LA NIÑA DE LOS PEINES

Pastora Pavón

Garcia Lorca:
“voice of the shadows, voice of tin, voice of moss...”.

In 1996 her voice was declared a part of Andalusian cultural heritage by the Cultural Council of the Regional Government of Andalucía. Pastora Pavón is now considered the best and most important cantaora of all time. Her singing, which she described as “singing with a foundation”, is the mirror through which all other cantaoras look at themselves.

Pastora Pavón Cruz, known as La Niña de los Peines Seville, Spain-10 February ,1890-November- 26-1969

She is considered the most important woman flamenco singer of the 20th century She was a sister of singers Arturo Pavón and Tomás Pavón, also an important flamenco singer, and aunt to Arturo Pavón, the first flamenco pianist. Both brothers, Pastora and Tomás, together with singer Manuel Torre,, were the inspiring models for the next generation of singers like Antonio Mairena, Pepe de la Matrona or Fosforito , who led the movement towaBorn in the famous quarter of Alameda de Hércules, in Seville, she started singing for the public as at the age of 8, in the Seville Spring Fair . Later, when she was singing at Café de la Marina, a café cantante in Madrid, she acquired the nickname La Niña de los Peines (The Girl of the Combs, a nickname she never liked), as she usually sang a stanza in tangos style with the following lyrics:

Peinate tú con mis peines
Mis peines son de canela

Comb with my combs
My combs are made of cinammonrds

SEAMUS HEANEY

Seamus Heaney born 13 April 1939 is an Irish poet, writer and lecture and who was awarded theNobel Prize in Literature in 1995. He currently lives in Dublin



small bird

chirp-chirruped:

yellow neb,

a note-spurt.



Blackbird over

Lagan water.

Clumps of yellow

whin-burst!

LAJOS PARTI NAGY

Lajos Parti Nagy

He was born (1953) in Szekszárd, Hungary. teacher of literature and history from Pécs University before going on to edit the Pécs-based journal of contemporary, Hungarian literature, Jelenkor (The Present). He began his literary career as a poet and has been writing prose and drama since the early 1990s. He written and adapted a number of works for the stage as well as his own original pieces, (adaptations of works by Caragiale, Hauptmann, Kroetz, McDonagh and Moliere). He lived in Berlin in 2001-2002 on a DAAD scholarship Lajos Parti Nagy , contributed to the reinvention of the Hungarian, literary language and his works always present something new and memorable. His recent works ,Hősöm tere (My Hero's Square - published in German in 2000 as Meines Heldenplatz), Grafitnesz (Graffitness - poems, 2003) and A fagyott kutya lába (The Frozen Dog's Leg - short stories, 2006). Kossuth Prize and the Hungarian Literary Prize.

Speaking in terms

Speaking in terms

of perspective,

infinity

finally turns

the parallel

of our lines

into a point,

but in terms of

railway sleepers,

endlessly linked

and kept apart

we are both

running on

our own.

INDIAN CONTEMPORARY POETRY

THE POET


by P. Lal


For all his wild hair like an aureole, Stammer at parties, slipping from a tram,
Putting off the mending of a sole,
And putting on a mock-heroic Damn!,
He notices the spider’s intestines
Claim harlot, smuggler and blackmarketeer,
And in the clicking grin his eye divines
A moody world of artifice and fear.

Above all, this: When a woman turns
Black clouds of hair, with a rhythmic hand
Weaving their silk in the possessive sun,
He sees her common eyes stretch to a land
O lost, lost; as when repentance yearns
For hope,and love, and finds that there is none.

Purusottama Lal born 1929, in Punjab - India. Poet, essayist, translator, professor and publisher. Founder and publisher of Writer's Workshop in Calcutta where he lives presently.
Under the name of P. Lal, he has written eight books of poetry, over a dozen volumes of literary criticism, a memoir, several books of stories for children, and dozens of translations from other languages, chiefly Sanskrit, into English. He has also edited a number of literary anthologies.

http://www.shakuhachi.com/Sound/Tanifuji/Tanifuji-Shakulute-C-1.mp3

Japanese Flute

Wild Geese Descending to Sandbar, Chosôn dynasty (1392–1910)Unidentified artist (late 15th–16th century)KoreaThe title identifies the work as one of the Eight Views of the Xiao and Xiang Rivers, a poetic theme traditionally associated with the Northern Song painter Song Di

This painting takes as its inspiration a poem, inscribed in Chinese characters in the upper right corner after the four-character title:

On the frozen frontier is a hail of arrows,

Along the Golden River [Jinhe] there are no rice fields.

Brothers one and all, flying down in skeins,

After ten thousand li, they arrive at Xiao and Xiang.

The distant waters shine like reels of silk

The level sands are white as glinting frost

.At the ferry quay, no one is about,

Close to the setting sun, the geese descend ever more gracefully.

(Translation by Roderick Whitfield)–ca.

HAGIWARA SAKUTARO

At dayFor all the startling beauty and originality of his work, Hagiwara remains a poet of the dark; a native of that extraordinary world where Dylan Thomas' question ("Isn't life a terrible thing, thank God") really needs no answer. Shiveringly sensitive to loveliness in all its million modes, he finds it not only in its familiar haunts but even in such unexpected subjects as a rotten clam or the dead body of an alcoholic. A man intensely aware that the sun, that symbol of Japan, rises as much to cast shadows as to give light, his early self-portrait establishes the tone of all his later work:

Sad in the ailing earth,
Tongue-tender with despair,
Green moves through grief's grimace;
And, sick and lonely, there
In the gloom of the under world
,At the bottom of the world, a face.

The Most Primitive Feeling

In the depths of this jungle one can see
Fronds of the great
Gum-trees lounging leadenly:
Like ears of elephants
Their leaves luxuriate.
In this damp and dim-lit place,
Towing their shadows like a trawl,
All kinds of fern embrace
Wetly. All kinds of plants
Sprawl out upon each other. All
Kinds of reptiles, kinds of snake,
Frog, lizard, salamander, newt
Maul in the clammy gloom to make
Slithering absolute.
From the sad longing of mid-day
For what did Adam yearn,
To what dank dawn look back?
The feeling of primitiveness
Is like a cloud, an endless
Endlessly darling love.
It flows away
Past reasonings of return,
Endless and endlessly.
On the far-off other bank
Of the river of memory,
There is no glade nor grove
Nor landing place nor plank
To pin this feeling down.

EZRA POUND

Canto XLIX: For the Seven Lakes

For the seven lakes, and by no man these verses:

Rain; empty river; a voyage,

Fire from frozen cloud, heavy rain in the twilight

Under the cabin roof was one lantern.

The reeds are heavy; bent;

and the bamboos speak as if weeping.

Autumn moon; hills rise about lakes

against sunset

Evening is like a curtain of cloud,

a blurr above ripples; and through it

sharp long spikes of the cinnamon,

a cold tune amid reeds.

Behind hill the monk's bell

borne on the wind.

Sail passed here in April; may return in October

Boat fades in silver; slowly;

Sun blaze alone on the river

.Where wine flag catches the sunset

Sparse chimneys smoke in the cross light

Comes then snow scur on the rive

And a world is covered with jade

Small boat floats like a lanthorn,

The flowing water closts as with cold. And at San Yin

they are a people of leisure.

Wild geese swoop to the sand-bar,

Clouds gather about the hole of the window

Broad water; geese line out with the autumn

Rooks clatter over the fishermen's lanthorns,

A light moves on the north sky line;

where the young boys prod stones for shrimp.

In seventeen hundred came Tsing to these hill lakes.

A light moves on the South sky line.

State by creating riches shd. thereby get into debt?

This is infamy; this is Geryon.

This canal goes still to TenShi

Though the old king built it for pleasure

K E I M E N R A N K E I

K I U M A N M A N K E I

JITSU GETSU K O K W A

T A N FUKU T A N K A I

Sun up; work

sundown; to restdig

well and drink of the water

dig field;eat of the grain

Imperial power is? and to us what is it?

The fourth; the dimension of stillness.

And the power over wild beasts.

TRANSLATION OF THE NIGTH

Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo.

Born in March 4, 1901, Tananarive, Madag.he died in June 22, 1937, place Tananarive) Malagasy writer. Largely self-educated, he earned his living as a proofreader for a publishing concern. He wrote seven volumes of poetry in French, of which Near-Dreams (1934) and Translation of the Night (1935) are considered the most important. The mythical and surrealistic world created in his poems is intensely personal and dominated by visions of death, catastrophe, and alienation. Harassed by French authorities and addicted to drugs, he committed suicide. He is regarded as the father of modern literature in his native land.


"And the drum is ready
when gladioli crown
the horns of the delivered calf
who bounds
and grazes the hills of grass.

There it will resound,
and its incantations will become dreams ...

from Translated from the Night:#3


9



The secret hives are aligned
near the lianas of heaven,
among the luminous nests.

Gather nectar there, bees of my thoughts,
little bees winged with sound
within the pregnant cloud of silence;
laden yourself with resin
perfumed with stars and wind:
we will seal all the gaps
communicating with the tumult of life.


Laden yourself also with stellar pollen
for the prairies of the earth;
and tomorrow, when there will be wreathed
the wild roses of my poems,
we will have celestial rose hips
and sidereal seeds.

PLACES WHERE I NEVER BEEN

Probably never see, so I let my imagination go where they are .....

Madagascar

Is legendary wildlife and flora,Isolated from the continents 160 million years ago, Madagascar followed a unique evolutionary path into enormous tortoises elephant birds, and lemurs. Lemurs were the highest primate formon the island until the Malagasy people, of Afro-Polynesian ancestry,arrived a mere 2000 years ago. Though divided into at least 18 tribes or clans, the Malagasy share a belief in the power of dead ancestors.This belief explains the importance of tombs and funerals. Although the form differs among the clans, it is after the first burial that the Malagasy honour their dead. The best-known ceremonyis the famadihana of the Merina people, a joyful occasion to communicate with a loved one whose remains are exhumed and wrapped in a new shroud. Some of the world’s most unusual birds are found only on Madagascar – gorgeous ground-rollers,the diverse vanga family, the couas.

THE ODE TO ANACTORIA

Sappho -fragment 2

The Ode to Anactoria


That man seems to me peer of gods, who sits in thy presence,
and hears close to him thy sweet speech and lovely laughter;
that indeed makes my heart flutter in my bosom. For when I
see thee but a little, I have no utterance left, my tongue is
broken down, and straightway a subtle fire has run under my
skin, with my eyes I have no sight, my ears ring, sweat pours
down, and a trembling seizes all my body; I am paler than
grass, and seem in my madness little better than one dead. But
I must dare all, since one so poor ...

H. T. Wharton

THE COOL BREEZE AND STARRY NIGTH

the cool breeze and starry night

A sea-breeze (or onshore breeze) is a wind from the sea that develops over land near coasts. It is formed by increasing temperature differences between the land and water which create a pressure minimum over the land due to its relative warmth and forces higher pressure, cooler air from the sea to move inland. Generally, air temperature gets cooler relative to nearby locations as one moves closer to a large body of watertells me

you are near!
Sea Breeze


Far off. Let’s go!
the birds, fly


into unknown spume

golden gardens mirrored by eyes –


in the sea,
the abandoned light of my lamp,

Boredom...
islands

CARMINA BURANA

The satire of the organization of the Christian religions is subtle and swift, particularly in the performed presentation of the works. The verse begins as a hail to the virgin

"Ave, Formosissima"...

Hail, most beautiful and good,

Jewel held most dear by us;

Hail, honor of maidenhood,

Virgin ever glorious--

Hail, thou light above all lights,

Hail, rose of the world--

Blacheflor

And Helen,Venus,Venus,

Venus noble-souled!

and ends as a tribute to three goddesses of love .

BONITA AND THE FOUR GIRLS

ELLA MAILLART, HERMINE DE SAUSSURE,

( MIETTE) AND TWO GIRLFRIENDS

Four girls, they are loaded aboard an old yawl of 14 tons,Bonita, for Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily and, following in the footsteps of Ulysses,
and the Ionian
Islands Ithaca. Finally, on a tuna they rigged the yawl Atalante
they attempt to repeat the feat Alain Gerbault.

ARRESTS OF LOVE II

JEAN GENET visual poem

"UN CHANT D´AMOUR"

Evoking homosexual desire and existentialist suffering ,. After its initial screening in 1950, the film was banned in France , the only copies remained for over a decade with the gay intellectuals . In America in the 1960s the films resulted in arrests, near-prosecutions and finally an outright ban. Fifty years after itsbirth, the film was judged to be acceptable for public screenings, (some of the film’s more controversial scenes were cut.) Genet himself disliked the film and, in later life, disowned it. Despite its chequered history and reputation as pornography for the gay intelligentsia, Un chant d'amour is arguably Genet’s most evocative and haunting work. His only film, it is easily on a par with hi decided to start with the first film, Le Sang d’un poète / The Blood of a Poet, which runs about 55 minutes. I was dubious about Cocteau as a filmmaker since, as a poet, he was one of those laughably bad frauds produced during Europe’s decadent interwar years. While attempting to be Surreal, Cocteau’s writing was puerile, half-hearted, and soaked with clichés. He loathed the king of the Surrealists, André Breton, whom he sought to displace, and their antagonism has gotten both bad writers more play than anything either one ever wrote. s celebrated literary works, such as Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs and Querelle de Brest. With the mocking surrealism of Luis Buñuel and dark poetry of Jean Cocteau, it is as much a condemnation of middle class values as it is a celebration of sexual desire and a reflection of Genet’s grim existentialist outlook. The film depicts homophobia with uncompromising brutality, through the sadistic prison warder, for a society that is both titilated and repulsed by the idea of homosexual acts. A short film , twenty six minutes,in black and white, with no soundtrack.

Stylistically, nearer to the experimental films of the 1930s (Cocteau's Le Sang d'un poète or Man Ray's surrealist shorts). Cinematography crude, almost primitive. Genet draw on his own experiences in prison . Existentialists this film conveys the bleakness of a existence in a godless universe with painful believability. Thel anguish prisoners in their solitary cells, yearning for the human contact to reaffirm their existence, (share a fragment of the existentialist nightmare that was Genet’s own troubled life, a life marred by rejection, depression and self-doubt.) Un chant d'amour is less a film about homosexuality or voyeurism, but much more one about the torment of living in an empty loveless universe.

ARRESTS OF LOVE I

Arrests d'Amours. Le tout diligement revu et corr igé en une infinité d'endroits, outres les précédentes impressions.
- Rouen, Raphaël du Petit Val, 1587 In-16 de 899 pp.,(1) p., (29) ff., maroquin citron, filet doré d'encadrement, armes aux centres des plats, dos à nerfs orné de caissons de fleurons et d'oiseaux dorés, pièce de titre de maroquin rouge, coupes et bordures décorées, tranches dorées (reliure du XVIIe siècle). Belle édition des célèbres Arrêts d'Amour de Martial de Paris, dit Martial d'Auvergne. Elle est complète et comporte bien le 53e Arrêt. Composés vers 1460 par ce juriste, procureur au Parlement, les Arrêts d'Amour furent l'un des livres les plus lus à la fin du Moyen-Age (on compte 35 éditions jusqu'en 1734). Chacun des 53 "arrêts" est un cas de casuistique amoureuse, un procès débattu devant Prévot de Deuil, Bailli de Joie, Viguier d'Amour, la Cour d'Amour ou les Dames du Conseil d'Amour. Chaque arrêt est divisé en trois parties: énoncé de la cause, débat, lecture du jugement. La peine la plus grave est le bannissement de l'Empire d'Amour. Ce livre repose sur la parodie du langage juridique et marque l'aboutissement du type lyrique des cours d'amour, ainsi que des remous suscités par "La Belle Dame sans mercy". Les thèmes proviennent du roman courtois mais prennent souvent une allure de fabliau: le plaisir de conter, le goût de l'époque pour le récit bref s'y trahissent."Livre charmant. Il est plus clair et plus léger que "Les Droits Nouveaux" de Coquillart, moins amer et moins profond que "Les Quinze Joyes du mariage". Montaiglon, Poètes français. Quelques restaurations anciennes, petit travail en marge à une dizaine de feuillets. Bel exemplaire, en maroquin, aux armes de Jacques-Annibal Claret de La Tourette, président de la Cour des Monnaies de Lyon. Olivier, Hermal et Roton, pl. 37, fer n° 2. De la bibliothèque Michel de Bry (Bookseller: Librairie Laurent Coulet]

ADONIS ALI AHMAD SA`ID

The Language Of Sin

I burn my inheritance, I say:
"My land is virgin, and no graves in my youth."
I transcend both God and Satan
(my path goes beyond the paths of God and Satan).
I go across in my book,
in the procession of the luminous thunderbolt,
the procession of the green thunderbolt,
shouting:
"After me there's no Paradise, no Fall,
"and abolishing the language of sin.

To Sisyphus

I vowed to write upon water,
I vowed to bear with Sisyphus
his speechless rock.
I vowed to stay with Sisyphus
suffering the fevers and the sparks, and seeking in blind eyes
a last plume
that writes for autumn and grass
In the poem of the fall
I vowed to live with Sisyphus.














Said Unto You

I said unto youI listened to the seas
reading to me their verses
I listened to the bells
slumbering inside the oyster shells.
I said unto you:
I sang my songs at Satans wedding
and the feast of the fable.
I said unto you: I beheld,
in the rain of history
and the glow of the distance
a fairy and a dwelling.
Because I sail in my eyes,
I said unto you, I beheld
everything
in the first step of the distance.

JEAN -PAUL BELMONDO

CHARMING BÉBEL

Jean-Paul Belmondo was born in 1933 in Neuilly-sur Seine, near to Paris. He had a comfortable bourgeois family background, his father being the distinguished sculptor, Paul Belmondo. As a youth he trained as a boxer before deciding that his future lay in acting. After a number of attempts, he finally gained admittance to the Paris Conservatoire in 1952, although his tutors were not overly optimistic about his prospects. It was here that he acquired the affectionate nickname Bébel.BelmondoFrench motion picture actor who embodied the antiheroic spirit of the French New Wave in his early performances and later starred in and produced many commercially successful films that highlighted his graceful agilit.

SLEEPWAKEFULNESS

Sleepwakefulness

Isaiah Latuf Mucci

Clothe me with a shirt embroidered with butterflies in pink sequins and went to sleep. Cover me with a quilt with flowers, hoping that in my dreams, the butterflies were dancing in their ballet up those sleepy flowers. When I woke before the sun of summer flowering, I was like a big blue butterfly, as this beautiful dragonfly, which appeared suddenly, out of the Atlantic, last Monday of carnival in the paradisiacal site and Helium Fernando, here in Saquarema. Flowers are flying butterflies and the butterfly is a piece of blue sky, a fragment of the sea, chinks of a pond, unaware that the law of gravity. The blue butterfly is a dream of God. and wakefulness

COME UN GATTO

1. Elaine Erig- painting Ragazzi
   
   

Pier Paolo Passoline -

"Io sto benissimo nel mondo, lo trovo meraviglioso, mi sento attrezzato alla vita, come un gatto"

La piccola ode A un ragazzo, come scrive lo stesso Pasolini :

"Il ragazzo è Bernardo Bertolucci, figlio del poeta Attilio Bertolucci,
e ora bravissimo poeta lui stessoL'ode si colora dell'elegia al fratello Guido,
partigiano caduto per mano di partigiani nella Venezia Giulia.
Pasolini sente quasi come una colpa la morte
del fratello e così ricorda l'ultimo loro incontro:


"Era un mattino in cui sognava ignara
nei ròsi orizzonti una luce di mare:
ogni filo d'erba come cresciuto a stento
era un filo di quello splendore opaco e immenso.
Venivamo in silenzio per il nascosto argine
lungo la ferrovia, leggeri e ancora caldi
del nostro ultimo sonno in comune nel nudo
granaio tra i campi ch'era il nostro rifugio.
In fondo Casarsa biancheggiva esanime
nel terrore dell'ultimo proclama di Graziani;
e, colpita dal solo contro l'ombra dei monti,
la stazione era vuota: oltre i radi tronchi
dei gelsi e gli sterpi, solo sopra l'erba
del binario, attendeva il treno per Spilimbergo...
L'ho visto allontanarsi con la sua valigetta,
[dove dentro un libro di Montale era stretta
tra pochi panni, la sua rivoltella,
nel bianco colore dell'aria e della terra.
Le spalle un po' strette dentro la giacchetta
ch'era stata mia, la nuca giovinetta...".


The little ode to a boy, as the same Pasolini:


"It was a morning in which dreamed unaware
numerous horizons in the light of the sea:
every blade of grass grown as a barely
was a wire that immense splendor and opaque.
We were silent for the hidden argine along the rail,
yet lightweight and warm our last sleep in the nude
in town barn through the fields it was our refug

At the bottom of the
white lifeless Casarsa Terror in the proclamation of Graziani;
and affected only by the shadow of the mountains,
The station was empty: over the sparse trunks of mulberry trees and Sterpi,
just above the grass of the track, waiting for the train Spilimbergo ...
I saw away with his briefcase, where in a book of Montale
was close a few clothes, his revolver,
white color in the air and earth.
Shoulders a little 'tight inside the jacket
who had been my neck giovinetta

STOP ALL THE CLOCKS, CUT ......

E

STOP ALL THE CLOCKS,

CUT OFF THE TELEPHONE


W. H. Auden


Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,

Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.



Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead

Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,

Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public

doves

,Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves



He was my North, my South, my East and West,

My working week and my Sunday rest,

My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;

I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.



The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood

For nothing now can come any good

English poet and critic.To the young intellectuals of the left he was the great voice of the 30s: political,radical and uncomfortable.,his homosexuality was behind several personal refrences, appearing repeatedly in his poetry. As T.S.Eliot published the firsth collection of auden,poems 1930 he was immediately recognized as the spokesman of his generation


Erika Mann,arranged a marriage of convenience with W. H. Auden, in order to stay in England

ERIKA AND KLAUS

Lotte Jacobi - Klaus and Erika Mann

Lotte Jacobi -

The avant-garde of the 20's had the curiosity and the courage to go beyond the conventional approaches in showing men and women and started to explore in depth what was obscure, ambiguous. male, Klaus Mann, female, Erika Mann. reversed roles: female looks like The photographer, Lotte Jacobi.

The shift of sexual traits in the photo suggests somehow a quest for androgyny unit..

THE IMPOSSIBLE GIRLS

Erica Mann

Annemarie Scharzenbach

WU ZETIÃN HAVE NO TIME FREE

Wu Zetiãn say:







SO SORRY , I AM BUSY
I HAVE TWO BOY FRIENDS

www.womeninworldhistory.com/heroine6.html - 13k -

WALKING THE LINE

The 55-minute work, entitled

Walking The Line,

was performed in the space leading from to the foot of the staircase leading to the famous Winged Victory of Samothrace, The 55-minute work, entitled Walking The Line, was performed in the space leading from Michelangelo’s The Dying Slave

with the audience sitting on the wide steps looking down into the galleries.
The historic sculpture collection created a dramatic environment as a showcase

for Jones' sinewy body and for Tibetan singer, Yungchen Lhamo,

and French percussionist, Florent Jodelet, who accompanied him.

“Bill had worked with the singer before, and the acoustics are perfect

in this great architecture,” says designer Robert Wierzel, lighting designer for the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. “Yungchen has a mesmerizing, transformative voice,

and Florent added unique bells and interesting sounds that lingered in the space.
“We went to Paris last spring to check out a possible space,” Wierzel adds. “

The first idea was to perform under I.M. Pei's glass pyramid,

but it is a huge space that you can't really shape, and there wasn't any power

that could be easily accessed,” he explains. “We also looked at a conference hall,

but it was too small and too conventional. Bill wanted to involve the museum more.”
Eventually, it was the Denon wing, located to the right of the pyramid, that seduced Jones.

“It is an amazing space, with three galleries that together measure

more than 100 meters long,” notes Wierzel. Bjorn Amelan,

a set designer and sculptor who frequently collaborates with Jones,

added a Gerriets Vario dance floor in red, which punctuated the space

like a ribbon of color cutting through the galleries. “Bill is like a living sculpture

,” says Wierzel, whose challenges were to unify the three galleries for

the performances and to work within the restricted conditions of a museum,

and not just any museum.
“There was a small audience of 100 to 150 people, maximum,”

continues Wierzel. “This was the first time Le Louvre did something like this, I was told.”

That it was a first for the museum made some of the curators

a little nervous for their centuries-old collections. “These sculpture galleries

are usually lit by daylight, so there is very little artificial light available,” the LD notes.

“I wanted to transform the space as we do in the theatre,

discover how it would be revealed, and work with the limitations,

not against them.”
Thursday, and Saturday during the week of November 20 to 24, 2007).

“Everything had to be removed from inside the galleries,” says Wierzel.

“They closed at 6pm, and the performance was at 8:30pm,

so we had a two-and-a-half-hour window. It was much more like

an installation than a theatre piece. That impacted the lighting in a major way.”

At first, Wierzel thought about using fluorescent fixtures on the floor

in a sculptural manner, à la Dan Flavin, but opted for another idea.

“In the Roman gallery, which is the longest one and the one closest to

the seating area, there are big, beautiful arched windows that look out

into a courtyard,” says Wierzel, who was allowed to leave any lighting instruments

that were outside of the windows in place for the entire week.

He opted for nine powerful 5kW ARRI Fresnels, one shining in through

each window on a 30'-tall, ground-supported boom.

“This idea bathed the marble and architecture in a beautiful, sensual,

operatic quality of light and unified the space,” adds Wierzel.
A vestibule that serves as a transition to the galleries was a second space

where the lighting could be left up, so Wierzel placed a series of eight truss booms,

four on each side, to light the red dance floor,

with each boom sporting three ETC Source Four ellipsoidals. “

This provided very bright, specific lighting, with a different look from

the large gallery,” he says.
Lighting designer Robert Wierzel had to unify the three galleries that

made up the staging areas for the performances..

In the farthest gallery from the audience — that of The Dying Slave
— Wierzel used small PAR lamps and 12 High End Systems Studio Color

wash units on the floor, focused on the vaulted white ceiling.

“I used animation very sparingly,” he notes. As this was one space

where the lighting had to be struck when the museum was open,

the floor provided the simplest solution.
In the front of the large gallery, closest to the stairs where the audience

was sitting, Wierzel had another four booms with Source Fours that had

to come and go, as well. These lit what he refers to as the “front stage,”

where the red dance floor ended. “I wanted all the color temperatures to match,” he says. “It was all very warm, with a natural light on the marble

and on Bill's beautiful skin texture. Even the High End fixtures were color-corrected.”
Wierzel worked closely with the museum's in-house team,

“The cueing was very meditative, except for one section where the light became very aggressive, following the emotional arch of the dance.”
One Vari-Lite VL3500 fixture was also placed on the floor in front of The Dying Slave,

pointing toward the audience and mostly used as a beacon.

“This blinked like the soft blue landing lights at an airport,

then morphed into a warm, effusive light. For me, it became a doorway of sorts,

a point of transition,” Wierzel explains, adding that this light was used

for Yungchen's and Jones' entrance. “You discovered the figure was there

before the light was too bright.” Additional cues gave movement to the

lights outside the windows in the main gallery, which followed Jones as he

made his way through the space.