Author: David Gorsline

Installation

Jennifer Tipton at the light board for a show of her own making:

When computer controls came in, for example, she was surprised by how much she liked them.

“You can program cues with a liquid movement you could never have with human beings pushing levers and knobs,” she said. “Before the computer, I can’t remember a cue that lasted more than 30 seconds, but now you can have something happening across the full hour of a program. I thought I would miss the ability to call cues in the way I was taught — vocally, you can speed it up and slow it down — but I was thrilled that it happened the same way every time.”

New equipment can alter color and orientation automatically — so if she wants to change something, “you don’t have to stop the rehearsal and have a guy get the ladder out and change it,” she said. But many of the new high-tech colors aren’t to her liking — “they aren’t full spectrum, like the sun” — and the fact that the manufacturers keep changing them makes it difficult to maintain the consistency of her designs for older works still in repertory.

Some ink: 13

The orchid that Margaret Chatham spotted and I photographed on a VMN field trip to Great Dismal Swamp NWR received a little shout-out (scroll way down) from the state organization and Zach Bradford of Virginia DCR.

It’s a largely southern species (that ranges into South America) that has seemingly been inching towards that Virginia state line in recent decades, with the previous closest population about 15 miles to the south in NC.

A state record — cool!

Woolf decoded

Yes, he [Peter Walsh] remembered Regent’s Park; the long straight walk; the little house where one bought air-balls to the left; an absurd statue with an inscription somewhere or other.

—Virginia Woolf, The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway (2021) (p. 82), notes by Merve Emre

air-ball turns out to be a bit of a disappointment. I was hoping that it meant a tasty treat. But big Oxford has “a ball inflated with air, a toy so called.” Also it appears to be a Briticism that has fallen out of use. Webster II doesn’t have an entry, nor does my Concise Oxford of 1990.

And, of course, nothing to do with a missed shot, although I suppose you could launch an air ball with an air-ball.

A mystery: 27: and solved

I have become mildly obsessed with Mantovani’s anodyne arrangement of “Charmaine,” perhaps the epitome of easy listening/elevator music. When I worked on Clybourne Park, it was one of the songs on Jim’s mixtape. I’ve just finished reading Joseph Lanza’s Elevator Music, which has a few additional tidbits about the song (I wish that Lanza had included song titles in his index).

What has been nagging me is the dance performance that I alluded to back in my 2016 post: I could not summon any memories of it, except bland white background paper, dancers in black, and a burly, bearded male dancer crossing his arms in exasperation. What was the company? Not Mark Morris, although the dancer had a similar build. Where did I see it? Probably at the Kennedy Center.

And then comes Brian’s Siebert’s story on the long-running collaboration between Alex Katz and Paul Taylor.

With the rift behind them, Katz and Taylor continued their mischief. “I said to Paul, ‘You’re so good you could choreograph to elevator music,’” Katz recalled. “And Paul said, ‘I’m not dancing to that trash.’ And three months later, he said let’s do it.” This was “Lost, Found, and Lost” (1982), a brilliantly funny piece with chic black costumes, a flat white stage world and recycled bits of “7 New Dances.”

Yep, the $100 Jeopardy! answer, Paul Taylor Dance Company, whom I have probably seen four or five times.

A hat tip to Angela Kane and her catalogue of Taylor’s works, which confirmed that “Charmaine” was indeed part of the score for this dance.

Sad but probably true

Kevin Roose on the Twitter acquisition:

… Musk seemed to intuitively grasp what Twitter actually was — a high-stakes popularity contest that, if won, could get you almost anything you wanted, from a higher stock price to a Saturday Night Live hosting gig.

I am weighing my options—considering taking a pause. The original reason I joined has long become moot, one of the purposes I put Twitter to is fading, and I can get news directly from the source.

I’m OK with “yinz”

One more nuance in Shakespeare to look out for: pronoun choice. From John McWhorter’s latest column for the Times:

In Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing,” Benedick, likely wanting to connote intimacy to Beatrice, tells her, “Come, bid me do anything for thee.” But a bit later, when he is addressing a more formal and even menacing matter, he switches to “you”: “Think you in your soul the Count Claudio hath wronged Hero?”

And an opportunity missed:

Old English’s pronoun for “she” was “heo,” which sounded so much like “he” that by the time Middle English was widespread in the 1200s, some dialects were using “he” to address both men and women. Yes, even long before the births of Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare, English was on its way to developing a new gender-neutral pronoun. But apparently that did not feel quite right to many speakers. Thus, speakers recruited one of several words that meant “the” at the time, “seo,” which became today’s “she.”

And shoeboxes

Doors, lumber, lighting instruments: theaters are grappling with supply chain issues.

The Crossing the Line festival presented by French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF) came back for its fifteenth year, and this was the first year since the pandemic that they brought all international productions. Typically, they would ship their set pieces from France, but with the price of fuel so hiked up by inflation, the freight was out of their budget. “We decided to rebuild the sets here,” says programming manager Clementine Guinchat. “That’s when we realized the shop situation in New York was so crazy.”