she's been charged to protect. Shaolin is a great kid, and I felt at home right away with her and the rest of the ensemble. (Saturday began with five women gabbing away in an SUV while the last stragglers made their way through some hairy road-construction delays. Love it!)
I have a nifty-looking sword, some formidable enemies, 380 years of complicated to play with, and an open-ended world for it all to play out in. If you know me at all, you can guess how happy this makes me.
It's an ambitious project, to be sure, being realized by a small team with not a lot of money. So we're starting fairly small, with a three-section season that will take us through the end of 2011. This first section, which will be divided into three 8-to-10-minutes webisodes, is wrapped and in post-production, with a rollout planned near the beginning of the year. The second will be filmed in April, and the third in August. And then, we'll see from there...
I'll definitely keep you all posted on promo materials as they become available, and beg you shamelessly to pass them on! This whole mode of storytelling is still in its infancy, and heaven knows any new project needs all the grass-roots support it can get. This thing has the potential to be a pretty big deal, and I'd love to see that happen.
Posting on the fly, as I learn lines and get my set bag together to shoot on location in the woods all weekend. This is the exciting new webseries project I've been cryptically babbling about (shush! babbling can too be cryptic!) on Twitter all week, and I promise to give you all the details just as soon I can! In the meantime, I can tell you it involves quite a few of my favorite things: Playing with swords, urban fantasy, history, a story driven mostly by an array of awesome women, and a rich, complex character I can really dig into. I'm loving every minute, and can't wait to tell you all about it.
In the meantime, I can tell you to come check out Elgin Opera's annual benefit dinner and performance on Sunday, October 24. I'll be singing with the ensemble in several numbers, and enjoying the costumes (I love anything that extends my Halloween), the amazing artists joining us as soloists, and the unfailingly scrumptious Italian food at Villa Verone. Check out the website for all the details, and I hope to see you there! We're also still gladly accepting items for the silent auction, so if you'd like to contribute in that way, please call the office at (847) 695-5014.
Fall in the Fox Valley is gorgeous, with lots of old-growth trees turning amazing colors and shedding their leaves. Last weekend I went out to the nearby Bluff City Cemetery to work with photographer Daryl Darko on his ongoing "Cemetery Girl" project. Check out this cool animation he created using over 1600 photos from the session!
In which our Diva is all for a bit of blood on one's hands
Some of you lovely folks follow the horror blogosphere, but I think most don't, so you may not be aware of the buzz around this weekend's watershed release of Hatchet II.
What makes it watershed, as discussed in more detail in this article over at Dread Central, is that it marks the first theatrical release of an unrated horror movie in over 25 years. If the experiment proves financially viable for AMC Theatres, it could pave the way for commercial release of more envelope-pushing independents, with their content intact, on big screens. The current discussion is centering on horror, obviously, but the ripples could be felt in other genres as well.
Now, maybe none of this is your bag. Maybe it makes no difference to you whether that edgy film with the niche audience turns up for a day or two at an art house if the filmmakers are lucky, or just goes straight to DVD... or maybe, just maybe, occupies a showing or two a day on one of the 20 or 30 screens in the typical suburban multiplex. And that's just it: If you don't want to see a movie, it makes no difference where you don't see it. But for those who do want to see it, and for those who made it, that single screen for a few hours a day makes all the difference in the world.
We're not talking about blockbusters here. We're not talking about tearing down Western civilization as we know it. (Though I'm sure it'll be about 45 seconds before someone takes that position, if they haven't already.) We're talking about one more little chink in the homogeneity of an industry dominated by international conglomerates whose corporate hive minds only comprehend numbers in the hundreds of millions.
Travis Legge, who directed me in Raymond Did It this past summer, is one of those filmmakers watching the developments with keen interest. He's lost a lot of sleep in the last few months, making apparently arbitrary edits, just to get the all-important MPAA green band for a trailer.
I had the opportunity to see Cyrus: Mind of a Serial Killer at last weekend's Chicago Horror Film Festival, but it didn't occur to me until later in the week that we're probably in the same boat with that one. No rating was mentioned at the screening, and I don't know whether it's been submitted for one, but to my eye it's on the edge of what makes the R grade. Our Mark Vadik took home the festival's award for Best Director, and mentioned during a brief Q&A that we're now an Anchor Bay property, with release expected early next year. It remains to be seen what form that release will take, but you can bet the company is keeping a very interested eye on what develops from this Hatchet II thing.
Which brings us to a bit of a kicker: Everybody goes for the R because everybody knows it's financial suicide to release NC-17. Thing is, I remember when NC-17 was the "respectable" relabeling of the X rating, which had been thoroughly appropriated by the porn industry. (If you've ever run across the fact that the MPAA has trademarked their ratings, and wondered why, that's the reason.) All either rating ever meant was "No children under 17 will be allowed in to see this." Every other bit of associated baggage has alchemized out of the collision of conservative culture and marketing. (You could get another whole article about the advent of PG-13 in the 80s, and whole books have been written about the Hays Code, for which the MPAA was designed as the forward-thinking, filmmaker-freeing replacement!)
In the long run, in the best case scenario of what indie filmmakers are hoping for, "unrated" will eventually become the new NC-17, and we'll have to play this game all over again. But in the meantime, maybe some films that deserve a life beyond the video shelf will get one.
In which our Diva seeks musical inspiration yet again
A friend recently pointed out a curious thing about the Pre-Raphaelites as a group that should have been obvious, but which had never occurred to me: None of them really cared a fig about music. They drew or painted people making and listening to it, and DGR drove people nuts by humming constantly while he worked, but they didn't think of it in the same artistic terms as the disciplines where they made their mark: painting, poetry, design.
Which hasn't stopped a variety of recording artists from being directly or indirectly inspired by them. The second half of Kate Bush's Hounds of Love is a mini-concept album called The Ninth Wave, with a secondary album "cover" intentionally based on Millais' Ophelia. Broadway star Rebecca Luker's last album features a lovely setting of a Christina Rossetti poem. And if you've ever seen or heard Loreena McKennitt, well.
The voice of my Lizzie is coming more easily as I write, and as with many characters I've played, I've assembled a playlist for her. Because unlike the PRs, I am very much a musical creature! Like the show, the playlist is a work in progress, and will probably shift a lot by the time I'm ready to put this baby on stage. (And suggestions, if you have them, are always welcome!) But for now, this is what I'm writing to.
I didn't set out for quite so much of it to speak to her relationship with Gabriel, since part of my intention has always been to bring out her own point of view, which history has tangled so inextricably with his. But then she did that herself to a large extent, and I'm finding my way more to acknowledging and dealing with that, while keeping the story very much hers. It remains to be seen if I succeed.
At least one of the above is equally applicable to the Lizzie and Gabriel of the BBC's rollicking and gorgeous Desperate Romantics, as evidenced by this fan-made music video. Inspiration abounds!
In which our Diva has rather a wide range of projects
Ooops! I really didn't mean to go nearly a month between posts, but I got really busy with auditions and geekiness. The latter involved getting ready for and attending Wizard World Chicago Comic-Con and Dragon*Con, both of which were ridiculous amounts of fun.
Now they're done, and I've emerged from my sewing room to find that Cyrus: Mind of a Serial Killer will be screened at the Chicago Horror Film Festival, September 24-26. The movie will be shown on Sunday evening, and is up for several festival awards. After all the pouting I've been doing about not being able to make it to the other events where it's screened (okay, I'm still going to pout about London!), I'm seriously stoked to get to see it on a big screen locally! If you come out for it, I'd love to chat at the event.
With other projects taking precedence, I've only just now finally edited my video diary for Storefront Shakespeare's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream this past June/July. If you thought that bunch was crazy onstage...
Special thanks go to the lovely Emma Wallace for kind permission to use her song "Pet (Helena's Lament)." I discovered her through our director, Nora Manca, and just love her "modern ragtime" style. Be sure to check it out! And don't miss her blog, where she frequently offers free "song sketches" to fans.
