Category: arts and letters

Seattle Immersive Theatre: Part One

BEST THEATRE EXPERIENCE, EVER. That was my take on the Seattle Immersive Theatre‘s production of “Romeo + Juliet”. Of course, I’m no expert on theatre (we’ve seen a few Shakespeare productions at Ashland and Boise, and both Shakespeare and contemporary stuff during my other lifetime in Los Angeles — and I did work in the 1970s in my art consulting period with Luis Valdez of El Teatro Campesino, Peter Coyote of the San Francisco Mime Troupe and then on the California Arts Council, and other local LA theatre groups. And Nik has a wonderful book of Shakespeare verbal insults!).

But this was absolutely extraordinary. We were able to get some last-minute tickets to the last performance of the week (and I thought at first that was forever, but you can still get tickets for shows into at least the first week of April — and you should; fly in from anywhere in the nation, in the world, to see this stuff. I mean it, really.) and so after driving all day from E-OR, we landed just in time to check in with Ivi and the Seattlite Cousins, and have dinner. Then Ivi (who has already seen the show) sped us off to the “undisclosed Seattle warehouse” in the Queen Anne District where we were to have at it.

While dropping by the Seattlites at Chika & Jared’s, we saw Melissa for a few seconds, then she had to disappear to prepare for her part in the proceedings. In case, you don’t know, Melissa plays the role of Tybalt (breaking a gender barrier), the member of Juliet’s Montague family who challenges Mercutio, a member of the rival Capulet family and Romeo’s pal, to a duel. When we first met Melissa a couple of years ago — before becoming wedded to Rohit and joining our extensive family — we were charmed by her sweet, gentle nature and learned that she had a degree in theatre but apparently was mostly working as a fitness trainer and doing some improv on the side, when she and Rohit converged. But to see her in action on the stage … wow. Leather and chains and tattoos, with an overlay of punk and hip-hop, and a voice that could knock you over … that was just the beginning. As the play progressed, Melissa/Tybalt was making comic utterances and curses on the periphery (we have been told that her improv skills kicked in for these elements).  She proved able to unleash to a torrent of action and emotion.

By the third or fourth — I couldn’t keep track — scene, a fight breaks out in the open market square (more about that later) between Tybalt and Mercutio. Holy cow. Melissa engaged with a gymnastic/acrobatic/martial arts/dancing sort of explosion in her bout with the Mercutio character, himself gifted in such dynamics. Backflips, flying kicks, leaps across people and props, kungfu-like motion across a “moonlit” expanse of stage. Utterly amazing. While Mercutio bites it in the end, ultimately Tybalt does battle next, to her/his demise, with Romeo.

DPP_00574208-EditSIDEBAR: Perhaps we should be reminded at this juncture of one of the finest wedding photos (who was the photog?) ever, which documents Melissa in a spontaneous bridal gesture in celebration of the occasion. This is only a tiny inkling of what we experienced at that undisclosed Seattle warehouse venue that night.

Ivi had been telling us about it for some time, but never got around to sending along any visual documentation. Seems that billboards, banners and posters have been appearing around Seattle featuring uber-talented, ravishing beauty Melissa’s tattooed frontal aspect in promotion of the Theatre’s production. So, I entreated Ivi to later drive me in the daylight to the Undisclosed Seattle Warehouse where I could make my own photographs. Herewith …

There is so much more to be said about the Seattle Immersive Theatre and Romeo + Juliet that it may have to continue in a future installment. And of course more photos are to come of the Seattlites, perhaps even including one or two of Melissa as civilian.

Brassai

[This post was originally slated for my photo blog, but perhaps this is an obsession that can be appropriately shared with the family audience as well.]

Looking back at my Dew Drop Inn posting of the other day — one of those things that I had entirely forgotten until stumbling across the old negatives in my archive revival project — I wanted to add the comment that there is a long tradition of such subject matter in the history of photography.

Brassai on boulevard Saint-Jacques, 1931
Brassai on boulevard Saint-Jacques, 1931
If you had to ask me for the name of my favorite photographer ever (something that might, of course, be subject to daily change depending on mood and other factors), I would probably be most likely to say Brassai. Gyula Halász (his real, Hungarian name) came to Paris in his early twenties and documented life around him until he died in about 1984. Brassai is probably best known for his photographs of Paris after dark in the 1930s. He photographed people in bars and restaurants, lovers, dancers, prostitutes, pimps, brothels, street scenes and much more. He fell in with the art and literary crowd and became a friend of luminaries such as Picasso, Dali, Matisse, Giacometti, Jean Genet and Henry Miller.

Here are just a couple of sample pages from one my prized Brassai books (which includes work from material such as “The Secret Paris of the 30s”, “Paris By Night”, etc., along with written material by himself and others.

Brassai also made some wonderful photographs of … cats!

Paris.

I previously posted some photography of Paris by Ed Clark.  Probably the earliest photographs of that city that remain fixed in my consciousness are those of Eugene Atget, particularly his large-format view camera work of Paris streets and parks at night, and of Paris architecture, done in the late 1800s and early pre-war 1900s. Another of my all-time favorites, Atget could be the subject of a separate post. Brassai and Atget both tapped similar subject matter: street people, prostitutes and so on. I have never seen Paris, and would be almost reluctant to do so, as I fear the Paris of my mind, the Paris of Brassai, may no longer exist.

Photogrammar

Photogrammar is a Yale online project site for organizing, searching, and visualizing the 170,000 photographs from 1935 to 1945 created by the United States Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information (FSA-OWI).  I quickly discovered about 100 photographs of Monona County, Iowa — where I spent most of my childhood — on the site, made by later-renowned photographers Russell Lee (famously documented Japanese-American internment during WWII) and John Vachon (noted for his photos of Marilyn Monroe, among others).  The Monona County photographs are dated about one year prior to my birth.  Here are a few examples.

I also came upon hundreds and hundreds of FSA photographs from eastern Oregon made by legendary photographer Dorothea Lange, like this:
dorothea_lange_8b35081v

Thanks to photographer friend, John, for alerting me to Photogrammar.

Venice – Dogtown Postscript

I’ve been (surprisingly) getting a fair amount of feedback on my old Venice image resurrections.  Some is from old friend and ex-UCLA-colleague, John, who tells me that he was coming of age then in the Dogtown (aka Venice) skateboarding culture era.   Along with many fascinating details of the sport, the music of the time, Venice itself and his own youth as a skateboarder, he reminds me of the 2001 documentary, narrated by Sean Penn, of the skateboarding scene in Venice in the 1970s.  Here’s the trailer (and I will try to see if it can be viewed online in its entirety somewhere — perhaps YouTube):