Two Views on the New American Repertory Theater’s Staging of Porgy and Bess
Empowering Bess, and Porgy Too: The Great American Opera One More Time
By Ray Allen, Brooklyn College
"When Broadway director Diane Paulus and Pulitzer-Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks told the New York Times they were cooking up a twenty-first century remake of Gershwin’s classic opera Porgy and Bess, Stephen Sondheim cried foul....read more
Porgy’s Cane: Mediating Disability in A.R.T's Porgy and Bess
By Stephanie Jensen-Moulton, Brooklyn College
A few minutes after the curtain closed on the 17 September 2011 performance of Porgy and Bess, the dramaturge beckoned interested audience members to the center seats in the front of Cambridge’s Loeb Theater for a question and answer session with the cast....read more
Audra McDonald (Bess) and Norm Lewis (Porgy)
Photo by Michael J. Lutch, courtesy of the American Repertory Theater
Jimi Hendrix's innovative use of recording technology in Electric Ladyland
paved
the way for a generation of sonic exploration in rock music. The album's
programmatic suite "1983...(a Merman I Should Turn To Be)," which chronicles an
escape from the dystopian earth’s surface for a better life in Atlantis, was
written and recorded weeks after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in 1968.
In Hendrix’s hands the recording process is itself an electro-acoustic
performance of a work that represents both 1960s science fiction escapism and
social commentary. Will Fulton is a doctoral student in musicology at the
Graduate Center, CUNY, and teaches at Brooklyn College.
John Cage believed his music could, like nature itself, would be governed by the
laws of chance. Though chance might lead to unforeseen futures, as Cage's
surrogate for the category of nature, chance was in fact a route toward certainty,
and could provide him with a foundation on which to base the authority of his
aesthetic position. This quest for certainty marks Cage as a modern figure, when
"modern" is defined by the distinction between an objective, apolitical nature and
a subjective, political society. Benjamin Piekut is Assistant Professor of
Musicology at Cornell University.
The New Lost City Ramblers were pioneers in the old-time music revival that paral-
leled the great folk music boom of the 1960s. In Gone to the Country: The New Lost
City Ramblers and the Folk Music Revival, (University of Illinois Press, 2010),
Ray Allen examines the Ramblers’ efforts to recreate “authentic” old-time mountain
mu- sic at a time when the folk music scene was dominated by commercial singers
and political singer/songwriters. Ray Allen holds a Tow Professorship at Brooklyn
College where he teaches courses in American music and American studies. The
Dust Busters are a (young) old-time string band based in Brooklyn, NY. They met
while playing with folk music legends John Cohen of the New Lost City Ramblers and
Peter Stampfel of the Holy Modal Rounders. John Cohen is a founding member of the
New Lost City Ramblers, a Professor of Art emeritus at SUNY Purchase, and a
critically acclaimed photographer and documentary film maker.