#maiko wedding portrait

[bluespiritshonour]

First of all I’m such a big fan of your art and writing. If you would be down (and I know your super busy xD) I’d love to see your take on Maiko wedding art (pic for reference)!

Thank you so much😊

Hi! I saw your ask and my brain went BRRRRRRR!

Because, well, FASHION!!! So, before we get to the real deal—I just fucked around and here's some self-indulgent Mai sketches! Hehe.

She looks more like canon Mai without the makeup. (I coloured her eyes in the same layer, please ignore ⊙⁠﹏⁠⊙)

So, Fire Nation wedding dresses are white. What Ta Min is wearing here and what Ursa wore in the comics. I imagine Mai would sooner slit her throat with her own dagger. LOL. So, red it was. FN has heavy emphasis on the colour red. It's considered an auspicious colour in Chinese culture and I've seen traditional Chinese wedding dresses are predominantly red. (Please free to correct me if I'm wrong!)

Also, Mai has worn red without any hesitation in canon.

Sorry, I didn't do the Roku/Ta Min one that you asked for—for some reason I couldn't.

Pose inspiration for this one are Gomez and Morticia. I know Maiko is like the Addamses only aesthetically—but they were both traumatised kids; I don't see why they can't be like the Addamses when they're both grown up and adults and healed somewhat.

Plus, all that PDA? Definitely Addams family vibes.

And oh! I drew such glorious eyebrows for Mai but alas, her bangs came in the way 🥹

But I absolutely have to share it!

Aren't those eyebrows glorious? [sigh]

Anyways! Thanks for enabling me.

P.S: my full-updo Zuko propaganda is raging full force. That man has to have long hair and he has to put it all up!!!!

[evercornelias]

zuko had this portrait of him and mai commissioned when they just started dating…just imagine how magnificent maiko’s wedding portrait is!

[ao3feed-zukka]

Spare Me the Glow

read it on the AO3 at https://ift.tt/3bQMXgI

by chronicpainzuko (competentmonster)

At the bottom of the overwhelmingly red pile of silk is a single pale golden robe. Embroidered in undyed silk threads is a pond scene: cattail reeds, tall grasses and thorny bushes bearing tiny fruits, and long curving ripples of water tailing… turtleducks.

“This one,” Sokka says, easing it out of the trunk.

The Prince’s sharp eyes move from Sokka to the robe.

“That one was my mother’s,” he says. His voice is throaty and raw, like he isn’t used to speaking.

Sokka moves closer, holding up the robe to the Prince’s chest. His breath ghosts over Sokka’s hands. From this close it’s clear that the man’s imposing figure comes mostly from the tall crown, although he does have a few inches on him. The Prince’s eyes meet his straight on for a short moment before falling away: one pale and one dark, deep, piercing.

Sokka swallows and steps back. “If you don’t mind,” he says, clearing his throat, “this one will be perfect.”

---

Portrait of a Lady on Fire AU. Ten years after Fire Lord Iroh takes the throne and ends the war, Crown Prince Zuko travels to Republic City to have his wedding portrait painted by Sokka, a gifted artist struggling to confront his past.

Words: 8120, Chapters: 1/8, Language: English

Fandoms: Avatar: The Last Airbender

Rating: Explicit

Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Categories: M/M

Characters: Sokka (Avatar), Zuko (Avatar), Mai (Avatar), Original Characters

Relationships: Sokka/Zuko (Avatar), Zuko/Mai (Queerplatonic)

Additional Tags: Mental Health Issues, Depression, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Suicidal Thoughts, Miscommunication, Hopeful Ending, Angst, republic city au, The War Ends Early AU, Trans Sokka (Avatar), Trans Zuko (Avatar), artist sokka, Crown Prince Zuko, Queerplatonic Maiko, Polyamory, Sokka (Avatar)-centric, Chronic Pain Zuko, Autistic Zuko (Avatar), Sokka (Avatar) Has ADHD, Portrait of a lady on fire au

read it on the AO3 at https://ift.tt/3bQMXgI

[newyorktheater]

Four shows are opening on Broadway in March. Two of them are transfers from Off-Broadway that thrilled audiences in very different ways: “Be More Chill” and “What The Constitution Means To Me.” The other two bring to Broadway some beloved tunes — a revival of Cole Porter’s “Kiss Me Kate” and “Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations”

But as savvy New York theatergoers know, Broadway ain’t the half of it: For every “Ain’t Too Proud” on Broadway, there’s an “Ain’t No Mo'” Off-Broadway.  Among the shows opening Off-Broadway in March:

Daveed Diggs in White Noise by Suzan-Lori Parks (Public Theater)

Playwright Suzan-Lori Parks – White Noise

Florian Zeller

Alan Cumming in Daddy by Jeremy O. Harris (Vineyard and the New Group)

Daveed Diggs in “White Noise,” a new play by Suzan-Lori Parks (Top Dog/Underdog); Isabelle Huppert in The Mother, a new play by Florian Zeller (The Father); Alan Cumming in “Daddy,” a new play by Jeremy O. Harris (Slave Play.)

Below is a selective list of Broadway, Off-Broadway, Off-Off Broadway and festival offerings in February, organized chronologically by opening date, with each title linked to a relevant website. Color key of theaters: Broadway: Red. Off Broadway: Black, Blue, or Purple. Off Off Broadway: Green. Theater festival: Orange. Puppetry: Brown. Immersive: Magenta.

To look at the Spring season as a whole, check out my Off Broadway Spring 2019 preview guide and my Broadway 2018-2019 season guide

March 1

  Ajijaak on Turtle Island (New Victory)

A “family-friendly First Nations spectacle.” Separated from her family in a Tar Sands fire, the crane Ajijaak makes her first migration from Canada to the Gulf Coast alone, discovering the strength of her song along the way.

Chained: A Victorian Nightmare: (FOST at Starrett-Leigh Building )

An immersive theater VR adaptation of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Tickets sold only as an add-on to the FOST (Future of Storytelling) Story Arcade, which is described as a “pop-up, showcasing a… sampling of  immersive, experiential, and multi-sensory exhibits.”

March 5

Daddy (Vineyard at Signature)

In the second Off-Broadway play by Jeremy O. Harris (who gained some notoriety with his Slave Play in the fall), Alan Cumming plays Andre, an older white art collector who befriends Franklin, young black artist on the verge of his first show. Their bond creates a battle of wills with Franklin’s mother.

The Cake (MTC at City Center)

In what sounds like a recent Supreme Court case, Debra Jo Rupp portrays a baker in North Carolina who refuses to create a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. The difference — one of the brides is the daughter of a dear friend, now deceased. The play is by Bekah Brunstetter (who writes for the TV series This Is Us.)

  March 7

Fleabag (Soho Playhouse)

The play by Phoebe Waller-Bridge that inspired the BBC television series currently being shown on Amazon Prime.

Actually We’re F**ked (Cherry Lane)

In this play by  Matt Williams, “four millennials gather every Thursday to order take-out, drink too much wine, and argue over how to unf**k the planet.”

Chick Flick The Musical (Westside Theater)

In this musical by Suzy Conn, four friends gather to unwind, watch a chick flick and play their favorite chick flick drinking game.

Chimpanzee (HERE)

A “non-verbal puppet play based on true events.” An aging, isolated chimpanzee pieces together the fragments of her childhood in a human family

March 10

  Be More Chill (Lyceum)

Broadway transfer of the teenage cult musical about high school student  Jeremy Heere who sees himself as a loser but then swallows a pill containing a supercomputer and becomes cool — but at what cost?

My review of Be More Chill Off-Broadway

  If Pretty Hurts Ugly Must Be a Muhfucka(Playwrights Horizons)

In the village of Affreakah-Amirrorkah, no one questions that Akim is the one true, perfect beauty — not even her jealous classmates. But they’ll be damned before they let her be the leading lady in this story. A decidedly contemporary riff on a West African fable by Tori Sampson

March 11

The Mother (Atlantic)

Isabelle Huppert stars in a play by Florian Zeller (The Father) as a woman suffering from clinical depression and grasping for stability after her grown children move on to build lives of their own.

Southern Promises (Flea)

A revival of Thomas Bradshaw’s incendiary 2008 play: On his deathbed, a plantation owner vows to set his slaves free, but when his wife rejects the request chaos erupts on the plantation.

  March 12

Ashes (HERE)

In a small village in the south of Norway, a young man sets houses on fire, and a writer seizes them as literary material several decades later. From Plexus/Polaire, the Norwegian/French avant-garde theater company that in January presented Chambre Noir

March 13

Surely Goodness and Mercy (Keen Company at Theater Row)

In this play by Chisa Hutchinson (“She Like Girls,” “Dead & Breathing”), a Bible-toting boy with a photographic memory befriends the cantankerous old lunch lady in an underfunded public school in Newark.

Hatef**k (WP)

In this play by Rehana Lew Mirza, passions ignite when Layla, an intense literature professor, accuses Imran, a brashly iconoclastic novelist, of trading in anti-Muslim stereotypes. But as their attraction grows into something more, they discover that good sex doesn’t always make good bedfellows.

March 14

Kiss Me Kate (Roundabout at Studio 54)

Kelli O’Hara and Will Chase star as warring ex-lovers forced to portray the warring couple of Shakespeare’s ‘The Taming of the Shrew’  in this third Broadway revival of Cole Porter’s 1948 musical. The winner of the first-ever Tony Award for Best Musical, the show features such familiar tunes as “Too Darn Hot,” “So In Love” and “Always True To You In My Fashion.”

  Georgia Mertching is Dead (EST)

In this play by Catya McMullen, three 30-year-old women who have been friends since high school set off on a road trip south–with homemade female urination devices, too much pie, ill-advised sexual escapades–to celebrate and mourn a figure from their past.

Rogues Gallery (Broken Ghost)

Unleash your inner villain in this fully immersive evening of world conquest and inevitable betrayal!

March 18

Culturemart Festival (HERE)

Cannabis! by Baba Israel, 9000 Paper Balloons by Spencer Lott & Maiko Kikuchi,Songs of Sanctuary for the Black Madonna by Imani Uzuri,A Voluptuary Life by James Scruggs,Paper Room by Laura Peterson 

Nantucket Sleigh Ride (Lincoln Center’s Mitzi Newhouse)

Written by John Guare and directed by Jerry Zaks (the pair behind House of Blue Leaves and Six Degrees of Separation) this new play stars  John Larroquette as a New York playwright turned stockbroker revisiting a wild event that happened 35 years ago on that island.

March 19

Juno and the Paycock (Irish Rep)

Part of the theater’s season of Sean O’Casey, the play is a devastating portrait of wasted potential in a Dublin torn apart by the chaos of the Irish Civil War. When a handsome visitor arrives with news of an inheritance, the Boyle family begins to plan their new life, but their apparent salvation soon reveals itself to be the cause of their ruin

March 20

White Noise (Public)

Daveed Diggs (Hamilton) returns Off-Broadway in a new play by Suzan-Lori Parks, directed by Public Theater artistic director Oskar Eustis. Long-time friends and lovers Leo, Misha, Ralph, and Dawn are educated, progressive, cosmopolitan, and woke. But when a racially motivated incident with the cops leaves Leo shaken, he decides extreme measures must be taken for self-preservation

St. Peter’s Foot (UP Theater)

Mike and Roma think they made the right decision in not having children. Then a baby is left on their doorstep

March 21

Aint Too Proud (Imperial)

“Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations” stars Jeremy Pope (Choir Boy) as Eddie Kendricks, Ephraim Sykes as David Ruffin, etc. This new musical with a book by Dominique Morisseau helmed by the director of “Jersey Boys” follows The Temptations’ journey from the streets of Detroit to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

March 25

Accidentally Brave (DR2 Theater)

Actor and playwright Maddie Corman shares her true story of what happened after her husband was arrested on a shocking charge.

March 27

The Lehman Trilogy (Park Ave Armory)

Italian playwright Stefano Massini’s play, adapted by Ben Power and directed by Sam Mendes (The Ferryman!) stars acclaimed actors Simon Russell Beale, Adam Godley, and Ben Miles and the Lehman brothers and their sons and grandsons over nearly two centuries, climaxing with the end of the firm that bore their name in the crash of 2008.

Ain’t No Mo’ (Public)

In this satire by Jordan E. Cooper that began at the Fire This Time Festival, African-Americans leave en masse a country plagued with injustice.

March 31

What The Constitution Means To Me (Helen Hayes)

Fifteen-year-old Heidi Schreck earned enough money for her college tuition by winning Constitutional debate competitions across the United States. Now, the Obie Award winner resurrects her teenage self in order to trace the profound relationship between four generations of women in her own family and the founding document that dictated their rights and citizenship. My review of the play Off-Broadway

  Do You Feel Anger? (Vineyard)

In this play by Mara Nelson-Greenberg , Sophia is hired as an empathy coach at a debt collection agency

March 2019 New York Theater Openings Four shows are opening on Broadway in March. Two of them are transfers from Off-Broadway that thrilled audiences in very different ways: "Be More Chill" and "What The Constitution Means To Me." The other two bring to Broadway some beloved tunes -- a revival of Cole Porter's "Kiss Me Kate" and "Ain't Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations"

[thekimonogallery]

Geisha dancing kimono. Meiji period (1868-1911), Japan. The Kimono Gallery. A tall geisha silk 'susohiki' - trailing kimono for dance - featuring yuzen-painted portraits of famous stage actors. Embroidery highlights. A 'susohiki' (trailing skirt) is a type of formal dance kimono worn by maiko (apprentice geisha) and geisha that is designed to trail on the ground. This example was worn by a geisha, as it has short, unpatterned sleeves. While all women's kimono are longer then the length of their body, modern kimono are designed to be folded over at the hip. Susohiki are not, so they are even longer and have a padded hem to drape more attractively. Another word for susohiki is hikizuri. Although both the dancing susohiki and wedding uchikake share the characteristic of having a padded hem, susohiki are designed to be worn closed in front and tied with an obi, contrasting to the uchikake, which is worn with front open without obi. This susohiki is decorated with famous kabuki stage actors, with a bamboo fence at the bottom, perhaps alluding to a specific performance. This example was an expensive garment to commission, and is obviously the work of a talented textile artist, and would have been worn by s senior and wealthy geisha of the day for important stage dance performances.

[newyorktheater]

A Soldier’s Play

Medea

Grand Horizons

My Name is Lucy Barton

Below is a selection of New York theater openings in January, organized chronologically by opening date.* Three shows  are opening on Broadway this month —  Laura Linney in “My Name Is Lucy Barton,” David Alan Grier and Blair Underwood in “A Soldier’s Play,” Jane Alexander and James Cromwell in “Grand Horizons.” There are also a handful of exciting shows Off-Broadway — Rose Byrne and Bobby Cannavale in a modern update of a Greek tragedy; Charles Busch in his lastest comic melodrama. What makes January one of the busiest months of the year for theater in New York are the annual January theater festivals.

Although several of these festivals have died recently, those that remain offer collectively more than 70 theater pieces; most are experimental, often hybrids that redefine what theater is, and are often difficult to describe; many run for as little as one or two performances.

The festivals seem to set the tone for some of the non-festival works this month. When else but in January would there be two adaptations of Medea, and a trio of plays from New Zealand?

Each title below is linked to a relevant website. Color key: Broadway: Red. Off Broadway: Black or Blue.. Off Off Broadway: Green. Theater festival: Orange. Immersive: Magenta. 

*The festival shows and many Off-Off Broadway don’t have official opening nights, so they are listed according to their first performance.

January 2

Exponential Festival, though February 3

The festival begins with “Fear in the Western World” (Target Margin)

Digital puppetry that examines the apparatus of fear by telling the story of a young couple whose young daughter is attacked and kidnapped by spirits

January 3

Term of Art (Exponential at Jack)

In fragmentary scenes with four actors moving through many voices, the piece draws on recent transcripts of Supreme Court justices wrestling with how to police the borders of citizenship in order to deny rights that ought to be inalienable.

January 4

Wild Dogs Under My Skirt (Soho Playhouse)

In this first of three plays from New Zealand this month at Soho Playhouse this stage adaptation of the poetry of Tusiata Avia examines and celebrates what it means to be a Samoan woman

Or, An Astronaut Play (The Tank)

The Astronaut School has four students—but only one can actually make it to outer space.

January 6

Love, Medea (The Center at West Park)

Part theater piece, part dance show, part haute couture runway and part art installation, this adaptation of Euripides’ play presents the title character as a woman who was stripped of voice and homeland, who sacrificed her heart to put a man’s heroic epic before her own, but will stay in the shadows no more.

January 7

The 8th (The Secret Theater)

A year after the death of their father, an Irish family argues over the suspicious circumstances surrounding his demise, while outside the people of Ireland are equally divided as they prepare to vote on whether to repeal the eighth amendment and legalize abortion i

January 8

Under The Radar Festival through January 19

The festival begins with six shows (listed in order of what time they begin today):

To The Moon

A virtual reality experience created by Laurie Anderson and Hsin-Chien Huang.  During the 15-minute experience, the viewer is shot out from Earth, walks on the surface of the Moon, glides through space debris, flies through DNA skeletons, and is lifted up a lunar mountain.

Ryan J. Haddad: Falling For Make Believe

A memoir full of show tunes whimsically recalling the “Haddad Theater” he ran as a child.

The Shadow Whose Prey The Hunter Becomes

The story of a public meeting, whose topics include “the ethics of mass food production, human rights, the social impact of automation and the projected dominance of artificial intelligence in the world.”

Grey Rock  

A play by Palestine’s leading playwright/director, Amir Nizar Zuabi in which a Palestinian man dreams of reaching the moon, building a rocket inside his shed in the West Bank.

Susan

Ahamefule J. Oluo’s darkly comic musical portrait of his mother builds one story out of many, a journey from Section 8 housing in 1980s Seattle, to the mangrove swamps of the Niger Delta, to the Clallam Bay Correctional Facility.

Triple Threat

Casting herself in all the main roles, McCormick will attempt to re-connect to her own moral conscience by re-enacting the New Testament via a Nu-wave holy trinity of dance, power ballads, and performance.

Queens Row (The Kitchen)

In a near-future America after a civil war has left the country reeling, three women one by one get on a pedestal and tell the story of their struggles.

January 9

Prototype Festival through January 19

The festival begins with Blood Moon (Baruch), an opera-theatre piece with puppetry and a Taiko-infused score, in which three characters encounter the past on the night of a full moon: a nephew who returns to the mountain-top where he left his aunt to die forty years earlier, the ghost of the aunt he abandoned, and the moon that presides over this night of reckoning.

Modern Maori Quartet: Two Worlds (Soho Playhouse)

In this second of three shows from New Zealand this month, the group sings songs and tells stories.

January 10

Cartography (New Victory)

Inflatable rafts on the Mediterranean. Dark holds of cargo trucks. Family photos hidden carefully in a backpack. Hear the stories of young refugees in this multimedia theatrical work for ages 10 and up;

  Iron and Coal (Prototype)

A rock opera by Jeremy Schonfeld that weaves together his personal experiences with excerpts from his father, an Auschwitz survivor, brought to life through animation, a rock band, an orchestra, and 200-member multigenerational choruses.

January 11

Contours of Heaven (Soho Playhouse)

In the last of the three plays from New Zealand, this verbatim work is based on interviews with six rangatahi (Maori youth.)

January 12

Medea (BAM)

Rose Byrne and Bobby Cannavale star in writer-director Simon Stone’s rewrite of the Euripides tragedy.

Daydream Tutorial (Under the Radar)

Japanese collagist, animator, and puppeteer, Maiko Kikuchi, mixes mediums in this solo show, inviting us to the whimsical nexus of her surreal series of daydreams.

January 15

My Name Is Lucy Barton (MTC’s Samuel Friedman Theater)

In this solo play adapted from the best-selling novel by Elizabeth Strout, Laura Linney stars as Lucy Barton, a woman who wakes after an operation to find – much to her surprise – her mother at the foot of her bed. They haven’t seen each other in years.

January 17

Miss America’s Ugly Daughter (Marjorie Deane Little Theater)

Barra Grant explores her life growing up in the shadow of her mother Bess Myerson, the first and only Jewish Miss America.

January 19

Josh Lamon as Prince and Lesli Magherita as Princess

Emojiland (The Duke on 42nd Street)

A musical that  is set inside a smart phone, with the resident emojis facing a “textistential” crisis —  the phone is due for a software update. That’s in the first act. In the second act, they face a virus.

My review of Emojiland when it was part of the New York Musical Festival

  January 21

A Soldier’s Play (Roundabout’s American Airlines Theater)

The Pulitzer Prize-winning mystery about the murder of a black sergeant on a Louisiana army base in 1944 comes to Broadway for the first time, starring David Alan Grier and Blair Underwood.

Paris (Atlantic)

Emmie is one of the only black people living in Paris, Vermont, and she desperately needs a job. When she is hired at Berry’s, a store off the interstate selling everything from baby carrots to lawnmowers, she begins to understand a new kind of isolation.

January 23

Grand Horizons (Helen Hayes)

In this new play by Bess Wohl, James Cromwell and Jane Alexander portray Bill and Nancy, who have spent 50 years as husband and wife. But just as they settle comfortably into their new home in Grand Horizons, the unthinkable happens: Nancy suddenly wants out. As their two adult sons struggle to cope with the shocking news, they are forced to question everything they assumed about the people they thought they knew best.

Fire This Time Festival through February 2

seven ten-minute plays by writers of African descent.

January 26

Das Barbecü  

A nod to Wagner’s Ring Cycle merged with a comedic Texas fable, the songbook ranges from Broadway to Texas swing, from jazz to twangy country and western as mismatched lovers meet on the day of their double shotgun wedding with five actors playing more than 30 characters. It takes place at the Hill Country Barbecue Market, which is a restaurant and nightclub in the Flatiron District.

January 29

The Confession of Lily Dare (Primary Stages at Cherry Lane) The latest comic melodrama written by and starring Charles Busch tells the story of one woman’s tumultuous passage from convent girl to glittering cabaret chanteuse to infamous madame of a string of brothels.

January 30

Sister Calling My Name (Sheen Center)

A brother reluctantly holds a reunion with his developmentally disabled sister who has become an extraordinary artist.  When he discovers his sister’s guardian, a nun, is a woman he knew from his past, the three are all thrown into an emotionally charged encounter that leaves them forever changed.

January 2020 New York Theater Openings Below is a selection of New York theater openings in January, organized chronologically by opening date.* Three shows  are opening on Broadway this month --  Laura Linney in "My Name Is Lucy Barton," David Alan Grier and Blair Underwood in "A Soldier's Play," Jane Alexander and James Cromwell in "Grand Horizons." There are also a handful of exciting shows Off-Broadway -- Rose Byrne and Bobby Cannavale in a modern update of a Greek tragedy; Charles Busch in his lastest comic melodrama.