A turn toward history we need: Paris Commune at the Public Theater in New York
4 June 2008
Paris Commune, written by Steven Cosson and J. Michael Friedman, directed by Steven Cosson, and performed by The Civilians at the Public Lab Series Workshop at the Public Theater in New York City, April 4 to 20
Paris Commune, staged recently at the Public Theater in New York, is a musical about the first government established by the working class, which ruled the French capital from March 18 until May 28, 1871, when bourgeois troops crushed it and massacred thousands.
The artistic quality of the work and the seriousness with which the creators treat the material make this theatrical piece unusual in the current cultural environment, especially in the US. It suggests that the general restiveness and discontent in artistic circles is beginning to find a more focused expression.
Plays and other works of art about the lives of ordinary people are not entirely lacking, but a consideration of those moments when daily life becomes charged with great historical purpose has been more or less off the map for most artists.
In Paris Commune, we are presented with a thoroughgoing and lively presentation of precisely one of those moments in history.
Writers Steven Cosson and J. Michael Friedman uncovered new material from primary sources for this work. They present facets of French life often missing from accounts of the Commune—in particular, with the Public Theater production’s 14 songs and dance numbers, the popular culture of Paris in the 1870s.
The play lets the workers of Paris speak for themselves, but it fills in many of the gaps in historical knowledge that a contemporary American audience might have. (For that matter, the Commune is not widely taught in French schools, either.) At one point, for example, the play combines a lesson in French revolutions from 1789 to 1871 with a dance number that simultaneously teaches the history of the famous dance, the can-can. This scene, literally breathless, puts the Commune in context as the final and greatest revolutionary struggle of the nineteenth century.
The writers, of course, can’t fill in all the blanks in 90 minutes. A sense of the French Second Empire (1852-1870) and its Napoleon III is largely missing. That is a shame, too, since the period resembles our own in many ways: the frantic greed of the ruling classes, the social polarization, the stifling political atmosphere, the constant military adventures and provocations, a vulgar and dimwitted ruler.
The parliamentary resolution, drafted by a commission for cultural and religious affairs, said dancers should not be shown on television, and un-Islamic scenes should be cut from Indian TV series broadcast in Afghanistan, said Din Mohammad Azimi, a lawmaker and member of the commission. …
Last year gunmen entered the home of Zakia Zaki, the female owner of a radio station, and shot her to death in front of her 8-year-old son. Zaki had apparently criticized local warlords who warned her to change her station’s programming.
Shaima Rezayee, a popular host for an MTV-style music show, was shot dead in 2005 after clerics criticized her show as “anti-Islamic.” …
“It’s the re-Talibanization of Afghan society,” Mohseni said. “Every single week they come up with something new.”
Canada: By stealth, Ottawa seeks to censor film and television production: here.
Dozens of tankers carrying oil for NATO forces were destroyed Sunday in a bomb blast targeting a Pakistani border crossing where they awaited clearance to enter Afghanistan, officials said: here.
Turkish gov’t, military split on dispatching troops to Afghanistan: here.
SOFIA - Bulgaria’s Environment Ministry is to fight a Supreme Court decision revoking the protected status of a Black Sea nature park, a ruling which opens the door to the construction of holiday homes.
“We will definitely appeal. We are preparing the appeal at the moment,” a ministry spokeswoman on Wednesday.
Last week the country’s Supreme Court cited irregularities in the way officials originally drew up the boundaries for the Strandja park as the reason for ending the area’s special status.
The decision has drawn ire from a coalition of conservationists and national figures worried Bulgaria’s countryside is falling prey to a property boom fuelled in part by foreign demand for cheap second homes.
“The court’s ruling is yet another farce, which aims to wipe out the protected territories in the name of corporate and private interests,” 17 environment organizations said in a statement.
Earlier this week police arrested 35 people after 200 protestors blocked a major roadway in Sofia to demonstrate over the court ruling.
Municipal authorities in Strandja, on the south-east edge of Bulgaria bordering Turkey and the Black Sea, and a property developer who has illegally built holiday apartments in the region, had challenged the status of the park in court.
Critics said the court ruling not only contained factual mistakes but was also symbolic of the way Bulgaria’s judicial system works. …
“In some cases, the judicial system does not protect the public interest but cares only about corporate interest,” said Toma Belev, head of the Association of Nature Parks in Bulgaria.
The emergence of thousands of ancient written documents in Timbuktu as a direct result of the recent funding and creation of new libraries is causing “a stir among academics and researchers, who say they represent some of the earliest examples of written history in sub-Saharan Africa and are a window into a golden age of scholarship in west Africa” according to a Guardian news report.
It certainly changes the fact that oral tradition is the only source in the region.
MOLINE, Ill. — There is a snake wandering around northwestern Venezuela named after a 14-year-old Quad Cities boy.
It’s called the Paraguanan blue whiptail, but the snake’s proper name is Atractus matthewi.
The boy’s is Matthew Markezich.
It’s his father’s doing. Allan Markezich, 57, is the snake’s discoverer.
“I do research on evolution, ecology and biological diversity in the tropics,” said Markezich, a biology professor at Black Hawk College.
That sentence sums up a career that involves tramping around the Western Hemisphere — mainly Venezuela — since the late 1980s, studying reptiles and amphibians and trying to conserve their habitat.
Atractus matthewi probably does not have a common name, Markezich said.
It’s a secretive ground-dwelling animal that tends to live in cover in an isolated mountain range in northeast Venezuela.
“You don’t see this kind of snake often,” the 57-year-old said.
And there are other South American species that owe their human names to Markezich.
AS an American who has lived in Germany for more than 30 years, the choreographer William Forsythe has grown accustomed to his role as a foreigner.
For two decades he ran the Frankfurt Ballet, one of Europe’s most adventurous companies.
And when it folded in 2004, he created the Forsythe Company, based in Frankfurt and Dresden.
But faced with a daily barrage of anti-American sentiment in Europe over the war in Iraq, he said, he found himself “constantly reminding people that not all Americans are radical right-wingers.”
“Not all of us support the war or think that way,“ he added.
“Three Atmospheric Studies,” his new and most overtly political piece, is an indictment of war: “Forsythe’s Guernica,” one critic has called it.
But Mr. Forsythe, one of ballet’s most influential choreographers, prefers to see it as, simply, “an act of citizenship.”
This evening-length work has played to audiences in Europe, but on Thursday will have its American premiere at the University of California, Berkeley, before arriving at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Feb. 28.
To those who question whether dance and politics make good partners, the ever provocative Mr. Forsythe is ready with a question of his own: “Since when aren’t artists citizens?”
There will always be those for whom the roles of citizen and artist are mutually exclusive. In American dance, politically engaged works have generally been regarded warily.
…
Mr. Forsythe is hardly the only modern choreographer to have put politics center stage.
“The Green Table,” Kurt Jooss’s antiwar masterpiece, was created in 1932 as Hitler was rising to power and is in the repertories of both American Ballet Theater and the Joffrey Ballet.
Last year Paul Taylor paid homage to Jooss’s work with “Banquet of Vultures,” with Death again a central figure, but this time he wore a suit and tie and was a stand-in, Mr. Taylor has said, for President Bush.
Among a younger generation of American choreographers Bill T. Jones is well known for dances that confront racial, sexual and gender politics.
The downtown dance maker Juliette Map tallied the casualties in Iraq in a recent work, and last fall David Dorfman unveiled a new piece about the political activism of the 1960s.
Igor Moiseyev, ballet dancer and choreographer: here.
Why are there no black ballerinas in the UK’s big companies? Here.
The Protest Goes on: They Bombed Paradise (and I Put up a Multimedia Extravaganza)
When Joni Mitchell was asked to take part in a ballet about her life, she was unimpressed.
But then she saw the chance to make a statement about something more important: The War in Iraq
by Andrew Gumbel
The Ballet does not sound too promising an artistic concept. In fact, when Joni Mitchell herself first heard about it she didn’t like it at all.
The legendary singer-songwriter was approached by the artistic director of the Alberta Ballet in her native western Canada about putting scenes from her life on stage to a soundtrack of some of her most familiar songs, like “Both Sides Now” and “Chelsea Morning”.
It would, in effect, have been a kind of song-and-dance This Is Your Life to pay tribute to one of Canada’s famously rare artistic luminaries. …
So Mitchell came up with another idea, centred on the twin preoccupations that have been gnawing at her, on and off, for the whole of her artistic career: the devastations being visited on the environment, and the horrors of war that the US has unleashed around the world, most recently in Iraq.
Opera that depicts Bush, Blair dancing in underwear is canceled
Last update: December 29, 2006 – 9:15 AM
ROME — La Scala opera house has canceled a production of Bernstein’s “Candide‘’ that includes a scene with actors dancing in underwear while wearing masks of world leaders including President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
La Scala said in a statement that the decision was made after artistic director Stephane Lissner watched a performance Tuesday at the Theatre du Chatelet in Paris, where the new production is being staged through the end of December.
The opera, scheduled for nine performances in June and July, “was not in line with La Scala’s artistic program,'’ the theater said in a statement Thursday night. It did not elaborate.
In the production directed by Robert Carsen of Canada, actors wear masks of Blair, Bush, former Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi, French President Jacques Chirac and Russian President Vladimir Putin as they dance in their underwear, wearing ties featuring their national flags.
Though Bush’s buddy Silvio Berliusconi lost the Italian elections, unfortunately, it seems some of his spirit is still alive in Italy …
By 
From the 
In the afternoon of 18 February, the theater had a preview of shows for the next weeks.
From 
Associated Press 
