Showing posts with label gesture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gesture. Show all posts

Thursday, May 17, 2012

"What's opera, Doc?"

This must be my earliest acquaintance with Wagner....

Really I have no commentary in particular on the Ring at the Met - I did enjoy it, and I'm very glad to have seen the whole thing in one bash, but it confirmed my sense that it's not really suited to my sensibilities.  The music is very easy and compelling to listen to, and the purest and most intense pleasure for me in the whole thing was probably just the lavish beauty of the writing for woodwinds, my favorite family of orchestral instruments.  The clarinets were especially lovely, but of course also English horn, and at various moments my mind drifted to an alternate universe where I am perhaps a professional bassoonist with a sideline in oboe and English horn - really it wouldn't have come to pass, but one has time in that context to sit and ponder such things! 

The 'machine' came into its own in Siegfried, as a surface on which light is projected; in other respects, it seemed cumbersome though not unduly so.  There is a sense in which the lighter moments, especially in Siegfried, are actually familiar anachronistically by way of this vintage of Disney film; in fact, the whole thing was much more Disney than I had possibly imagined, as I had some vague and largely misleading association of the cycle with the most avant-garde wing of twentieth-century Bayreuth productions (why did I somehow imagine that more of this music would sound more like Webern?!?), and of course this is not at all the style in which a house like the Met is going to approach the thing.  It is not an original observation if I say that really the Disney theme park is the most fully realized twentieth-century sequel to Wagner's fantasy of the total work of art.  The music must have sounded electrifyingly strange and original when it was first heard, but has been largely naturalized by way of a century plus of over-the-top movie music; in fact, that was probably my other most startling realization, that the idiom for a certain kind of movie music continues to be borrowed almost literally from Wagner's orchestration, how strange that this should be so!

It was not an electrifying production, in short, but I am very glad to have heard the music all the way through and gain a much clearer sense of what it is really like and how it works.  My one regret is that Eric Owens wasn't singing Alberich in any of the performances I saw; I will have to make sure to go and hear him in something else before too long.

I have no substantive complaints for this week, and in fact I have been busy with some very pleasant things: a party at the NYPL in bestowal of the Young Lions Fiction Award; congratulating our graduating senior English majors and handing out awards in the humanities to other CC students, including one or two of my own, on a day so rainy that it made even me, a die-hard umbrella-despiser, contemplate the utility of such things; a beautiful long run this morning and a very good subsequent meeting on a student's dissertation prospectus.  However I cannot shake my end-of-year malaise: I suppose it is the usual consequence of overwork. 

I have an overdue essay that I should be writing, but I really can't face any work for another day or so; all I want to do is exercise, which puts me in a good mood while I am doing it and for a few hours thereafter, then results in a total mood crash so persistent that even the unexpected arrival in the mail this afternoon of a thousand-dollar check that I wasn't at all expecting didn't cause any appreciable lift!  I think I just have to be patient and wait for the cloud to go away (only I really do need to write that essay!).

Closing tabs:

Nico has a good long post that touches on many matters of interest, but especially wombat gait!

Also: body language....

Sunday, January 23, 2011

Story-telling

Aside from the story I am trying to tell in my novel, I also have a story to tell in each of the two classes I'm teaching this semester. I'll post the novel syllabus tomorrow after the first class has met, I think; I still need to put together the course reader for that and drop it off at the xerox shop in the next day or two.

The reader for the drama course is done, though; I dropped it off around 8pm on Friday night after a rather frenzied day of running around town. In addition to these required books (that's about eight plays altogether) and various stuff that we'll read online through the Columbia library system (including DNB entries for Garrick and Colley Cibber and a good chunk of Cibber's landmark autobiography), the reader includes these materials:

Erving Goffman, chapter one (“Performances”), The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor Doubleday, [1959]), 17-76.

William Wycherley, The Plain Dealer (1677), from The Plays of William Wycherley, ed. Peter Holland (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

Aphra Behn, The Second Part of the Rover (1681), from The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Janet Todd, vol. 6: The Plays, 1678-1682 (London: William Pickering, 1996).

William Congreve, Love for Love (1694), from The Complete Plays of William Congreve, ed. Herbert Davis (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1967).

John Dryden, All for Love: or, The World Well Lost (1678), from The Works of John Dryden, vol. 13: Plays (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985).

Excerpts on acting styles given in David Thomas and Arnold Hare, eds., Restoration and Georgian England, 1660-1778 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 166-173 and 341-358.

[David Garrick], An Essay on Acting (London: W. Bickerton, 1746).

Denis Diderot, “Paradox on Acting,” in Diderot’s Selected Writings, ed. Lester G. Crocker, trans. Derek Coltman (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 318-329.

Joseph Roach, chapter two (“Nature Still, But Nature Mechanized”), The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (1985; rpt. Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1993), 58-92.

Marcel Mauss, “Techniques of the Body,” in Techniques, Technology and Civilisation, ed. Nathan Schlanger (New York and Oxford: Durkheim Press/Berghahn Books, 2009), pp. 77-95.

Peter Holland, “Hearing the Dead: The Sound of David Garrick,” in Players, Playwrights, Playhouses: Investigating Performance, 1660-1800, ed Michael Cordner and Peter (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 248-270.

David Garrick, The Country Girl (1766), from The Plays of David Garrick, Vol. 7: Garrick’s Own Plays, 1757-1773, ed. Harry William Pedicord (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982).

David Garrick, The Jubilee (1769), from The Plays of David Garrick, Vol. 2: Garrick's Own Plays, 1767 – 1775, ed. Harry William Pedicord and Fredrick Louis Bergmann (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980).

Saturday, October 23, 2010

Testimonials

From Sterne's Sentimental Journey:
The old officer was reading attentively a small pamphlet, it might be the book of the opera, with a large pair of spectacles. As soon as I sat down, he took his spectacles off, and putting them into a shagreen case, return’d them and the book into his pocket together. I half rose up, and made him a bow.

Translate this into any civilized language in the world--the sense is this:

‘Here’s a poor stranger come in to the box--he seems as if he knew no body; and is never likely, was he to be seven years in Paris, if every man he comes near keeps his spectacles upon his nose—’tis shutting the door of conversation absolutely in his face--and using him worse than a German.’

The French officer might as well have said it all aloud; and if he had, I should in course have put the bow I made him into French too, and told him, ‘I was sensible of his attention, and return’d him a thousand thanks for it.’

There is not a secret so aiding to the progress of sociality, as to get master of this short hand, and be quick in rendering the several turns of looks and limbs, with all their inflections and delineations, into plain words. For my own part, by long habitude, I do it so mechanically, that when I walk the streets of London, I go translating all the way; and have more than once stood behind in the circle, where not three words have been said, and have brought off twenty different dialogues with me, which I could have fairly wrote down and sworn to.

Thursday, October 21, 2010

The pro-zoo camp

Death by fox: penguin cover-up at the London Zoo.

I write from the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Buffalo, New York; I am about to go and register for my conference (I am speaking on Saturday afternoon on Sterne and novelistic conventions for the notation of human gesture) and then investigate the purported rooftop swimming pool...

Friday, August 20, 2010

People and books

At the NYRB, Timothy Garton Ash remembers Tony Judt:
Tony had a couple of characteristic gestures. There was a motion of the hand, as if cooling it down after touching a hot saucepan or shaking off water. This denoted that something was silly, toe-curling, inauthentic. And there was a sideways inclination of the head, accompanied by a quick, wry lifting of one end of the mouth and a twinkle in the eye. This had multiple applications, ranging from satire and self-deprecation to an attitude that might inadequately be verbalized as c’est la vie. As motor neuron disease (ALS) relentlessly immobilized him, he could no longer make these characteristic gestures; but somehow he still managed to convey them with his eyes.

Tuesday, March 02, 2010

The electric trephine

Last night I read the first hundred pages or so of The Swarm (one of the last couple left of the January Humane Society haul), but Dorothy Dunnett has spoiled me: it is not at all bad, I guess, but the proportion of 'fact' to fiction was not what I found myself in the mood for ("You see, depending on the isotope -- you do know what an isotope is, don't you?" "Any two or more atoms of a chemical element with the same atomic number but with differing atomic mass." "Ten out of ten! So, take carbon" - real actual dialogue!).

So I put it aside and delved through the miscellany and came up with a book I've been meaning to read ever since I first read Oliver Sacks's piece about it in the NYRB (open-access PDF), Frigyes Karinthy's A Journey Round My Skull. It is an extraordinary little memoir about Karinthy's experience undergoing surgery to remove a tumor from his brain. This is a bit I especially liked (it gives the feel of the book's texture):
Incidentally, I have often noticed that my gestures are not original. I hold a cigarette exactly as my father did, and I have a way of turning my head that reminds me of a certain ex-Prime Minister of Hungary who once looked round in Parliament with an expression of surprise when some of us shouted a protest from the journalists' gallery. It is only when I am alone that I become conscious of these unnatural gestures, and once recognized I find them embarrassing. It amuses me to recall my first flight in an old-fashioned, pre-war aeroplane. I was alone with the pilot, who sat in front of me. Not a soul could see what I was doing, yet I found myself sitting in a rigidly conventional attitude. Carefully placing my hand in front of my mouth, I gave an embarrassed little cough. Then I tried to find the correct position for my hands. First I laid them carelessly on the sides of the 'plane, but I soon let them fall on to my lap and began strumming absent-mindedly with my fingers, as I had seen a fashionable actor do on the stage.