Musings on art and modern audiences

  Romeo and Juliet : dance as the language of love Dance adaptations of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet have been and continue to be highly popular, and they work so fluidly because they’re concerned, at their core, with emotions that transcend language or logic, and instead lean on something emotional and electric between two people. Is it love? Is it lust? Is it infatuation? Such questions are reasonable, but superfluous. What matters is the something at the heart of the relationship - the fire, the magnetism. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to discount Shakespeare’s work of literature entirely; my point is not that words are insufficient and therefore utterly useless in the attempt to explore such a relationship. In fact I’d argue we begin to understand emotions like those depicted in Romeo and Juliet when we have a language to express those ideas in. Instead, my point is that such a story can be wordless, and still carry the same weight, the same emotion, the same narrative...

  Arrival : is language mankind’s closest thing to a superpower? The sci-fi genre allows us to frame ideas of foreignness, language, and communication in our world from a safe, fictional distance, and Arrival is unexceptional in that way. Arrival is no gun-slinging intergalactic blockbuster by any means, but the elements of science-fiction that do exist in the film are part of its moral and political framing.  Ideas of translation, communication, and national security are not unfamiliar concepts to audiences. In fact, on the contrary, it seems those ideas are all too familiar, uncomfortably so. Immigration and refugee crises are always present and pressing issues, and yet they too are often issues where the language we use can be horrifyingly dehumanising. Arrival considers the ways we use our language to forge connections between beings across the universe. By learning the heptapods’ language, Louise gains powers beyond her wildest imaginings. But whether we take this lit...

  A Room With A View and Call Me By Your Name : Italian romances There’s something inexplicably romantic about Italy. Italy in some ways feels like it’s unattainable. There’s a dreamlike quality to it: the heat of the Italian summer, the brevity of a summer holiday over the space of a few weeks. There’s a sense of freedom which resists time and social conventions. In the true spirit of holiday escapism, what follows on today’s blog is my romanticisation of Italy. (And I suppose it doesn't hurt that the 1985 adaptation of A Room with a View and the 2017 adaptation of Call Me By Your Name are both beautifully shot films). Italy is, incidentally, the key setting of the two stories I’m interested in today: André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name and E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View . There are plenty of differences between the two stories. Primarily, the former depicts love between two men in the 1980s, and the latter explores Edwardian expectations about the social suitability ...

  The Crucible : a play for audiences The powerlessness of the audience is not a radical concept. The very role of an audience is to sit quietly and simply watch, then reflect on the events when all is said and done. Audiences, in this way, have no agency over the events on stage; they can only watch.  The Crucible is a difficult play to watch for many reasons. It deals with uncomfortable themes and events, including capital punishment and the miscarriage of justice, and its presentation and use of the Christian faith are also challenging. Witchcraft and religion become entangled with justice and community. Power slinks from one person to another as if on a whim of its own. We never know who we can trust, what decisions the characters might make, how information might be interpreted. There is no line between truth and lies, only between what people believe. In other words, the play can be desperately confusing. But The Crucible is also difficult to watch because it makes us ...