If It’s Baroque, Don’t Fix It

Tonight I’m going to see Händel‘s 1743 opera Semele, which I adore, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in a production created by La Monnaie in Brussels and the KT Wong Foundation.  It’s being performed by the Canadian Opera Company in a reprisal of their performances in the 2011/2012 season, with Canadian soprano Jane Archibald resuming the title role.

Looks pretty crazy, right?  The key to this unusual production is the KT Wong Foundation, devoted to fostering dialogue in the arts and education between China and the West, which approached Chinese artist Zhang Huan with the idea of directing an opera.  His inspiration was a 450 year old Chinese temple he bought and wound up using as the centerpiece of the production (watch it being assembled at BAM here).

Three Heads Six Arms by Zhang Huan in Florence, 2013

KT Wong has several videos about the project on Youtube and it’s certainly an interesting one!  Besides performances at Brussels and Toronto, the show was also taken to Beijing (where it was censored, natch)

Now, as a first-time opera director, Chinese person unfamiliar with Western opera, and a fancy-shmancy artist, Zhang is not beholden to opera’s sacred cows and has taken a pretty radical approach.  Besides the weirdo stage elements, he’s omitted some of Handel’s music (a capital offense in my book) and inserted several anachronistic Chinese elements.  So some weird hybrid of baroque opera and modern performance piece which I’m admittedly having a hard time preparing myself for…  I’ve seen reviews run the gamut from negative to glowingly positive, so we’ll see which what side I’ll land on…

In any other situation calling this concurrent production of Semele at the Seattle Opera the more traditional one might seem strange, but heck, this is just old school in comparison!  Opera News seemed to like this one a lot more, at least…

It’s great to see Semele performed by a smaller, regional companies, and if Zhang Huan’s production spurs renewed interest in this very deserving opera, than that’s a good thing!

The stage maquette for Semele by Zhang Huan at La Monnaie

And for no other reason than because I like their Digital Archive, here is a set maquette from La Monnaie!

Muslims in America, Italians in Russia

In catching up on some NY Times arts coverage this weekend I found two Bizarro-Twins-appropriate articles I thought I’d merge into one…

Chronologically first, Italian mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli has a new album of baroque operatic arias called St. Petersburg.  Not a city we associate with baroque opera, but as Bartoli’s latest musicological excavation effort points out, as was the case all over Europe, the Russian court was home to several Italian composers patronized by emperors and empresses, alongside other artists from across Europe.  The pieces they composed basically followed Italianate opera conventions, though they were occasionally performed in Russian, but all 11 tracks on the CD are world premiere recordings so it’s certainly a rare set of materials.

 

Bartoli herself went to the Mariinsky Theater archives to peruse these scores, which were sort of hidden especially during Soviet times to suppress the history of Russia looking to Western Europe, a binary that’s relevant to this day.  I’d certainly like to know a bit more about those archival adventures!  (NYT article)

The other story I wanted to share was a conversation between three Muslim-American artists on how being Muslim, and depicting Muslim characters, influences their work.  The trio included Ayad Akhtar, creator of the Pulitzer-winning play Disgraced, currently on Broadway, Sundance award winning filmmaker Musa Syeed, and of special interest to us, writer G. Willow Wilson, creator of Marvel’s best-selling Ms. Marvel comic, of which the first trade paperback came out earlier this month!  It’s an interesting conversation in its own right, and Wilson talks to how the themes of assimilation and representation pop up in Kamala Khan’s own hero’s journey. (NYT article)

Ms. Marvel by Adrian Alphona, Copyright Marvel Comics

Apparently the new Ms. Marvel, a Pakistani-American teenager from Jersey City whose own comic debuted in February of this year, is now Marvel’s top-selling female character, and that’s with competition from titles like Black Widow, Storm, She-Hulk, Elektra, and even her inspiration, Captain Marvel!  Not bad kid, not bad…

40 Years of Funky

Today’s Saturday morning cartoon post is about a new exhibit on black cartoon characters up at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (host to the Black Comics Fest a few weeks ago).

Specifically charting the increasingly positive depictions of black characters in cartoons from the 1970s, the show is actually the first traveling exhibit of the Museum of Uncut Funk, founded by Sista ToFunky (favorite comic? Heroes for Hire) in 2009.

The show features characters like the Jackson 5ive, Harlem GlobeTrotters, and of course Fat Albert:

One noteworthy cartoon here is “Kid Power“, which I’d never heard of, but was based on Morrie Turner‘s nationally syndicated multicultural comic strip Wee Pals.  Turner died in January of this year.

If you can’t make it to New York, you can see selections from the museum’s animation collection online.

Black Comicks

This weekend is the 2nd Annual Black Comic Book Festival at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem.  Over Friday and Saturday, there will be 40 exhibitors in the convention, as well as several panel discussions, cartoon screenings, and some comic-related workshops.

Though admission is free, you do have to reserve tickets, separately for each day.

As a newly minted library scientist, I’m pleased to see libraries getting in on the comics game.  Seems like a perfect match, since libraries already collect comics.  Would also seem like a natural setting for comic-making workshops; teens would be all over that, right?  Hope the 2nd installment of this fest goes well, and that it has many more installments to come, and hope the comic bug spreads out to more NYPL branches…

OK! on PBS

1953 mail order form for Oklahoma! revival (from the NYPL Digital Archives)

The last musical theater installment in PBS‘ Arts Fall Festival is Rodger & Hammerstein‘s 1943 musical, Oklahoma!, in a performance from the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain, originally from 1998, featuring singin’, dancin’ Wolverine (aka, Hugh Jackman).  9pm this Friday.

Al Hirschfeld caricature of 1969 Oklahoma! revival cast (from the NYPL Digital Archives)

Found this great Al Hirschfeld caricature of the 1969 revival cast on the NYPL Digital Archives, which reminds me that the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts has an exhibit on Hirschfeld’s theater illustrations up through January 4th.  Definitely worth checking out, he’s a fun one.

I’ll leave you with the one song I know how to play on the piano which happens to be from Oklahoma!  From the 1955 technicolor movie, with Gordon MacRae:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DLsZHVNOok&w=350&h=300]

Brooklyn Invasion

Pardon my absence, school is kicking into high gear, but when I learned about this I figured I needed to post about it!  Tonight at 6, at Columbia University’s Butler Library, is the last event in the year’s graphic novels series of programs, with three preeminent indie cartoonists from Brooklyn:

Maybe see you there?  Maybe if I get enough work done today  😛

 

Selfie Photo Album

Over on my other blog today, I used this gem by Maryland Institute College of Art student Sarah See Andersen to talk about born-digital documents.

Copyright Sarah See Andersen

As technology has improved, we’ve been able to produce more things, more easily, quickly outpacing production from years past and inundating ourselves in a sea of new material…  With digital items especially it’s easy to spiral out of control, since we’re never visibly constrained by the physical limitations of storage and maintenance…  Which can lead to a hard drive full of iPhone selfies, for example…

This was all a preface to the admittedly very exciting Kickstarter-ed iSketchnote, an iPad cover that digitizes your drawings and notes as you make them.  This could be a pretty nifty tool for cartoonists and illustrators especially, so any techy artists out there might want to check it out…

Also, Sarah See Andersen‘s tumblr comic, Doodle Time, is hilarious, so definitely check that out too.  In fact, watch this space tomorrow for some more of her work…

via Digitize as You Go.

A Trained Librarian in Training

Copyright Sarah McIntyre

This weekend I launched my more professional site, with my library school resume and art portfolio, and I’ll be blogging there too, on library stuff but also on comics, of course.  I’ll probably reblog the more relevant posts here, but if you’re interested in library & information science and want to give me a job, consider checking me out there too!

A Trained Librarian in Training.

via My New Blog!

Lifetime of Libraries

I should start a collection of cartoonists cartooning about libraries…  This example from Brooklyn-based Julia Wertz page, from a longer meditation on her lifelong relation with books (and libraries), is especially poignant:

Page from “A Strange & Curious Place“, Copyright Julia Wertz (click for full comic)

Someone get this lady a booth at the American Library Association Conference!

There are plenty of other samples of her work, from longer works like this one to 4 panel gags, on her website, under Archives.  Here’s one that sums up her ornery nature:

Misery is Funny, copyright Julia Wertz

Here’s her list of books and where to buy them!

Illustration Whiplash

Looks like I emerged from my summer class frenzy in time to see the Society of Illustrator’s current shows before they close this Saturday.

Henry Patrick Raleigh illustration

It’s an interesting trio, with the obvious headliner being the Maurice Sendak exhibit.  I’m a bit more intrigued by the “high-low” pairing of classy Golden Age illustrator Henry Patrick Raleigh (seen above) and the satiric contemporary cartoonist Bob Fingerman (below).

Copyright Bob Fingerman, from Minimum Wage

 

Should be a neat contrast.

Raleigh seemed pretty under-documented through a basic Google search (no Wikipedia entry!?!), but there is an archive of his work maintained by his grandson, apparently begun after his friends gave him a gift of 8 original pieces by the grandfather he’d never met on his wedding day.  So charming!  Gotta love those one-person archivists…  Labors of love indeed.

The last day to see the Raleigh, Fingerman, and Sendak exhibits is Saturday, so hurry on over.