http://www.thecrimson.com/arts.aspx The Harvard Crimson :: The University Daily Since 1873 Copyright 2009, The Harvard Crimson, Inc. “Marat/Sade,” Peter Weiss’ violent, absurd, revolutionary drama, is both a wonder and headache. It’s a play within a play of the most perverse sort—the death of a radical written by a libertine and performed by lunatics; a thick weave of freedom and surveillance, change and identity brought together with a tense, gripping energy (and the occasional musical interlude). But it’s also a drama about events which took place 200 years ago driven by theories of theater half that age. One look at the show’s original 1963 title, “The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade,” should raise a flag: this is not a straightforward piece of writing. http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=529977 Fri, 06 Nov 2009 02:03:12 GMT Sprawled on a couch, bloodshot eyes fixed on the screen, five hours into the third season: this is not the scene commonly associated with social responsibility. Yet this past Thursday, stars of the acclaimed HBO series “The Wire,” together with eminent Harvard professors, proposed that the poignant images of socio-political ills television can invoke are often the most powerful tools that can sensitize viewers. An event organized by the Department of African and African American Studies, the Boston Foundation, and the Ella J. Baker House, “The Wire at Harvard: Lessons for Policy and Politics,” served as a call to action to the show’s many fans. http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=529976 Fri, 06 Nov 2009 02:02:18 GMT This past weekend, over 200 Harvard University Band alums flocked to campus to celebrate its 90th anniversary, trumpets and French horns in hand. The weekend’s festivities, meant to recreate for grads the unique social and musical experience of being in the Band, included a number of events, such as the annual montage concert on Friday night in Sanders Theatre, the halftime show at the Saturday afternoon football game against Dartmouth, a post-game concert at Dillon Field House, and a special Sunday brunch in the band room. http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=529975 Fri, 06 Nov 2009 02:01:08 GMT Everyday, regardless of Boston’s variable weather, thousands of graying tourists stumble through the gates of Harvard, flattening students, taking pictures of every irrelevant detail possible, and saying things like “Wow, this is just like a movie set.” Recently though, this has become a literal reality as large film productions roll into Boston and Cambridge. Ben Affleck has graced the grimy pit of the Harvard T station, John Hamm has been spotted outside burrito joints, and Katie Holmes has been mobbed while eating cupcakes with her daughter Suri. Perhaps it’s just my Boston-is-always-cold-and-dark pre-winter bias kicking in, but I find myself slightly skeptical about Boston’s increased exposure. http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=529974 Fri, 06 Nov 2009 01:53:41 GMT A bare stage is the birthplace of a dancer’s art—a space where emptiness is the presence preceding emergence, the incubator for stories narrated through movement. On a particular Thursday night, seven members of the Harvard Ballet Company mill about the Loeb Mainstage; with a few preparatory jumps, they gauge the pliancy of the marley floor before beginning rehearsal of a piece from the Company’s latest production, “Momentum.” http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=529973 Fri, 06 Nov 2009 01:52:42 GMT Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Sorcerer” follows a fairly simple recipe: combine a cast of eccentric villagers with a powerful love potion and see what hijinks ensue. The new production by the Harvard-Radcliffe Gilbert & Sullivan Players of the classic opera and satire of early Victorian life, which opened last night and runs through November 15 at the Agassiz Theatre, aims to successfully convey the piece’s whimsical nature. http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=529972 Fri, 06 Nov 2009 01:50:41 GMT The Wild Cat, a new bar in the basement of The Garage on JFK Street, has recently been serving up some extremely unusual fare. Until November 15, this dingy little watering hole will be home to “The Taming of the Shrew,” the most recent production by the Actors’ Shakespeare Project. This fictional bar acts as the backdrop for Shakespeare’s famous battle of the sexes, directed by OBIE-award winner Melia Bensussen. http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=529971 Fri, 06 Nov 2009 01:49:55 GMT “The artist, however faithful to his personal vision of reality,” John F. Kennedy ’40 said of Robert Frost in a speech following the poet’s death, “becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an officious state.” Horacio Castellanos Moya emerges as another writer who recognizes the discrepancies between his ideal and the reality and uses his talents to critically assess the forces responsible for the latter. In “The She-Devil in the Mirror,” the second of his novels to be translated into English by Katherine Silver, Moya continues in the tone he cultivated in the first of his translated books, “Senselessness,” filtering his condemnation of post-Salvadoran Civil War politics through the paranoid consciousness of his schizophrenic narrator. http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=529970 Fri, 06 Nov 2009 01:47:08 GMT “Our concern with history… is a concern with preformed images already imprinted on our brains, images at which we keep staring while the truth lies elsewhere, away from it all, somewhere as yet undiscovered.” Transcending these images is a dangerous prospect. By staring beyond the stills of history, we risk destabilising not only our ideas about the past but also our own place within that narrative. Despite this, W.G. Sebald’s “Austerlitz” stages such a staring contest, in which we—along with the protagonist—are challenged not to look away when those images dissolve, as devastating as the truth might turn out to be. http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=529969 Fri, 06 Nov 2009 01:28:53 GMT In 1851 Gustave Courbet painted “A Burial at Ornans,” an enormous depiction of a country funeral, with cloaked townsfolk surrounding a priest and an open grave. Its classical style and enormous size all smacked of historical and religious importance; but Courbet’s choice to depict an everyday, contemporaneous funeral set in a rural area found modernity through an exultation of the commonplace. The painting itself was a radical upending of hierarchies. Courbet demonstrated the self-consciousness that sets modernism apart: a form of expression that, even as it acknowledges its tradition, eschews it. http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=529968 Fri, 06 Nov 2009 01:27:37 GMT