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So, I’ve missed a couple Saturday Morning Art Blogging posts, and today isn’t Saturday morning, but I wanted to get this one up as part of the series.
Last night, we went to the opera to see Tosca. Live opera was everything I had imagined it could be, and more. This review isn’t so much the performance review as it is just thoughts from the first experience seeing opera.
Our seats were about 10 rows back from the stage in the orchestra circle, on the right side. I could see everything. The expression on the performers faces, the smaller gestures that don’t carry back to the balcony, everything. The opera house has an amazing setup, with a very very steep structure so there is supposed to be “no bad seats” – which I’d agree with, from where I sat (ha!) Next time, I’d be perfectly happy with mezz or balcony seating.
The stage set was gorgeous, the performance was amazing, and by the second act, when Tosca’s heart is breaking at the agony she is being put through – betray her love for Mario in order to save his life – both Marcus and I had tears just pouring down our faces. The third act was even more powerful, more beautiful, and more heart-wrenching, and we sobbed through nearly the whole thing.
The Ellie Caulkins opera house has one small feature that I think people would appreciate in some ways, but totally annoyed me: subtitles.
Every seat has a small led screen that flashes the English or Spanish translation of the performance, at the time the performers are singing the words on stage in italian, german, french, whatever. While I can appreciate the subtle nuances that are made available (like the line about the Voltaire reading rebels who don’t believe in Rome or God) – I really wanted to go into the performance with just the synopsis, and ‘see’ and ‘hear’ the performance in the italian to get the full experience. I was able to turn my words off, and the panels are set in such a way that you can’t see the ones to the sides – but the whole ten rows in front of me flashed like a field of blue every time the singing started, and it was really really distracting. In the first act, I found myself watching the subtitles and that pulled me out of the performance. But in the second and third acts, I worked really really hard to not read what they said, and focused on the stage. I felt more connected to the performers at that point, and I feel the subtitling really creates a wall between the performers and the audience. If you have a really good cast (which I think this performance did) they should be able to, for the most part, convey those nuances through their performance so you know what’s going on.
Sure, it’s easy for me to say all this because I have listened to opera, and I read the synopsis, and while I don’t speak italian, I speak enough french to pick up certain words, and I’m experienced with being an observant audience member for symphonic performances, plays, art, etc. I realize the subtitles are a way of bringing the accessibility to a wider audience, to cultivate a new crop of supporters, but still. I just wish the screens had been placed a bit lower, made a bit smaller, or a little dimmer.
Anyway. The performance? 5 stars. The opera house? 3.5 stars.
Typically I will look at artwork for Saturday Morning Art Blogging, but today, I’m going to tell you about a movie. First of all, movies can be art, and that’s my link for the purpose of including it in my blogging. Last night, the boyfriend and I went to the Mayan Theater here in Denver to see Terribly Happy, also known as Frygtelig lykkelig, the Danish submission for the 2009 Oscars.
This isn’t my typical type of movie. I didn’t watch the trailer beforehand, and there is a chance that, had I done that, I might not have wanted to go see the film. But, I heard about it briefly on the radio, with the summary “a dark film about the lengths people will go to fit in.”
And that is what it was, but it was also so much much more. Terribly Happy is visually enticing, and beautifully filmed. The shots contrast between bleak open Danish landscapes, full of water, mud and flat grey skies, to tight busy shots of interactions between people, to repeated shots of the visual expressions of the cast of characters. The landscape and the town are desolate, but the minds of the people are active, and in everyone’s business. Nothing goes unnoticed in this small town in South Jutland, Denmark. Far away from Copenhagen, the smallest difference is marked as a glaring fault of those who don’t belong.
After I was asleep last night, still thinking about the movie, I sat bolt-upright in bed and smacked my boyfriend – “The bog! The bog! It’s a symbol! It’s a metaphor!!” In the movie, the bog is the location of vigilante justice, the site of the secrets that are buried in the psyche of the town. At the bog, people and animals get sucked in, and disappear. Likewise, in this small town, the quiet madness of the characters sucks people in, and they either fall into a struggle with trying to maintain their personal truth, or completely losing their minds into the play of endless bleak days.
At times, as a viewer, I was thoroughly irritated with some of the characters for their fatal flaws and obvious bad decision making, and yet – the tension and anxiety throughout the film makes you wonder just what exactly is going on…and at the end, a surprising puppetmaster arises. Who is really pulling the strings?
I highly recommend this film if it is playing near you. It’s a worthwhile hour and 40 minutes. And yes, it’s in Danish, with subtitles.
I have always loved Joan Mitchell’s work.
From the Joan Mitchell Foundation‘s website:
Joan Mitchell was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1925 and died in a Paris suburb in 1992. Her expatriate years began in the late 1950s and continued uninterrupted until her passing in Vetheuil, France. She occupied a celebrated stature in the generation that succeeded Pollock and Rothko. She declined the theoreticism of her European counterparts, and remained throughout her career the empirical American, personally accountable for her memories and emotions. Her work is characterized in many developments from the 1950s to the early 90s shortly prior to her passing. She usually worked on multiple panels or large scale canvases – striving to attract a natural rather than constructed rhythm from the composition, a rhythm emanating from the expansiveness of the gesture or from the unrestrained use of color and the pervasive luminosity. The titles of her last paintings suggest the abstract valleys and empirical ‘fields’ of her beloved French countryside.
In speaking of Mitchell, others tell us of her physical materiality – how she exudes the visual sentiments of nature – the objectivity of her painting, devoid of anecdote or theater and in her own words “to convey the feeling of the dying sunflower.” Joan Mitchell as an abstract expressionist composes with long curvilinear strokes or broad stains of color, contrasting warm and cool, often on unprimed canvases. Her perceptions enrich her work with a fascinating sense of the unfinished. Joan Mitchell demonstrated in painting just as in life, anything can happen.
Isn’t that an amazing narrative? Beyond that though, it’s a challenge to find much about Mitchell. I first encountered her work in Detroit as a student at Wayne State University. The husband of my art history professor was one of Mitchell’s students in Paris, so we got to hear a bit about the hard woman, driven to paint, drink and swear. The commitment to art. The giant canvases and the light filled studio.To me, it sounded like heaven, and her paintings enthralled me just as much as the mythology.
I have to admit I haven’t done quite enough study on Mitchell as a person or a painter, other than to say that I adore her work, so this week’s blog post will be about how I feel about Mitchell’s paintings. Obviously, I love them. I’ve had a lot of interaction with them through books and screen, but not nearly enough in person, something I hope to remedy as time passes.
In my undergraduate painting course with Mary Connelly, we had an assignment where each student was given a 1″ square cut out of an art magazine, and told to recreate a painting based on that square. I immediately knew my square was from a Joan Mitchell painting, and worked to develop the layers, drips and patterns inspired by the small piece I was working with. It was the best work I did in that class, because I felt such a connection to the piece, and to the ideals that I saw – a second generation abstract expressionist, a woman, a name in her own right. Despite her immense talent, however, she never reached the stature that many of her male contemporaries did, which I think comes out in her work. Despite her primary inspiration being landscapes, these are not pastoral paintings. They’re violent, abrasive, aggressive, heavily textured and dramatic.
There’s a lot to learn about Mitchell and her work, and a lot to appreciate that isn’t necessarily known. You can buy a book that really delves into her work and the environment she was creating in, and I do recommend it if you have any interest at all in Abstract Expressionism. If you’re not familiar with her work, I highly encourage browsing the web, getting a book, and just spending time thinking about what you’re looking at in her paintings.
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