By request, below the fold we're going to post photos of some costumes worn by Maoist Orange Cakers this year and in the past. If you'd like to add to this line-up, e-mail your JPEGs, GIFs or BMPs to one of us. And please continue celebrating little gator's post on Halloween.
The beauty of hand-made costumes, using masks from Venice and creative assemblage:
(Kat, Halloween 2007)
(Creating that medieval "layered look")
(Kat's boyfriend, Halloween 2007)
(Kat's boyfriend Halloween 2007, close-up of mask)
Costumes used by Kat's dear friend Paul Joseph Serna of the Houston Grand Opera in production of Un ballo in maschera (A Masked Ball) and La fille du regiment (The Daughter of the Regiment)+2.bmp)
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little gator has come through with some photographs of her pumpkin carving party for 2007 and the glorious results, below. In the last photo, the woman in white shirt and black pants is little gator -- only a backside view, maybe we get to see your face next time, too? (please?)
This is not a Halloween costume -- rather, it's from my infamous Pirate Birthday Party of 1984, at Lake Merced in San Francisco. A rowdy crew of dykes and children dressed as brigands swarmed the rowboat concession at the lake. We had cutlasses, pistols (my flintlock shot caps -- o how I love cap pistols!), a plank to walk, and cannonballs (dodgeballs painted black). Within half an hour, we'd cleared the lake of anyone but us. My Chocolate Heart Attack cake from Just Desserts had to be cut with a plastic dagger. This shot is after my roommate and one of the great loves of my life, Sharon "Lava" Franklet had persuaded me to insert my flintlock into my breeches for added effect -- I let her do the placement and adjusting. I was an out-of-control Mary Bonney. It was my first birthday after Mama died. The tattoo between my exposed cleavage was a red rose emblazoned with "Mom."
Last, but not least:
(Ghost doggies, as references in little gator's post)
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
CAKERS' COSTUMES (Updated)
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Feminist Wagnerian
Greer Grimsley is one sexy Dutchman. And a hot Wotan, and an absolutely sizzling Telramund. Seattle Opera’s summer production—the first opera of the season—is generally something big. And in Seattle, something big often means Richard Wagner. Last Wednesday it was the Flying Dutchman, with Greer Grimsley in the title role. Great stuff.
As Rebecca Brown has pointed out, it’s kind of strange to be simultaneously a feminist and an opera fan. Sure, there are a lot of strong female characters in opera, but they all end up either dying or getting married, usually the former. Sometimes the man dies, but unlike the woman he never dies alone; if the man dies, the woman dies too. But just try finding an opera in which the man dies and the woman has sufficient strength of character to survive him. The only one I can think of is Werther, and that’s iffy.
Especially problematic for the feminist opera fan are the operas of Herr Wagner. Allow me to borrow from Perry Lorenzo, Education Director at Seattle Opera and Lecturer Extraordinaire. All of Richard Wagner’s operas are about one thing: Richard Wagner. They go like this: There’s this guy, and he’s alone and lost, usually in the wilderness. And he’s searching for something... something beautiful... for a woman, who will devote herself utterly to him, who will die for him, and bring him redemption. And when they finally get together at the end of the opera, and she dies—or maybe he dies first and then she dies—there’s a tremendous transformation scene which is impossible to stage and doesn’t make a great deal of sense, but is overwhelmingly beautiful and moving nonetheless. Despite Wagner’s insistence on the primacy of the “Eternal Feminine”, this is not exactly a story to warm the cockles of a feminist’s heart.
So we come to the Dutchman. Everyone knows the legend: A Dutch sea captain, trying to sail around the Cape of Good Hope in a storm, vows to round the Cape even if it takes till Doomsday. The Devil hears him and, for his hubris, curses him to sail the seas forever; he can only be saved if a woman proves to be faithful to him unto death. If she vows fidelity and fails, he will return to the sea and she will be condemned to Hell. A perfect recipe for a happy marriage. The Dutchman has tried it often and it has never worked, big surprise.
The opera opens on a modern Norwegian fishing boat, after an overture that cannot be heard as anything except a storm at sea. The Dutchman comes alongside in his 18th Century sailing ship; it is his once-in-seven-years chance to find a faithful wife. He boards the fishing boat and offers the Captain, Daland, a chest of treasure for the chance to woo his daughter Senta. Delighted at the prospect of a rich son-in-law, Daland takes the Dutchman home where Senta has been hypnotically staring at a painting of the Dutchman that just happens to be hanging over the fireplace. We’re talking pathological obsession here; she can’t talk about anything else, even to her boyfriend, Erik.
The Dutchman arrives, and he and Senta stare at each other without speaking for twenty minutes while Daddy babbles mindlessly. This extended silent staring is a sure-fire sign of Wagnerian love-at-first-sight. Finally they start singing. Funny thing, though: throughout this passionate duet (and it is passionate!) hardly anything is said about love. It’s all about her faithfulness and his redemption. Her obsession is less love than it is religious vocation. And he wants release from his curse.
As they prepare to marry the next day, Erik comes around and begs Senta not to dump him for a cursed man. On Wednesday evening the tenor practically ripped out the audience’s heartstrings with this song, but Senta is unmoved. Not so the Dutchman, who somehow manages to interpret Erik’s plea as proof of Senta’s unfaithfulness. He refuses to listen to her and sets sail for another seven years. She proves her faithfulness-unto-death in the only way she can: she jumps into the sea and dies, still faithful. In this particular production she doesn’t drown; she grabs some high tension wires before she jumps and electrocutes herself. Flashy. Then we have the redemption music as the curse is lifted, all glorious and up-lifting in spite of everything.
I know, the story, when it’s told like that, is offensive, and even perverted. When I first started listening to Wagner on the radio with nothing but synopses to go on, my feminist principles absolutely shuddered, and I didn’t much like Wagner. But somehow, when I attend an actual performance, with great singers and actors and direction, none of the ideology matters. I don’t exactly put aside my feminism or my modern ideas about human relationships, but for those few hours at the opera house, they don’t seem to be of overwhelming importance. Against all rational expectations it is a magnificent, inspiring theatrical experience. And I’ll be back again in ’08 for The Ring.
Wagner, by the way, eventually got a woman who devoted herself to him utterly, his last wife Cosima, though she didn’t die for him. She survived him by many years, and fought like a tigress protecting his artistic legacy. Great male artists get supportive wives like that often enough that it doesn’t surprise us. For women artists it is not as common, but it does happen. Alexandra David-Neel’s husband acted as her literary agent and handled her finances through all the years she was tramping around Tibet with her Sikkimese adopted son, studying in monasteries and meditating in caves.
More to come in the comments about my first Dutchman, proper opera attire, and on-stage sailing vessels.
Monday, July 9, 2007
Lesbian Separatism in the Middle Ages
Princess Ida, one of Gilbert and Sullivan’s lesser known works, opens in less than a week at the Bagley-Wright Theatre here in Seattle, and everyone in the Seattle Gilbert and Sullivan Society is going crazy. My job is a tiny one: I handle the in-house video. I sit at the back of the house running an empty video camera that’s hooked up to monitors in the pit. That means I get to see every performance. Yay!
Princess Ida isn’t a show one gets to see often. It has some of Sullivan’s most beautiful music, including a song with a tune like something out of Handel’s Messiah in which three stupid soldiers—we know they’re stupid because they tell us so themselves—take off their armor piece by piece before going into battle. In this production, one of the three men explicitly turns it into a strip-tease for the benefit of the women’s chorus. The show also features men in drag, women twirling battleaxes as if they were batons, a bondage song for the lead tenor, a power struggle between professors, a unique Gilbertian poke at Darwin, and local talk-radio star Dave Ross complaining that he has nothing to complain about.
As a fervent Gilbertian, it pains me to admit that Princess Ida is not one of Gilbert’s best libretti. That doesn’t mean it’s bad; Gilbert never wrote a bad libretto. But it’s not up there with The Mikado or Iolanthe. The main difficulty for the crew here at the MOC is the subject of Gilbert’s satire: women’s education, and by extension, feminism. As in any movement made up of human beings, there is plenty to laugh about in the feminist movement, whether First or Second Wave, but Gilbert knew nothing about feminism, so he ended up making fun of all the wrong things. Fortunately, WSG is an equal-opportunity satirist, and men get skewered too, along with a wide variety of ungendered human foibles.
I’ve long thought it would be possible to put together a good pastiche of Ida that actually would make fun of feminism, and do it using Gilbert’s own characters and jokes. For instance there is the disagreeable feminist who trashes her fellow feminists, all in the noble cause of ideological purity. This same feminist, when forced to live in a perfect non-sexist world, is miserable: “Isn’t your life extremely flat when you’ve nothing whatever to protest at!” And there are the three ignorant housewives: “Politics we bar, they are not our bent; on the whole we are not intelligent.” Later, after some consciousness-raising, they throw away all their bras, girdles, and made-up. “This brassiere, truth to tell, may look uncommon well, but in a fight it’s much too tight; it’s like a lobster shell.” Then there are the three liberal feminists who want to wage revolution “most politely,” and overthrow male-rule without offending anyone. I find it telling that these excellent feminist types are all male characters in Gilbert’s libretto. The only feminist type in female guise is the separatist princess herself.
Oh yeah, I did mention lesbian separatism, didn’t I? It’s here, even though G&S certainly didn’t plan it that way. Here’s the tale: Some time vaguely in the Middle Ages, their respective royal parents arrange for Princess Ida, aged one, to marry Prince Hilarion, aged two. As the show opens Ida is twenty-one and it’s time for her to move in with Hilarion so they can do their dynastic duty. But somewhere along the line Ida has decamped to Castle Adamant with a hundred female students, plus faculty, all of whom have vowed never to have anything to do with men for the rest of their lives. For those of us who remember the 1970s, this will sound oddly familiar. Naturally, the guys can’t leave well enough alone. Hilarion and two of his frat buddies sneak into the castle, put on women’s academic robes, and try to pass themselves off as women, just as if they were at a music festival or something. This does not work, though the boys do get a chance to dance the Macarena and discuss global warming. The more male chauvinist of Hilarion’s pals wins over one of the younger students (who has a thing for beards), while the other pal gets drunk. Hilarion sings rapturously about having Ida chain him up, and she obliges by packing him off to a dungeon. Meanwhile Hi’s father has taken Ida’s dysfunctional family hostage and is threatening war. A lot of genuinely funny stuff goes on before Ida finally exhausts all her options and is compelled give in graciously, as a princess should, politely claiming to love Hilarion. The script makes it clear, however, that Ida will soon be back at Castle Adamant with Lady Psyche and her girl students. Maybe Hilarion will be able to get something going with his drunken pal Cyril.
Eight hundred words already! And I haven’t had a chance to say anything about Tennyson, or the map I drew as one of the props, or my rehearsal sketches, or the international reputation of the Seattle G&S Society, or what the strip-tease has to do with the Iliad. Someone will just have to ask me.
Seattle Gilbert and Sullivan Society: http://www.pattersong.org/
G&S Archive: Princess Ida
Friday, May 4, 2007
I am the Prince of Poland
Or rather, I was the Prince of Poland last Saturday evening. Being an unrepentant opera fanatic, I couldn’t miss The Liberation of Ruggiero from the Island of Alcina, written around 1525 by Francesca Caccini. The singing, by four professional opera singers trading parts, was lovely, but the acting, I admit, was a little stiff. I suppose that’s to be expected when it’s being presented by the Northwest Puppet Theatre and all the actors are marionettes.
Ruggiero is the first opera known to have been written by a woman, and was originally performed in Florence to celebrate the visit of the Prince of Poland. In the prelude, the prince is welcomed by the god Neptune (who has no reason for being there except for the fact that the story takes place on an island), so things don’t make much sense if the prince isn’t around. That’s where I came in.
When I came in, I was one of the first to arrive—on purpose, of course. I’m 4’10” and wanted to make sure I got a good seat. And there before me was the best seat in the house, front and center with an excellent view. This was no ordinary theatre seat. It was a wooden chair with arms and a high back, fancy carving, and a red velvet cushion. My aching back said “Yes!” and I took it.
Before the music began, a woman came out and welcomed us, reminded everyone to turn off their cell phones, and introduced the audience to the Prince of Poland. That was me.
I was sitting on the throne! That made me the Prince of Poland. I was presented with a crown, which was altogether too brachycephalic for me, and a sceptre in the form of a wooden folly stick, which was introduced as my prime minister. His grin did remind me a bit of Tony Blair. During intermission the crown fell off and bent itself into a more comfortably dolichocephalic shape, so I no longer had to wear it dangling over my right ear.
During my evening of royal privilege, I strove to behave with the appropriate self-contained dignity and airy condescension. Only two people were allowed to kiss my hand.
By the way, next year the puppet opera will be Don Giovanni. Maybe I’ll get to seduce someone.
Bio (culled from ten minutes on the web):
Francesca Caccini, (1587 - 1645?) often called La Cecchina, (The Songbird), was born in Florence, Italy, on the eighteenth of September, 1587. Her father was a prolific composer; her mother, stepmother, brother, and husband were singers; and her younger sister, Settimia, was a singer and composer. Francesca herself was a singer, instrumentalist, composer, and lyricist; her performances were admired by Claudio Monteverdi. Although she was one of the most prolific female composers of her time, if not of all time, all that has survived of her work is Il primo libro delle musiche, a collection of songs, and Ruggiero alone of her five operas.
For more, see: Francesca Caccini
