Kyle > Recent Status Updates

One piece of the puzzle finally drops into place, but it would have had much more of an impact if I had a clear mental picture of who Gryff was before finding out who he becomes. Maddeningly, it looks like the quantum tunnel story told to Lev and Wilf was just a centrifuge and the amount of money being poured in from the future has made Flynne's stub the leading cause of the disastrous jackpot. At least Flynne knows.

An amusing Pythonesque piece of metatheatre with two critics transported to different places while reviewing what looks like a mundane drawingroom mystery, but may actually be the Mousetrap for ambitious Moon and adulterous Birdboot. They easily slip into the roles assigned by other characters and yet remain caught up in their surreal worlds. Wonder what old Canadian proverbs cover the triumph of art over commentary?

Vintage Stoppard from a more newspaper-filled era, much of Night and Day is about the meddlesome press in postcolonial Africa plus some strange attraction Ruth has for anyone not her husband. Tension over who gets to report what are muddied by union politics, with upstart Milne as the fly in Wagner's ointment until President Mageeba brings down his skull-cracking rebuttal. Everyone dreams in black and white.

In his analysis of a scene from Don Quixote, Auerbach finds nothing strays too far from reality as it must have been perceived by the ex-convict Cervantes at the turn of the 17th century. Even the famous madness that drives the playful plot has a moment of pause as when Sancho introduces the beautiful Dulcinea to his master, who at first sees a peasant on a donkey. Somehow it recalls Artaud's double reality.

The ingenious bits of self-awareness drop into letters to friends and relatives, mostly about Chekhov's boredom with travel and aversion to pretentious novels, that helped him shape one of his first melodramatic characters Ivanov. The excitability of Russians seems to be the cause of much of their undoing, yet somehow enough of them get sent off to Siberia due to this same inertia, as Chekhov will soon see firsthand.

Starting to see the connection between most plays in this volume, being Stoppard's Felicity Kendal years. Here she is the clever heroine Flora Crewe, a Bloomsbury poet languishing in India between portraits. Much banter about British colonialism and Indian aesthetic is thrown about, but innovates an odd-thumb character of Crewe's biographer Pike, mainly there to speak staged footnotes much to the displeasure of Nell.

Chekhov evolves, as much as these truncated letters reveal, from a humble sibling chastising his brother's worthlessness to an even more self-effacing short story author. His health issues pop up suddenly and vanish just as quickly while his strenuous medical work keeps him and the family he supports with a roof over their heads. So far travel is limited to inside Little Russia and big city Moscow and St. Petersburg.

The post-introduction opening of the book establishes why Brook lead his magic-carpet actor into the desert - no one knows why, at this point - and then Heilpern briefly introduces the dramatis personae who will attempt to answer the ineffable question. The Land-Rover-equipped Minitrek team could have probably published their own account of guiding the acting troupe through the Sahara, a narrative filled with 'eff's.

How did this play slip under my virtual-reality radar? Set pieces shuttle back and forth between staged "real" scenes repeated in the "virtual" home life mediated by vinyl, radio, television and VHS (as well as playwrights John Webster and John Ford). Yet with each cleverly cuckolded spouse taking a crack at who loves whom, the play still comes across as Henry's crass attempt to be classy for his Desert Island Discs.

The end of a season of fallow research fields is over, and now with a bumper crop of publications underway, I can turn my attention to the Elizabethan theatre where most my dissertation will take place. A chairperson at the closing night of my local Shakespeare festival gave a speech in which she thanked William Shakespeare, and this gratitude planted throughout my writing will generate more even fertile reflections.

Among the many quotations included in her book, from Antonin Artaud and Peter Brook to Virgina Woolf and Zeami, the most surprising inclusion comes with a mention of Julian Jaynes' Bicameral Mind. Not directly quoted, unfortunately, but hinting at the deep levels of wisdom lurking in the whole variety of Bogart's theatre experiences, specifically the positive spin she applies to embarrassment and resistance.

Without so much as a proper introduction, the tattered book begins to unspool its tale of Peter Brook's journey to Africa with a collection of familiar faces (Helen Mirren, Ted Hughes) and some not-yet-known (Katsuhiro Oida, Miriam Goldschmidt). What and why take a backseat to how and where as the troupe negotiates the weight restrictions of their Algerian transport. Heilpern's story has enough mystery to turn pages.

Without so much as a proper introduction, the tattered book begins to unspool its tale of Peter Brook's journey to Africa with a collection of familiar faces (Helen Mirren, Ted Hughes) and some not-yet-known (Katsuhiro Oida, Miriam Goldschmidt). What and why take a backseat to how and where as the troupe negotiates the weight restrictions of their Algerian transport. Heilpern's story has enough mystery to turn pages.

A short leap into the immediate future, looking at ways that quantum Internet will operate based upon current theory and emergent technology: Gribbin has made some practical predictions including the right-on-the-money QUESS project, but only goes so far into Josephson's intriguing quantum telepathy, derided by most Nobel-winners. Isn't this sort of spooky action now happening with entangled protons and trapped ions?

Two useful items in the director's toolkit are also ones that society at large has been trained to avoid: terror and stereotype. Of course, by now I am well aware of Bogart's habit of turning conventional assumptions on their head, so that terror become a wrestle with uncertainty and stereotypes are really meaningful container of culture. She is starting to get all Taoist with her advice but with a Zen Buddhist spin.

Taking a few more soap-opera turns, the narrative becomes the Lowbeer and Clovis show with special guests Flynne and Netherton. The terrible-sounding "party time" plague was simply a test for something that will pointedly not be addressed in the next bunch of chapters. At least someone in the story knows how the jackpot happened, but Lowbeer continues pretending she doesn't and acting accordingly. So why test Flynne?

Carefully sidestepping the messy details of Everett's personal life as he formed the Many Worlds Interpretation, Gribbin invites us to understand the multiverse through the ordered chaos of Deutsch, who saw the meeting point of many worlds in the superpositioned state of qubits. The actual capabilities of quantum computers is pretty mundane, crunching numbers more effectively, but has awesome universal applications.

Sex and violence are the common staples of television, advertisements and bodice-ripping novellas, so it stands to reason they are vital components of theatre. However, what Bogart means by the title of each chapter here is really being decisive as a director and attention-getting as an artist. It is more tantalizing to call each violence and eroticism respectively, yet what about parts of the book espousing honesty?

The emergenting of researcherly methodologication draws to a close in the last two chapterrini, and it was as much of a struggle to understand what is coming out of arts education as the remaining authors attempt to explain the process going in. Recapitulating on what worked in the graduate classes that Thompson, Beudert and Garber taught, it really is anything goes as long as they can be supported by other scholars.

Moving back from the continent to the New World, so to speak, many of the American contributors to quantum mechanics had the skills to split an atom but not the maths to calculate the wave-functioning particles inside. It took Northern Ireland's Bell to prove von Neumann was wrong (as did Breman's Hermann before him) and that the Universe lacked the local reality but was filled with seemingly spinning quantum digits.

Anne Bogart's journey to understand American theater (yes, I'll let go of the -re for now) brought her to some interesting places, including Toga Mura where I almost visited last month, in order to found her own company. The history of vaudeville gone Expressionist was greatly brought about by the Moscow Art Theatre's tour of the States pre-Depression, and then the really depressing acting came out with "the Method."

Looks like I have got to the filler part of the book, evidenced by the many words an little method behind it. One chapter mostly recaps a dull, paint-by-the-number movie by Terry Zwigoff, followed by a brief "analysis" of an even crappier movie. The author makes his students watch both three times! No wonder the history of art of education is so spotty, not even Bolin's phasing-out-of-consciousness history tells why.

Triumph mixed with tradegy, the little biography of Shakespeare's life is also where I recorded the passing of a couple friends and family members dearly missed by all. It also brings to a close my pre-candidacy studies as my committee rallied around my proposal and gave me a chance to research the alchemical side of virtual reality getting to where I need to be as a language and literacy scholar, in drama education.

Filling the metaphorical container with meaningful content requires an attention to aesthetic, the feeling of how we each experience beauty that defies logic or measurement. Much like her concluding chapter on time, directors making art (while making art mean something) is about perceiving these intangibles and giving the actors on stage something to do that represents what cannot be held physically only experienced.

There is plenty going on in theatre before an actor utters the first line or performs an initial gesture, and Bogart breaks it down into seven fundamental forces that draw an audience to the stage. She also makes the helpful allusion to digital media such as virtual reality. The most important addition to this seven-fold theatrical path is the Samma-Sankappa described in the next chapter: inner magnetism or attitude.

Perhaps another key component of quantum mechanics inception in the twentieth century is the gradual acceptance of Jewish students in Germanic and American universities. Feynman being the prime example in this chapter, with a surprising explication of Schrödinger's theories (much like his cat in a box, Erwin seems to be superpositioned between a Copenhagenist and its decrier) in support of proposing quantum computer.

The hard-hitting question of intention as Bogart hones in on the creative impulse are important but come across with an intensity that would make Shia leBeefy cringe in spite of all his greenscreened goofiness. Other voices join in to suggest that attending to daily life with such intensity creates theatre. Erwin Schrödinger, who must also cringe to have his darn cat mentioned, knows about letting an idea go lightly.

Within the space of two chapters, the emergent qualities of arts-based research goes from serious to sisyphean as Rolling first sets up the boundaries between what constitutes scholarly arts-based inquiry, striking a sensible balance. That balance is next thrown off by Garoian's double negative run-on sentences that support the round-about claim that any art experience gets folded into an artistic basis for research.

Bogart's essays are her attempt to make meaning of the psyche of early 21st century United States, and how to make art from the psyched out consciousness trained not to regard the arts as meaningful. Finding a suitable context for the words brought onto stage, and then articulating the words fully and forcefully, is not just the job of an actor but the civic duty of anyone who takes part in a global mediated village.