Background for the documentary on Across the Ages Dance at this link. Performances in Cambridge June 17 and 18.
The John Lennon Peace Wall | Prague 2010
John Lennon Peace Wall | Prague 2010 | Photo by Deborah S. Greenhut
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Discrepancies: The Teaching Life & School Safety
A video offers a caveat to those who think that teachers or children have an easy life:
Mexican Teacher of a kindergarten calms her young students in the middle of a shootout.
When interviewed, the teacher explained that all teachers receive training in how to handle these incidents. So, it's just part of the day, right?
We can soothe ourselves by saying it's not in our country, but our schools offer similar training and there are requirements or wishes for school safety, as reported, for example, in New York...New Jersey...California...Arizona, too. Managing weapons is very much a part of the school day. But that doesn't mean that it's all good. According to School Safety News, "Most schools have a lockdown plan. However not many schools have a good lockdown plan."
This is just one issue in a teacher's day. Try singing these lyrics the next time you're in lockdown, and do the math for school and teacher budgets while you go through the motions.
Everyone wants to feel safe. It's interesting that we put this burden on teachers and students with so few resources to support them. She was just doing her job, she said. "War, children, it's just a shot away" ...What is our job?
Mexican Teacher of a kindergarten calms her young students in the middle of a shootout.
When interviewed, the teacher explained that all teachers receive training in how to handle these incidents. So, it's just part of the day, right?
We can soothe ourselves by saying it's not in our country, but our schools offer similar training and there are requirements or wishes for school safety, as reported, for example, in New York...New Jersey...California...Arizona, too. Managing weapons is very much a part of the school day. But that doesn't mean that it's all good. According to School Safety News, "Most schools have a lockdown plan. However not many schools have a good lockdown plan."
This is just one issue in a teacher's day. Try singing these lyrics the next time you're in lockdown, and do the math for school and teacher budgets while you go through the motions.
Everyone wants to feel safe. It's interesting that we put this burden on teachers and students with so few resources to support them. She was just doing her job, she said. "War, children, it's just a shot away" ...What is our job?
Monday, May 30, 2011
Sunday, May 29, 2011
New Article Posted for Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo
Just posted a review essay at suite101 on Rajiv Joseph's play, Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo.
After a good night's sleep, it gets better and better. Robin Williams must be seen!
Link.
After a good night's sleep, it gets better and better. Robin Williams must be seen!
Link.
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Eyeing the Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo
Fair warning if you haven't spent a lot of time with American drama lately. There's a new kid in town at New York's Richard Rogers Theatre. We are not in Our Town anymore, and we are sinking lower than even Willy could imagine in our own horrific Zoo Story. Rajiv Joseph's Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo will push you around and take away your god no matter how powerful you thought he, she, or it was. If a tiger bites off a man's hand, he should be shot and killed, right? Religion is so over in the estranged world of Baghdad after the U.S. mission was, uh, accomplished. But there are some lingering questions about morality.
Evil, it seems, is omnipotent. Luckily for us, actor Robin Williams is, too. Understated, lonely as a dead tiger talking trash, the fantastic conceit of man as beast works in his interpretation, and poignantly well, with a full spectrum of humor to accompany the animal's acquisition of knowledge after he falls into the afterlife. The audience may egg him on, but Williams will not mug. In this production, Kaufman allows the two American marines and Uday Hussein to overact a bit, and that is too bad. Joseph's scripting of the character of Uday, in particular, is so painstakingly cruel that it isn't necessary. The torment by Uday of the well-acted character Musa and his innocent sister, Hadia, is unspeakable, and we cannot stop watching it.
This is a play about the utter demeaning of words and The Word. Hats off to the writer who can compel us to listen to animals speaking as men and deliver a significant portion of the plot in Arabic, often the language of women, with very little need of translation, which often fails anyway. We cannot mistake what is going on here. The knowledge this play brings to a ruined topiary garden in the afterlife on this extraordinary set is not what we want to know. But we have to do something about it. Fast.
Evil, it seems, is omnipotent. Luckily for us, actor Robin Williams is, too. Understated, lonely as a dead tiger talking trash, the fantastic conceit of man as beast works in his interpretation, and poignantly well, with a full spectrum of humor to accompany the animal's acquisition of knowledge after he falls into the afterlife. The audience may egg him on, but Williams will not mug. In this production, Kaufman allows the two American marines and Uday Hussein to overact a bit, and that is too bad. Joseph's scripting of the character of Uday, in particular, is so painstakingly cruel that it isn't necessary. The torment by Uday of the well-acted character Musa and his innocent sister, Hadia, is unspeakable, and we cannot stop watching it.
This is a play about the utter demeaning of words and The Word. Hats off to the writer who can compel us to listen to animals speaking as men and deliver a significant portion of the plot in Arabic, often the language of women, with very little need of translation, which often fails anyway. We cannot mistake what is going on here. The knowledge this play brings to a ruined topiary garden in the afterlife on this extraordinary set is not what we want to know. But we have to do something about it. Fast.
Friday, May 27, 2011
The Science Field Trip: The World's Largest Dinosaurs and the Hayden Planetarium
We're talking about those long-necked, long tailed sauropods that give new meaning to the idea of large. The American Museum of Natural History has an engaging exhibit set up about how they might have lived, beginning during the Triassic period. They survived that extinction through the Jurassic, and into the Cretaceous period, which ended with a huge extinction.
If you haven't been to this Museum for a long time, you might be surprised by the changes in the visitor-exhibit dynamic. When I recall my earliest visits there, I'm thinking of dimly lit glass cases that kept everyone at a respectful distance while sending back your awed reflection to your ever-widening eyes. Now, thanks to the short-attention span that rules everything, exhibits are made to be run through, and there's a lot of touching going on. The latter is a good thing, so please don't misunderstand. However...
It's the sidebar-style chunking of information in disconnected ways that worries me. While the designers do a lovely presentation of sizes of various creatures, the context for each succeeding example shifts so rapidly (for me, anyway), that it's difficult to adjust your train of thought as the frame of reference for scale keeps shifting. This same behavior is noted in contemporary textbooks where narrative has all but disappeared. This Museum used to be a very grown-up place to go, The animated features in the Dinosaur exhibit, such as the cartoon of the sauropod's likely digestive system, below--Gingko leaves and all--
Did they me help me to learn as much as I wanted to learn? There's also a large glass bin of foliage, including the fan-shaped leaves to help reinforce the point. Museums have a difficult line to manage in all of this--people seem to be big on paying attention at the beginning, and wanting big things at that point, and their interest picks up again at the end. This one has a dig simulation, and some people stop to try it. There's a lot of amazing material in the exhibit and, of course, elsewhere in the museum, so you will be thrilled if you want to spend more time.
In the aftermath, I'm feeling nostalgic for the older parts of the museum. There's a beautiful tribute to Teddy Roosevelt, to whom we owe our natural park system, and the elegantly informative, purposefully quiet, Audubon Gallery. But the old Hayden Planetarium, now new--where Tom Hanks' narrative has succeeded to Whoopi Goldberg's amid the loud soundtrack of the universe evolvin-- that is where I feel most bereft. My favorite part of those long-ago visits was the live show by the planetarium operator. He was strict with us. No talking. The reward was losing yourself in the dark only to find yourself floating in the Milky Way. It was Paradise, slow-moving, and enchanting. If you download the Museum's video The Known Universe, but mute the sound, you might recall some of that feeling. So this next moment of quiet is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Fred C. Hess, planetarium lecturer extraordinaire, and Helmut K. Wimmer, astronomical art wizard. These are the people who helped us believe we could reach the moon one day. Tonight, I'm wishing for a dark sky so we can hush and find ourselves again in the stars.
If you haven't been to this Museum for a long time, you might be surprised by the changes in the visitor-exhibit dynamic. When I recall my earliest visits there, I'm thinking of dimly lit glass cases that kept everyone at a respectful distance while sending back your awed reflection to your ever-widening eyes. Now, thanks to the short-attention span that rules everything, exhibits are made to be run through, and there's a lot of touching going on. The latter is a good thing, so please don't misunderstand. However...
It's the sidebar-style chunking of information in disconnected ways that worries me. While the designers do a lovely presentation of sizes of various creatures, the context for each succeeding example shifts so rapidly (for me, anyway), that it's difficult to adjust your train of thought as the frame of reference for scale keeps shifting. This same behavior is noted in contemporary textbooks where narrative has all but disappeared. This Museum used to be a very grown-up place to go, The animated features in the Dinosaur exhibit, such as the cartoon of the sauropod's likely digestive system, below--Gingko leaves and all--
In the aftermath, I'm feeling nostalgic for the older parts of the museum. There's a beautiful tribute to Teddy Roosevelt, to whom we owe our natural park system, and the elegantly informative, purposefully quiet, Audubon Gallery. But the old Hayden Planetarium, now new--where Tom Hanks' narrative has succeeded to Whoopi Goldberg's amid the loud soundtrack of the universe evolvin-- that is where I feel most bereft. My favorite part of those long-ago visits was the live show by the planetarium operator. He was strict with us. No talking. The reward was losing yourself in the dark only to find yourself floating in the Milky Way. It was Paradise, slow-moving, and enchanting. If you download the Museum's video The Known Universe, but mute the sound, you might recall some of that feeling. So this next moment of quiet is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Fred C. Hess, planetarium lecturer extraordinaire, and Helmut K. Wimmer, astronomical art wizard. These are the people who helped us believe we could reach the moon one day. Tonight, I'm wishing for a dark sky so we can hush and find ourselves again in the stars.
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Launching The White Room
Last night marked the launch of Jennifer Muller's The White Room at Michael Namer's Gallery 151 in NYC. Muller offered selections from the second act of this full-length work, and the dancers were in beautiful form. The company's season opens with a preview night on June 22. Come see this intense elaboration of innocence and experience at Cedar Lake.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)