Contemporary dance from a Hollywood animator

 animation, ballet, video  No Responses »
Oct 172011
 

Ryan Wood­ward began his career as an anim­ator, designer and story­board artist in 1995. He has worked on films such as the  films, Where the Wild Things Are and Iron­man 2.

The birth of Thought of You came from his desire to unite sev­eral of his pas­sions into one art piece.  Fig­ur­at­ive works, 2d anim­a­tion, EFX anim­a­tion, and con­tem­por­ary dance. He put together all three of these forms to sup­port a theme centred around the com­plex­it­ies of intim­ate rela­tion­ships, and Thought of You  was born.

On his web­site he says:

Rather than cre­at­ing a nar­rat­ive anim­ated piece that com­mu­nic­ates a well-defined story, this piece allows for each indi­vidual who views it to to exper­i­ence some­thing unique and per­sonal that touches their own sensibilities.

Thought of You from Ryan J Wood­ward on Vimeo

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  • wp socializer sprite mask 16px Contemporary dance from a Hollywood animator
  • wp socializer sprite mask 16px Contemporary dance from a Hollywood animator
  • wp socializer sprite mask 16px Contemporary dance from a Hollywood animator
  • wp socializer sprite mask 16px Contemporary dance from a Hollywood animator
  • wp socializer sprite mask 16px Contemporary dance from a Hollywood animator
  • wp socializer sprite mask 16px Contemporary dance from a Hollywood animator
  • wp socializer sprite mask 16px Contemporary dance from a Hollywood animator
  • wp socializer sprite mask 16px Contemporary dance from a Hollywood animator

Julie Taymor and Peter Brook: on the same path but in opposite directions

 musical theatre, opera  No Responses »
Jul 252011
 

As ’s pared down Magic Flute charms , that jug­ger­naut of a , , ’s ex-project, rolls on, charm­ing few. The con­trast got Los Angeles Times’ Mark Swed thinking:

Flute Spiderman Julie Taymor and Peter Brook: on the same path but in opposite directions

Brook’s return to opera has been mainly to down­scale and refash­ion clas­sics — such as “Car­men,” Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mél­is­ande” and now his “Flute” — into intim­ate drama. Tay­mor, though, has taken the oppos­ite route.

She absorbed Asian influ­ences early and made theater in churches and other small spaces in New York for little money with devoted col­leagues. As she became bet­ter known, she found ways to bring her masks, her sense of ritual, her love of myth­o­logy bril­liantly into the main­stream. Her first major opera pro­duc­tion — Stravinsky’s “Oed­ipus Rex” in 1993 star­ring Jessye Nor­man, with Seiji Ozawa con­duct­ing in Japan — was one of the great mod­ern opera sta­gings.… [con­tinue reading]

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Spider-Man musical is just a bore

 musical theatre  No Responses »
Jun 162011
 

spider men Spider Man musical is just a bore’s most expens­ive and ridiculed , “: Turn off the Dark,” with music by U2’s Bono, has finally opened, offi­cially. Tech­nical prob­lems had delayed the open­ing six times since it began pre­views last year, and the show was sus­pen­ded at one point after a rash of on-stage injur­ies and bad pub­li­city ulti­mately led to the depar­ture of its former dir­ector Julie Taymor.

magazine — “deteri­or­ated from mind­blow­ingly mis­be­got­ten carnival-of-the-damned to merely embar­rass­ing dud… No amount of mulch or manure can cover up the music, which is, by far, the show’s greatest weakness.”

New York Times — “this singing comic book is no longer the ungodly, inde­cipher­able mess it was in Feb­ru­ary. It’s just a bore.”

Reporter — “It’s their mediocre score, as much as any­thing, that makes this third-rate entertainment.”

USA Today — “the new Spider-Man is … more in line with the wink­ing musical adapt­a­tions of fam­ous films and brands that have lined the theater dis­trict in recent years… it might just make it.”… [con­tinue reading]

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Not crying now: Neil Jordan on Taymor’s incoherent Spidey plot

 musical theatre  No Responses »
Mar 182011
 

Oscar-winning screen­writer and “The Cry­ing Game” dir­ector Neil Jordan did well to back out of “”.

Jordan was the first writer attached to the and intro­duced his friends and The Edge to the dethroned Lion Queen, .

“Yes, I must admit that I sug­ges­ted they use Julie. Sadly. Well, not sadly. Well — whatever.”

says Jordan.

“I remem­ber meet­ing Bono and Julie at Bono’s house in the South of France and dis­cuss­ing ideas for the book, but it rap­idly became obvi­ous to me that Julie’s ideas were not very sens­ible. She was not headed in, let us say, a coher­ent nar­rat­ive direction.”

Jordan says Tay­mor was fix­ated on the now infam­ous Arachne char­ac­ter from the very first meet­ing.… [con­tinue reading]

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The worst and the worst of the Spider-man reviews: a round-up of the first “official” reviews

 musical theatre, roundup  No Responses »
Feb 082011
 

Spider Man Turn Off the Dark 300x211 The worst and the worst of the Spider man reviews: a round up of the first official reviewsCrit­ics have taken things into their own hands and atten­ded (unof­fi­cially) what was to have been the open­ing night of Spider-man: Turn off the Dark instead of the cur­rently announced 15 March open­ing. The 7 Feb­ru­ary date was in itself a post­pone­ment from an earlier open­ing night. After all the ungen­er­ous Twit­ter and blog buzz, the pro­fes­sional crit­ics have been no kinder. Here’s what the first-off-the-mark crit­ics have to say:

The Worst …

Ben Brant­ley, New York Times

I’m not kid­ding. The sheer ineptitude of this show, inspired by the Spider-Man comic books, loses its shock value early. After 15 or 20 minutes, the cent­ral ques­tion you keep ask­ing your­self is likely to change from “How can $65 mil­lion look so cheap?” to “How long before I’m out of here?”

Charles Spen­cer, The Tele­graph

There’s a leaden lack of humour about most of the script, and though the fly­ing sequences are excit­ing when they work (and even more fun when they don’t) there is noth­ing here to match the thrills, skills and sheer ima­gin­a­tion of Cirque du Soleil at its best.… [con­tinue reading]

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Dancers are the poor bloody infantry of the performing arts – quite literally, its foot soldiers: soothing the painful price of beauty

 ballet  No Responses »
Jan 142011
 

Ballet Feet 500x329 Dancers are the poor bloody infantry of the performing arts – quite literally, its foot soldiers: soothing the painful price of beautyRupert Chris­ti­ansen in The Tele­graph writes about Dance UK’s fund-raising to estab­lish a National Insti­tute of Dance Medi­cine and Science.

Mar­got Fon­teyn once said that, if people knew the phys­ical agony bal­let caused its dan­cers, only those who enjoyed bull­fights could bear to watch it.

It’s an agony that often leads to injury, and not only in bal­let either: ball­room, hip hop and jazz and tap also rank as top-powered ath­letic activ­it­ies car­ry­ing a high risk of per­man­ently crip­pling effects. The spec­tac­u­lar crashes repor­ted from ’s tricksy new ver­sion of  may be hit­ting the head­lines, but broken ankles and torn lig­a­ments are weekly occur­rences on any chorus line.

Dan­cers are the poor bloody infantry of the per­form­ing arts – quite lit­er­ally, its foot sol­diers.… [con­tinue reading]

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Lion King becomes the seventh longest running Broadway show

 other  No Responses »
Jan 032011
 

On Janu­ary 2, 2011, the pro­duc­tion of Dis­ney The Lion King will play its 5,462th per­form­ance, mak­ing it the sev­enth longest-running show in history.

Dir­ec­ted by , (cur­rently work­ing on ) the show will also reach a second mile­stone on that date as it passes the per­form­ance total of Beauty and the Beast, (also a Dis­ney pro­duc­tion), mak­ing Lion King the longest-running Dis­ney show to appear on Broad­way.… [con­tinue reading]

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