Criticultura em Portugal

Last night I attended a performance of the New York City Ballet at Lincoln Center. It would be better termed a concert of the New York City Ballet Orchestra, with dancing. That was great! Ballet is something I do not always enjoy. I have noted through the years that people enjoy it for a variety of reasons: 1. Grandeur, epic sweeping drama (e.g. Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty ) 2. Personality cult of specific dancers (opera has these kind of swooning fans too) 3. Athletic performance comparisons, like watching gymnastics at the Olympics 4. Titillation (I remember a colleague a few years ago who pointed out only which guys did and did not have great bodies). As for me, I really enjoy those ballets where watching the dance amplifies my appreciation for the music, which also needs to be excellent for me to have a good time. This cultural amplification effect occurs in a different way in opera, where the music amplifies the plot. Ballet amplification was on display last night in the all...

This vista encountered approaching Zermatt on my recent Swiss Alps hiking trip made me thing about the word "awesome". A little context..this hiking day, while enjoyable, had been a lot of pounding up a pass 3000 feet and then across a very rocky, desolate trail. Then, we turned the corner, and...wham! Awesome. My sense of the word has always been: overwhelming, grand, wondrous, pulse-raising. Maybe even a little scary. Looking it up, that is indeed the origin...both "awesome" and "awful" were synonyms and originally meant either "fear-inducing" or "being filled with fear" in old English, synonymous with "frightening" or "frightened" like when you encounter a bear. Over time, "awesome" evolved into a more abstract fear (more from a distance than up close, like an approaching storm), then into grandiosity and religious wonder mixed with fear, and was finally devalued in the 20th century by Valley Girls into ...

Its autumn in New York, when some older shows close, and new ones take their place. An American in Paris  has been running for 18 months, and is about to move to London and to a US touring production. I saw it without two of the original cast members, most notably NYC Ballet staple Robert Fairchild, who will again star in London but is replaced on Broadway by Aussie Dimitri Kleioris. It's a good show that does not quite soar to Eiffelian heights. The show is based on the 1951 classic film musical starring Gene Kelly as a US soldier who stays in Paris after the war to pursue his art career and dancer Leslie Caron, competing with his buddies (a singer and a composer) for her attentions. The film was uber-romantic, and won the Oscar that year for best picture. This show is really about dancing, and ballet choreographer (and danseur) Christopher Wheeldon has given a more balletic, less jazz-athletic spin to the dancing, leading to casting of male ballet dancers (who can sing and act ...

Its very hard to talk about "Caught", the intriguing play by west coast playwright Christopher Chen, without giving the whole thing away. So if you plan to see it soon, please read this introductory paragraph, then jump to my last Summary paragraph. This play is definite mindf***, manipulating your concepts of truth and morality in a very play-within-a-play-within-a play-within-a-play Russian dolls structure that both bewilders and provokes. Interviews with the young playwright suggest that some of this comes from his biracial identity (Irish-Chinese) and lack of fitting into any one cultural scheme, or "truth" system. His inspiration also came from several recent examples of journalists embellishing or fabricating material, while defending the action based on the need to give the reader a true sense of the injustice being written about. The play forces us to re-examine clearly divided rules regarding journalism, nonfiction vs. fiction. It does so by deceiving the a...

Part 3 (of 3) In the 1950's and early 1960's, Bergman used film to come to terms with his family and rigid Protestant heritage, not autobiographically, but auto-therapeutically. By 1965 he became more interested in commenting on a world that he saw as disintegrating into bestiality. Persona  (1966) shows the symbolic dis-integration of a woman who views the carnage of Vietnam on television. She splits into two people, and Bergman shows this schizoid personality with two connected-yet-distinct actresses (Bibi Andersson, Liv Ullmann)  who always appear together, sometimes eerily overlapping: Persona appears on many director's lists of best or most influential films. While sometimes baffling, it repays repeated viewings to get inside Bergman's visual symbolism. Its his most "modern" film, responding to the French innovators like Godard ( Breathless) , but in a way more connected to real human experience, rather than just as technical innovation because of i...