Posts Tagged ‘Arts’

Liv Ullman

      A rumpled bed, brightly lit and placed stage right, seems to dominate the stage in Liv Ullman’s haunting production of  ‘Streetcar Named Desire,’ now playing at Brooklyn Academy of Music .  It’s the place  where  the climatic confrontation between Blanche Dubois and Stanley Kowalski takes place, and where at night — as Stella says — ‘things happen between a man and a woman that make everything else seem unimportant.’   Desire — for sex and Desire  for life — infuse this production that stars Cate Blanchett, in a heartrending performance as Blanche.
    “I think we need Tennessee Williams now more than ever,” Ullman said during a recent interview at the Harvey Theatre, where the play will run until Dec, 20. “In a twitter world – we need his poetry.”
      “The way I see it,” Ullman wrote in the accompanying program. “Tennessee Williams wished to pull us out of our own angry darkness, by allowing us to see, to recognize the hurt and vulnerability and the fear disguised as violence or rudeness or carelessness or what may look like madness.”
     At the end of the play, Blanche moves off to stage right, bathed in light.
    Ullman said she may not be doomed – but has embraced her own solitude, accepted the untenability of her situation… “Maybe now she will be alone., Ullman said.  “Sometimes being alone is what a person may need.”

     The anguish and ecstasy of romantic love are embodied by  “In-I”, a theatre-dance piece currently on view at Brooklyn Academy of Music.
     French actress Juliette Binoche and British choreographer Akram Khan create a searing portrait of two lovers struggling with sexual and emotional intimacy.
      ”La Binoche,” as she is often referred to in the French press is all over New York this month and next.  A collection of her paintings is at the French Consulate.   And there is a book, “Portraits in-Eyes,”  which has poems and pictures based on characters she’s played and directors she  has worked with.   Her new film, “Paris,” opened this Friday.     

  Finding Magic

        Binoche, who has had a spectacular career, working with directors as varied as Kieslowski, Godard,  never thought about being a dancer. But at age 43, after answering her masseuse’s question: Do you Want to Dance? — she embarked on this project.
      But stretching boundaries is what she is all about.
      In an interview with writer  Faith Salie for  Double X,  she said she tries to stay away from labels. “I  try not to call myself [anything], because otherwise you get stuck into ideas.  Getting into other fields, worlds—it gives me certain freedom, and at the same time it shows me my limits, my pain.
       ”We have a tendency because of fear or of a lack of imagination to be out of tune with the truthful, magical side [of our bodies,” she told Salie.  And I have to say that if I didn’t get through that experience, I wouldn’t have discovered my energy—what the Chinese people call qi, you know the tai chi, the qi gong. I would say it is a sign of what the body has, which is the energy that you can’t see but you can feel.”
Finding Dreams
       Fearless  would be one word that would describe her.
       She posed naked for Playboy at the age of 43 and  while she doesn’t think she will keep dancing, she told Double X, she hs been transformed by having had the experience.  ” Dancing taught me to go for my dreams. And not to judge my dreams from outside, just to do it.”
    “In-I” will run through Sept. 26 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and is paired with a retrospective of her films at BAMCinematek: “Rendez-Vous With Juliette Binoche” through Sept. 30. Her paintings will be on display at the Cultural Services of the French Embassy at 972 5th Avenue through Oct. 9.