#brechtian ass

[phoenixcavalier]

Pink sunset last night :)

[bitterkarella]

Midnight Pals: 3 Men and a Dog

David Fincher: hi i'm david fincher Fincher: i used to be big in hollywood until the curious case of benjamin button Fincher: now i have to share an apartment with david cronenberg & david lynch Fincher: so stay tuned for Fincher: David, David & David Fincher: coming this fall

Fincher: [bursting into room, arms flailing] David! David! I've got huge news! Lynch: the deep in the dark, the eyes in the snail? [Sustained Audience hooting and hollering, 30 sec]

Fincher: David, what am I gonna do? This dog followed me home... [camera close-up on dog, sustained audience 'awwww' 30 sec] Fincher: but David Cronenberg HATES mammalian life forms! What am I gonna do?? Lynch: the deep in the dark, the eyes in the snail [audience hooting, 2 min]

Fincher: you're saying that I should disguise this dog as a xenomorph? Lynch: the deep in the dark, the eyes in the snail Fincher: that's crazy! it would never work [smash cut to Fincher dressing dog as a xenomorph, audience laughter 10 sec]

David Cronenberg: hey honey i'm home! Cronenberg: god what a day Cronenberg: my boss down at the ponderous 70s sci fi factory was riding my ass all day Cronenberg: the brechtian distancing mechanism got jammed again

Fincher: oh gee that sounds awful Fincher: maybe you'll feel better after you sit in your favorite weird chair made of teeth and spinal columns? Fincher: here, put your feet up Fincher: let me get you your favorite pipe made out of gristle Cronenberg: why are you being so nice

[knock on door] Fincher: who could that be? Dean Koontz: hi everyone! [sustained audience applause, 40 sec] Fincher: why, it's our wacky next door neighbor dean koontz! Koontz: i heard you had a dog here! [sustained audience laughter, 50 sec]

Koontz: i just wanted to come over and see your new dog Fincher: ixnay on the ognay! Cronenberg: a dog?! what's all this about Cronenberg: DAVID is there a dog in the house?? >:C Cronenberg: you know how i feel about animals with all their organs on the inside! >:C

Fincher: you don't understand david Fincher: this dog is really friendly! Cronenberg: you know how i feel about mammalian life forms! Fincher: he's a good dog! you'll like him! he's got veins! he's full of them! Cronenberg: that's NOT good enough!

Cronenberg: show me this dog! [dog waddles out, wearing xenomorph suit] Cronenberg: Cronenberg: that's a xenomorph Fincher: yeah i know it's stupid Cronenberg: I LOVE XENOMORPHS! Fincher: you do? Cronenberg: i admire their purity [chef's kiss]

Fincher: does that mean we can keep him? Cronenberg: only if you promise to take good care of him Cronenberg: a dog is a big responsibility Cronenberg: you have to shine that chrome carapace everyday Lynch: the deep in the dark, the eyes in the snail! [audience goes wild]

[demonbarbers]

so high rn so sorry if this doesn’t make any sense i’m just so emotional about josh and annaleigh and this production so i’m gonna ramble a bit about what i love about it and them. ok. enjoy.

the thing about sweeney todd is that it’s mean. it’s a mean show. it ends on the cruel irony of 2 officers bursting in on toby slitting sweeney’s throat, surrounded by 2 other bodies and one in the oven; on johanna watching her father die holding her mother and not even knowing it. everyone is an abuser or abused, and there is no hope or redemption to be found. and it fucking rules! it just rules. it’s so fun to indulge in our basest pleasures for nearly 3 hours, delicately served to us by one of the greatest composers who’s ever lived.

and every major production takes the bile and cruelty inherent to the material and runs away with it. like- just look at this swedish production from 2006, directed by vernon mound. or the last time it was on broadway, directed by john doyle:

productions tend go smaller and nastier, more intimate, in keeping with the spirit of how sondheim originally conceived the piece. (side note: i LOVE when they do that. my ideal sweeney has buckets of blood and visera right in your face)

the original production of sweeney was MASSIVE, but that came from hal prince. hal couldn’t really get an emotional foothold on the material until he found within sweeney an extended metaphor for capitalism and the industrial revolution; people literally eating people and the machine of capitalism grinding everyone up. revivals also tend to seize on the brechtian class elements, like this absolutely gorgeous korean production from 2019 directed by eric schaeffer:

sondheim, meanwhile, always objected to readings of sweeney as brechtian- it was all a farce to him, just a good, nasty time at the theatre. he approached it as a horror fan who wanted to write some fucked up stuff, which is maybe now some of the best art is created. but hal made it into epic theatre.

(if u don’t know what epic theatre is or what brechtian means google will explain it better to u than my ridiculously stoned ass can rn but im just focusing on one aspect of it rn: the distancing effect. basically, emotionally distancing the audience from the characters and the material so that everyone is engaging with the work on an intellectual level as opposed to an emotional one)

obc sweeney is an alienating show. it’s so fun and brutal and deeply felt, but these characters are grotesque. they’re cartoonish in their cruelty. just look at their makeup! john doyle also embraces the distancing effect; his revival is actor-muso, so we’re pretty aware at all times we’re watching a show. it’s all so cold, and the only warmth to be found is in the humor. and it rules. it’s nasty. i love it. this is the show i fell in love with.

all these things have become inherent to sweeney over time, all teased out of the greatest broadway show to ever exist; visceral horror, cruelty, coldness, and class commentary.

but this revival is just.. it’s warm! it’s lush! it’s romantic! and i don’t mean that in the sense of lovett and sweeney (tho this is the warmest they’ve ever been towards each other in any major production i’ve seen). i mean that it gestures at and plays with romanticism.

my biggest critique of this production is, in doing away with the brechtian elements (sondheim just cheered), it also does away with overt class commentary. it’s all still there in the text- turpin is a corrupt judge, beadle is effectively a sheriff, sweeney and lovett are working class, the beggar woman is homeless- but as a director tommy kail seems… uninterested in any biting political commentary, to put it generously lmfao. and i hate so much how little of it there is to be found in this revival, bc you can still Do It without invoking brecht. but i’ve long made my peace with that. i wanna talk about what i love.

and what i really love and what kept me returning to it (beyond the fact that it’s sondheim, and it’s sweeney, and josh groban is so stupid fucking hot) is how human everyone is. the entire production, from the ground up, is built around taking these characters and their pain seriously.

the ensemble all have incredibly period accurate costumes, unique to each character they’ve crafted (fun fact even the swings have their own unique costume that’s only seen when they perform). gone is toby as a mentally disabled man child with an oedipal fixation on lovett. in gaten’s hands he’s a young teenager, aging out of being a cute urchin and just looking for a mother. in daniel’s hands he’s beaten down young man with a limp and a genuine love for lovett.

ruthie’s beggar woman has developed DID after a brutal rape and the trauma of institutionalization and homelessness. she’s not played for laughs, even if sometimes the audience chuckles, and she makes u feel guilty if you ever did laugh at her situation. daniel yearwood leans so far into anthony as a sweet guy completely unaware of the story he’s actually in to the point of comedy. maria is just a revelation as johanna, all nerve and tension and bloody nails from years of self-harm. it’s easy to lean into johanna as a princess track, but ~crazy~. and maria plays jo as mentally ill and traumatized from years of incesteous abuse, but it’s not a pastiche or a praody of it. jo feels human in a way i’ve never seen her depicted before. i love it. maria bilbao u have my heart forever for this.

and then josh and annaleigh…. ugh!!! annaleigh really captures the avarice at the heart of lovett, but still brings in enough genuine moments of humanity and compassion that you find yourself (like sweeney and toby) endeared to her. lovett is always cruel and can only love through manipulation, but annaleigh’s lovett is a woman who makes small concessions. bit by bit, piece by piece, she erodes whatever goodness she had inside her until nothing but her desire for sweeney is left. she’s a woman who’s used seduction to get her way, and it’s easy to envision that when lucy returned from turpin’s, she shamed her for “giving it away” without getting benjamin back. she’s a monster! and yet, when she dreams of a better life, you feel it. when she holds toby in her arms and cried at her perfect little life unraveling, you feel it. annaleigh makes you laugh so hard she gets under your skin and stays there, exactly how lovett seduces sweeney in ALP. and there it is- identification! the complete opposite of alienation. we’re in it with them.

and then there’s josh and his sweeney… i really feel like his sweeney is undervalued. annaleigh steals the show. she won the drama desk for a reason. it’s a legendary performance. but josh…. man. i just. i keep returning to josh’s open wound of a sweeney over and over again. i think he’s probably had this take bouncing around in his head for years. they smartly leaned away from sweeney as this embodiment of rage and physical menace, which surprised a lot of people. but instead leaned into sweeney’s grief in a way i haven’t seen any major production do. josh’s sweeney feels like a man who was put on this earth to be a father and a husband. there’s a buried sweetness to him and you can still see benjamin barker in him until the very end. i keep calling him “kendall roy sweeney” bc it’s the closest way i can covey to other ppl what josh is doing here. he’s all big sad eyes and suicidal ideation, tragedy and twitchy hands. he’s so deeply pathetic he just endears himself to you. i want sweeney to succeed more than ever before. even though he spends all of act 2 killing people and being a shit father and thus killing benjamin barker, i still find myself wanting him and lovett to get away with it. and when the reveal comes, and even worse the betrayal hits- that this woman who he let into his life and body and who, in some odd way, became a friend, lied to him this entire time- it hits like never before for me.

i just love it all so much. i’m so happy it exists, so happy this revival does something so new! sondheim has said sweeney todd is a show about obsession, and it is. this revival supposes: what is the difference between love and obsession? what if the two look the same?

i think often of this quote from luca guadagnino’s suspiria (a masterpiece btw): “Love and manipulation, they share houses very often. They are frequent bedfellows.”

to me, that’s this revival in a nutshell- the thin line between love and obsession, and all the blood spilled in between.

[adamshallperish]

BRECHTIAN ASS SHOW

[callmearcturus]

a real-ass thing I said today: my brain is so ROTTED by pathologic that i have seriously thought "wait i could analyze mission impossible through the Brechtian lens" and then had to be sniped from a rooftop

[cosmicrhetoric]

tagged by @briarhips for my top ten films....i rarely do tag games but ive been watching too many movies lately so ty bestie. in no particular order:

The Handmaiden (2016): holy grail film. went thru a period of time where every time i got high i would put this on cause i knew i would enjoy it....despite it being a very bad movie to watch stoned. like fr dont do that

Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022): new fave movie full stop. everything abt it is perfect id watch it a million more times stephanie hsu oscar nom when

Pride & Prejudice (1995): i know. i know this is a six episode series. but not the way i watch it. there is something so comforting to me about that ugly ass pink satin they use in the title credits....i literally put this on when im bored

Om Shanti Om (2007): shut upppppp

The Philadelphia Story (1940): it was hard picking just one katharine hepburn movie but her performance in this is unparalleled.....esp cause i think its funny that whenever they try to remake it it's always bad. shoutout to sylvia scarlet and stage door though.

Mississippi Masala (1991): no words for how much i loved this. sarita choudhary and denzel washington are you fucking joking

Star Trek: The Voyage Home (1986): the one with the whales. feel good of all feel goods. also spock is there and he wears a little headband.

Us (2019): my fave horror movie of the 2010's for the pas de deux scene alone

Veere Di Wedding (2018): this movie is objectively mid but kareena kapoor says 'fuck' in it and like. inner child healed from that alone but also for the first time in my life i understood why white girls were sooooo obsessed with bridesmaids (2011) type films

Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989): im not kidding this is Cinema like listen to the score. movies with a yes and type plot and no villain. also there's a scene in the second one where bill n ted are sitting on their couch watching star trek and when i watched it for the first time i was with my own bestie (tagged below hey man wazzup) sitting in exactly the same position. knowing that any other night we wouldve been watching star trek too and that moment was so crazy for both of us that we became lifelong fans

tagging (no pressure 🙂): @bronskibeet @drybranmuffin @treedryad @jillianajones @brechtian @pastelrabbits @celestialkindliness and any and all mutuals who want to go for it

[olden-towne]

I tagged 547 of my posts in 2022

#musical theater - 7 posts

#sex and the city - 7 posts

#crazy ex girlfriend - 6 posts

#mtg - 6 posts

#prev tags - 6 posts

#mlp - 6 posts

#mlp:fim - 5 posts

#trans - 5 posts

#centaurworld - 5 posts

#captivating - 5 posts

Longest Tag: 139 characters

#blinded by the light ripped up like a deucer in the rumor of the night vs blinded by the light revved up like a deuce another runner in the

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

Pathologic and Pathologic 2 are both in-universe plays and the developers love to tear down the curtain and point this out in order to achieve a brechtian tone. Do you know what else likes reminding the audience that it is an universe theatrical performance in-order to achieve a certain mood? The Goes Wrong Show. This is why I'd like to pitch the following: Pathologic Goes Wrong.

43 notes - Posted June 15, 2022

#4

if Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins got big at right time, you know someone who attempted, and possibly succeeded, in assassinating a US president would have been a tumblr sexyman, and I shudder to think which cast member it might have been.

43 notes - Posted February 16, 2022

#3

I've come to make an announcement: Sorin Markov's a bitch ass motherfucker. He pissed on my fucking plane. That's right, he took his cold lifeless fucking vampire dick out and he pissed on my fucking plane and he said his dick was "this big" and I said "that's disgusting". So I'm making a callout post on my twitter dot com: Sorin Markov, you got a small dick, its the size of this rock except way smaller.

 And guess what? I'm a lithomancer, I can make you whatever kinda dong you want.

See the full post

65 notes - Posted May 7, 2022

#2

I know we all like the bearscape announced for secret lair, and we all want to see tokens for it.

but have you considered a follow-up secret lair for this card?:

I think they should make Ayula into a drag queen.

91 notes - Posted May 2, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

if your game didn’t fuck me up at least a little, then why did I even play it?

211 notes - Posted April 9, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

[ourladyofmaplemurder]

This is wonderful. Thoughts under the cut.

Jughead’s suspenders being his little black dress is EVERYTHING.

Also, Penelope loves to wait in the wings for dramatic effect. How could we forget in Season 4 where Cheryl returned from her ski trip to inquire about Nana being in mourning when Penelope waited until the right moment to come out of the secret wall passage? She is a legend. I love her forever.

Also, a note about the sound effect when Penelope enters. It is the exact same shing of a knife that played when Cheryl revealed her hickey from Archie!

“She starts explaining the McCarthy Era to the people who are still in 1955 which is so weird, because the televised hearings started in 1954, so this is another instance when the “1955” of this show has nothing to do with the real “1955” except for the part where Fred Andrews died in Korea.”

^^ You are so genuinely funny.

Cheryl #1 Homo at Riverdale High. <3

The eternal loneliness of Veronica Lodge. So real.

Also, it’s tragic we never actually got to see Penelope teaching. Genuinely tragic.

Eveyln as the evil cunt of Riverdale High is a wonderful thing this season. I love it so much.

“The very single, very childless, only works with minor teen boys Uncle Fucking Frank trying to control Archie’s outward behavior to keep him on the “straight and narrow” is fully ridiculous.”

^^^^^^^THIS

“Cheryl SloMo (™)” Her signature move.

There is so much I could say about the Brechtian quality of Riverdale. That is to say, when the show knocks you out of immersion so hard your teeth rattle. The moments of disengagement are different for everyone, but they happen, and they happen with regularity.

Bertolt Brecht was famous for this move in his work. He didn’t want his audience to immerse themselves and suspend their disbelief. He wanted his audience detached and paying attention to what the play was telling them about the world and the people in it. He did it to educate.

I have thought long and hard about why Riverdale does this and whether it is, at least to some degree, intentional. I reserve my final judgement on this matter until the series finale.

That being said, I do think it’s always a useful moment to sit back on reflect on a more analytical view of the scene when this happens. There’s something fascinating about the characters taking up classic theatre roles being that they, themselves, are classic American figures.

I do plan on doing a deeper dive into the roles they played at some point, but for today, I’ll just say I find it very interesting.

Also, Cheryl has to be the one to suffer because that is her role in the narrative forever. The St. Sebastian of Riverdale. Suffering the slings and arrows of fate is well…her fate.

Grundy being back is wild because we, the audience, know her significance. Considering what happens in a few episodes, I suppose it makes sense for her to be back as a herald almost.

Cheronica understanding one another once again. I wish they would get together so bad it hurts.

Your read of Lear is shared, my friend. I always thought he was an ass and argued so.

Riverdale is not the USA. They established this in season 5 when Betty said, “You’re not in the united states. You’re in Riverdale.” The implications of this line haunt me to this day.

Veronica “reacting like Hermione’s older sister” is SO REAL though. Hasn’t she always?

Wonderful recap as always. <3

Riverdale S7 E13 (Chapter 130) The Crucible

[Weird little translation note from an international viewer: There are apparently some titles that the Netflix Korea translator refuses to translate into Korean for the international release, and some they will translate.  The Crucible is one where the title is sounded out phonetically, which is very funny because the Arthur Miller play actually has a well known Korean title. The other deemed-untranslatable episode titles were Peep Show, Dirty Dancing, Hoop Dreams, Halloween 2, and After the Fall)]

The music is all jazzy film noir-ish at the opening of this episode as we slowly zoom in on Jughead in his very luxurious train car.  The sheer beauty of the innards of this thing take me by surprise every time.  Jughead is in suspenders, with what for him is sort of his Little Black Dress - a white t shirt under a button up shirt with suspenders over it. He looks upset and wan.

How does a fire start? he asks, or rather, types.  

Keep reading

[gideonthefirst]

1 & 19 for book asks :)

book you’ve reread the most times?

i've always been a big rereader, especially when i was younger, so there's a lot of potential answers to this; probably overall eragon ends up being the single book i've read the most? closely followed by any of the early skulduggery pleasant books. do i recommend either of these? certainly not

19. most disliked popular books?

man i really deeply hate so many things. probably the most popular book that i hate the most on the basis of having actually read and finished it, rather than just knowing that i Would hate it, is priory of the orange tree by samantha shannon. it's just...not good. it's structurally a total mess - the author is not used to writing standalones and you can super tell -, the characters are flat and uncompelling and their relationships seem to serve whatever purpose is specifically necessary to fulfill whatever needs to happen in the very messy plot, and its handling of its definitely-intentional allegories is boring, irresponsible, and genuinely rage-inducing. it's the latter point that leads to it probably topping the list of popular books i hate, alongside how mad i get about mediocre-to-bad lgbt+ fiction that's lauded as being amazing or something everyone should read or whatever; there is literally good gay/trans fantasy out there we do NOT have to settle for this and settling because it's gay is truly the only reason i can imagine why anyone would want to read it

[dwellordream]

“…You can’t really view Dear Evan Hansen through the lens of a bygone era’s more lax standards of age-related naturalism. Watching the film last night, I instead found myself straining to apply a more radical justification, to reason that Platt’s casting could work as a distancing device. Evan is a high-school outcast who feels alienated from his peers because of his depression and social anxiety. Could making him look radically different than them function in a Brechtian way, as a deliberate representation of how different he feels?

Nah! It is, as everyone speculated, enormously and constantly distracting to see this grown-ass man with a visibly receding hairline act like an awkward adolescent. (Not to be unkind, but Platt does not possess the ageless boyishness he’s blatantly struggling to convey.) The disconcerting Hans-Moleman-as-Bart wrongness of his presence underscores the movie’s larger failure to reconcile realism and the fantasy intrusions of musical theater.

There really aren’t that many songs in this 137-minute musical, which makes each one’s arrival rather jarring. That could work, in a Dancer In The Dark kind of way: a serious, thoughtful teen drama periodically interrupted by explosions of feeling the characters can only express through song. But director Stephen Chbosky, who wrote The Perks Of Being A Wallflower and helmed its adaptation (an infinitely more resonant portrait of teenage life and longing), stages the numbers in the same banal, sitting-at-the-table way as the standard dialogue scenes.

It’s hard to shake the feeling that no version of this material as written could walk the tricky tonal tightrope it lays out for itself. The plot, for those who don’t know, pivots around a contrived situation in which a letter Evan writes to himself falls into the hands of a classmate (Colton Ryan) who takes his own life, leading the boy’s parents to mistake it for their son’s suicide letter and Evan for a close friend, when in reality the two barely knew each other. Again, there’s potential in that premise… which we know because it resembles that of the more provocative and moving Robin Williams comedy World’s Greatest Dad.

But Dear Evan Hansen soft-pedals Evan’s murky motives, failing to ever totally confront the extent to which he lets this misunderstanding continue out of a desire to get close to the deceased’s sister (Kaitlyn Dever) and see a rise in his social stock. The songs, unmemorable in their clumsily conversational delivery and invariably quavering emotion, never dip too deeply into Evan’s guilt, fear of exposure, and overwhelmed need to keep a lie of omission going because he’s in too deep. Nor does the show musically reckon with how the borderline kitsch of its big “We Are The World” number—an inspirational group singalong in which Evan’s public “grief” inspires a viral anti-suicide movement—grows out of pure bullshit he fabricates for a school assembly.

So maybe the stage version is a mess, too. Either way, and with apologies to the film’s star (who may truly have killed it in that context), Platt does seem like the biggest problem here—and not just because he can’t credibly look like someone who’d get carded at the bar. The justification for casting him was basically the Hamilton-on-Disney-Plus defense, that more people needed to see this remarkable performance. But acting for film and acting for the stage are two very different disciplines, and you can’t just airdrop an approach devised for one medium into the other.

Platt, possibly gripped by muscle memory, always seems to be doing the show that won him accolades—playing his emotions to the balcony seats with every facial expression, singing the songs the way he’s always sung them. But that approach clashes dramatically with the film’s other performances, which range from miraculously well-measured, like Dever’s, to very lost-looking (Amy Adams doesn’t seem sure of how to play the emotions of this situation). In the end, Dear Evan Hansen is a reminder that not all stories should be musicals, and that not all musicals should be movies. Let’s hope TIFF saved the worst for first, and that brighter horizons await.”

- AA Dowd, for the AV Club

[garkgatiss]

s4 honestly makes me respect mofftiss more as writers because they had hundreds of us living up their ass for years, day in day out, combing their show and interviews for clues, and they STILL blindsided us with this brechtian circus and i can go back to the post-s3 interview where they talk about how they think watson fudged the adventure of milverton when he wrote it up to deflect suspicion because watson had been the one to kill milverton himself. they knew exactly what they were gonna do with s4 back in 2014

[phoenixcavalier]

Pink sunset last night :)

[rogueish]

Charli XCX’s new mixtape mostly runs the usual PC Music gamut; “Roll With Me” (SOPHIE’s contribution) is terrible, most of the other tracks are to varying degrees half-assed. I don’t understand how come PC Music’s collaborations with obviously great songwriters (Charli, Carly Rae Jepsen) see these artists adopting the self-sabotagingly clumsy phrasing which I assume the PC Music people see as some kind of Brechtian distancing device. This track breaks that mould, however; Charli hasn’t let herself be completely dissuaded from writing a good song, and so this is by some distance the closest any PC Music people (in this case, AG Cook and Easyfun) have come to making an actually good pop record.

[londontheatre]

An exciting all-female cast have been announced for Inside Pussy Riot – the new immersive theatre show from Les Enfants Terribles, the creators of Olivier nominated hit Alice’s Adventures Underground, Bird&Carrot (Brodsky/Baryshnikov) and Pussy Riot’s co-founder Nadya Tolokonnikova.

The dynamic cast are: Alex Gilbert (The People’s Revolt, Tower of London; Alice’s Adventures Underground, The Vaults; The Fitzrovia Hour’s Christmas Special, St James’ Theatre Studio); Alice Ivor (Thirst, The Space; Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons, London venues and Brighton Fringe; Doctors, BBC One); Asha Reid (Scarlet, Southwark Playhouse; Electra, The Old Vic; Beggar’s Opera, Regents Park Open Air Theatre); Beatrice Scirocchi (Nuclear War, Royal Court; The Winter’s Tale, ENO; The Skriker, The Royal Exchange); Cassandra Hercules (Under My Thumb, Edinburgh Fringe, Greenwich Theatre, New Diorama Theatre; 28 Days Later, Secret Cinema; The Tempest, UK Tour); Charlotte Newton John (White Devil, Shakespeare’s Globe; Abigail’s Party, Contexture Theatre and Rhodes Art Centre; Ghostbusters, Secret Cinema); Elena Voce (Ivanov, National Theatre; Dr Strangelove, Secret Cinema; The Poetry We Make, London venues and Brighton Fringe); Emily Stott (The Picture of Dorian Gray, Watermill Theatre; Early Doors, UK Tour; The Selfish Giant, Arcola Theatre); Fleur Rooth (GIANT, UK tour; The Girl Who Fell In Love With The Moon, UK tour; Monotone Man, UK tour); Jenny Horsthuis (Macbeth, St Paul’s Church; Word Words Words, Corbett Theatre; Fast Track, Monologue Slam UK); Marah Stafford (Alice’s Adventures Underground, The Vaults; The Golden Needle, JOYCE Central Hong Kong; Back to The Future, Secret Cinema); Mollie Lambert (The White Devil, Sam Wanamaker Playhouse; Dixi, CBBC; Russian Dolls, King’s Head Theatre); Rebecca Ward (60 Hour Film, London Short Film, Toyota Flow, Printworks; Dr Strangelove, Secret Cinema); Rosalind McAndrew (Scribble, Edinburgh Fringe; The Girl with the Imagination, Imaginate; Sinking Horses, Hidden Door); Roseanna Brears (The Famous Five, Gobbledigook Theatre; Humans, Channel 4; The Time Portal, MC Motors); Sara Hooppell (Freak, The Space; Macbeth, Beer Quarry Caves; Bare Blood New Bones, Bike Shed Theatre); Tamaira Hesson (The Merchant Of Port Royal, Belgrade Theatre; Sense8, Netflix); Tamsin Dowsett (Alice’s Adventures Underground, The Vaults; Les Misérables, Queen’s Theatre; Virtually Blackfriars, Platform, Southwark).

[See image gallery at http://ift.tt/1FpwFUw]

  Director Christa Harris comments, “I am tremendously excited to be directing an immersive experience with a group of kick-ass, courageous women who are ready to punch the patriarchy in the face and tell the world that they will not be silenced. As Pussy Riot are an all-female, punk, protest group, we felt that this story would best be served by reflecting this in the casting. Of course, being a female is not a prerequisite to being a feminist, but as our cast are playing Pussy Riot playing various roles in the experience (a la Pussy Riot’s 2016 music video ‘Make America Great Again’), this felt like an important artistic and political decision to go forward with. We want to push boundaries with this production, and not only aim to inspire and empower our audience with the anarchic spirit of Pussy Riot, but most importantly show them the power of their own voices.”

The new immersive production, Inside Pussy Riot, marks the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Audiences are encouraged to stand up for what they believe in, identifying with themes including censorship, patriarchy and pollution. Stand in the dock as Pussy Riot and live the realities of their incarceration through this exhilarating theatrical experience. Les Enfants Terribles and Nadya Tolokonnikova have created a Brechtian absurd experience, a unique mix of the comedic and the real.

Inside Pussy Riot is an immersive theatrical experience, about Nadya Tolokonnikova‘s tribulations as the co-founder of Pussy Riot, thepost-punkk, feminist art collective who stuck two fingers up at the Russian system and suffered the consequences. Many remember that on 17th August 2012, Pussy Riot’s Tolokonnikova was prosecuted for performing 35 seconds of a song called Virgin Mary Put Putin Away – a direct attack on the Russian Orthodox Church’s unequivocal support for Vladimir Putin – inside Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. She was convicted of ‘hooliganism motivated by religious hatred’ and was sentenced to two years of imprisonment, where she was faced with solitary confinement and humiliation, including regular forced gynaecological examinations.

The immersive world of Inside Pussy Riot seeks to remind audiences what actually happened and how one’s basic human rights and freedom of expression can be taken away at any point. With heightened extreme theatricality, the production exposes the horrors of Pussy Riot’s experience. It seeks to provoke and challenge audiences, showing that this could happen to anyone.

The production takes place as part of the Saatchi Gallery’s Art Riot: Post Soviet Actionism exhibition and is presented in association with The Tsukanov Family Foundation.

Inside Pussy Riot Saatchi Gallery King’s Road London 14th November to 24th December 2017

http://ift.tt/2yBWB0T London Theatre 1

[garkgatiss]

the more of these i find the more convinced i am that they’re up their own drama school ass in every episode... TRF parallels the Queensbury trial exactly, the S4 promo image is unquestionably a Chekhov reference, TAB is inspired by Oklahoma! obvi, TBB is Like That because they were awkwardly trying to foreshadow their future Brechtian parable-interlude with a Chinese theatre show-within-a-show... good lord what else