red...

Albert Molina and Eddie Redmayne as abstract expressionist painter Mark Rothko and his assistant, Ken.
2010 Broadway production of John Logan's play, Red.

Red: A New Play by John Logan

Okay, I think we can all agree that the Peace Country is off-off-OFF-Broadway. Which means most of us won’t get the opportunity to see John Logan’s play Red, a drama about abstract expressionist painter Mark Rothko any time soon. Happily, we can read the script of the play. Even more happily, we can see clips of the Broadway production on youtube.

If I could, I would go see this play ten evenings in a row just to watch the scene in which Rothko and his young assistant, Ken, together prime a large canvas in a deep maroon; the older man covering the top of the canvas, the younger the bottom. The sheer physicality of painting is rendered as a dance, as a struggle. Both men emerge from it covered with red paint. They look like they’ve just come newborn into the world, or from a battlefield.

Red depicts Rothko at the height of his success but staring down the spectre of his own irrelevance. He is in love with, and at the same time tortured by his own ideas. Even as he creates the canvases that are arguably the culmination of his life’s work -- all in pulsating, throbbing, swelling, breathing reds -- he contemplates his own end.

This is clearly a dark work. It’s also a seriously intelligent work. It presumes the audience has a good general knowledge of art history from Michelangelo through to Warhol. But, at the same time it reminds us that painting isn’t just a cognitive activity; it is something to be grappled with bodily. It is hand-to-hand combat. It is, and always has been, a struggle to the end.

This article was first published in Art of the Peace magazine, Issue #15, Fall 2010. See it in its original context here.

tragedy worn lightly....

Photo by Ariel Tarpey.

The other night I took my 14-year-old daughter to see Hamlet at Vancouver's Bard on the Beach Shakespeare Festival. On our way there, I gave her a quick verbal plot summary. "Oh, like The Lion King?" she asked. Yes. Very much so.

I saw my first Hamlet when I was 12, with my mom and the girl who was then and remains to this day my best friend. It was a contemporary rock musical version of the play, then called Kronborg: 1582. (Later called Rockabye Hamlet.) It was campy, and larger than life, and what I remember most clearly about it is the set, and the scene in which Ophelia went mad. "A flower for you, a flower for you...."

It was young and contemporary and fun; and happily, so is this summer's version of Hamlet in Vancouver. Although spoken in the original Elizabethan English, the sets, props, costumes and technologies are up-to-the-minute. And it works. The energy, the physicality, and the passion of the acting carry the considerable weight of this aged tragedy hurtling into the now, and wear it lightly. 

Jonathon Young is brilliant as Hamlet, but sometimes it is Naomi Wright who really owns the stage. In the role of a servant she generates real tears for the dead Ophelia, wiping her reddened and running nose. 

I wonder what my girl will remember of this Hamlet, when she takes her children to their first version of it?

Scenes from the 2013 production of Hamlet,
by Vancouver's Bard on the Beach Shakespeare Festival.

the timelessness of play....

Ann Hamilton. The Event of a Thread. December 2012.

If this is fibre art, then it's fibre art on a colossal scale.

More importantly, Ann Hamilton's The Event of a Thread is a work about play; about the purity of play, the innocence and the ecstasy of that moment of almost-flight that you have when you swing, that moment when your whole body is just hanging by a "thread." When you are almost weightless, flesh and bones reduced to pure joy.

The artist says: 

“I can remember the feeling of swinging,” ... “how hard we would work for those split seconds … when we felt momentarily free of gravity, a little hiccup of suspension when our hands loosened on the chain and our torsos raised off the seat. We were sailing, so inside the motion — time stopped — and then suddenly rushed again toward us. We would line up on the playground and try to touch the sky, alone together.”

Ann Hamilton. The Event of a Thread. 2012

Reviewer Jason Andrew describes this complex work.

"At its core, the installation features two fields of suspended swings connected via ropes and pulleys to each other and to a massive white curtain that bisects the 55,000-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall. Each swing has its counterpart on the other side and it is the visitor’s momentum on the swing that activates a rolling undulation of the curtain. The resultant movement brought on by one swing is enhanced when another visitor engages the corresponding swing on the opposite side. The movement of the curtain alone is mesmerizing and the beauty is that the curtain remains in a continual state of flux set in motion by the interaction of visitors."

Ann Hamilton. The Event of a Thread. 2012

Playful viewers laid down on the floor underneath the curtain to watch it move, like you would watch the curtains over your bed billow on a summer afternoon. Like you would lie down on the grass to watch the clouds. Like you would look for pictures in the stars.

It reminds me of a time when I laid down on the cold hard pavers inside one of the courtyards at the Louvre and looked at the stars as I listened to a lone violinist play. (Music resonating off of stone, time in conversation with the timeless.)

The timelessness of play.

See http://hyperallergic.com/61982/a-playground-for-the-soul-lost-in-ann-hamiltons-world/ for a more complete description and an eloquent explanation of The Event of a Thread.