#performance history
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remember when 👀
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oh hell yeah, London-scored Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer!
Shiki production, Nagoya leg, 20 July 2000, with Shinobu Aikawa as Rumpelteazer and Hitoshi Tsuji as Mungojerrie.
(At the end, leading into 'Old Deuteronomy', it's Sillabub who has the line equivalent to 'I believe it is Old Deuteronomy', and Skimbleshanks next to her near the camera. Skimble rather than Misto goes to fetch Deuteronomy.)
#videos#s: mungojerrie and rumpelteazer#c: mungojerrie#c: rumpelteazer#mungojerriexrumpelteazer#shiki#2000 shiki#shinobu aikawa#hitoshi tsuji#performance history
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Just saw someone on here say the Baz Luhrmann Romeo & Juliet is “considered the most faithful movie version of Romeo and Juliet” and had to stop myself from chasing them down the internet like the meme goose going “BY WHO?! BY WHO!?????” Don’t start internet beef over this, self! They didn’t say THEY liked it best! They might be an innocent bystander! Also you are weirdly aggressive about Shakespeare!
Okay, deep breath, short post. Short post! We can do this!
Romeo and Juliet has an oddly small cinematic footprint, compared to its cultural impact. That’s probably why Luhrmann’s version can still hold any primacy. (Gods, are there English teachers showing this in class? Because they don’t have to fast-forward through the Zefferelli nudity? What a thought. Stay on target.) I can only theorize that other Shakespeare plays get more adaptations because they’re centered on a huge male role, so they can be a Serious Showpiece for a single male actor. R&J doesn’t operate that way.
And in my experience (having seen four or five live productions, off the top of my head) it’s a play that really lives in the theater. Stupid as it sounds, every time I see Romeo and Juliet live, some part of me feels like this time, it might end happy. The letter might not go astray: the messenger won’t get caught in a quarantine, Romeo will know Juliet isn’t dead, and everything will turn out fine. It’s so often noted that the play isn’t structured as a tragedy, but as a New Comedy (like Midsummer Night’s Dream, et c. — a story about young people defying their parents for love) that goes wrong: somehow this works on me, in person, such that I really think maybe we’ll pull it off! The kids will be all right, the parents will be chastened, and all will end well. It breaks my heart, every time, when it doesn’t.
I have small quibbles with the Luhrmann R&J, but I won’t enumerate them here. I simply want to point out that Luhrmann makes the most appalling directorial choice he possibly could. And he’s not the only one! This choice was in vogue during the 19th century in England (which is also when Bowdler took the naughty bits out of Shakespeare, so…yeah. Not very concerned with being faithful to the text.) Luhrmann, and the rest of the 19th century text-criminals, have Juliet wake up while Romeo is still dying.
I suppose some of you are now going, “why is that such a terrible thing? It allows for more acting!” Well, yeah, that’s why the hams of the London stage liked to do it in Romantic and Victorian times. Everything for more melodrama!
But it’s a sin against the text, and I’ll tell you why. That breathless stupid hope I talked about above, that the entire play’s structure induces? The hope that everything will turn out right? It builds up in you like a flood, and everything goes wrong again, and the entire weight of your hope is penned up in your heart, and they came so close! It was so close to being all right, but Romeo kills himself, and nothing will be all right.
And Juliet wakes up, still a citizen of the Country of Hope where this trick is so clever and Romeo’s going to save her, and she finds him there. And nothing makes sense to her. He was supposed to be here, but he was supposed to be alive. It’s a cruel inversion of her hopes, it’s her love made Death at last, it’s her whole world collapsing. We know how close it came to being all right, but she doesn’t know. She despairs. She sees he poisoned himself. And then she kisses him. And she says,
“Thy lips are warm.”
Now she knows as clearly as we do how nearly they were together, how close they came to a happy ending. Total understanding crashes over her, and crashes out of us. It’s the perfectly weighted moment of catharsis for the entire play. No lie: just typing her words above, I started crying with no warning. It’s the sharpened point of the play in Juliet’s heart, and ours. Those four words are the most devastating, understated thing. They are the cold, uncaring touch of Death.
And if she saw him die, they don’t work. They make no sense. She sounds like a fool saying them. And the whole weight of the play lands wrong, because some director thought he knew better than William Shakespeare how to wring the salt tears from human hearts.
#Shakespeare nerd#favorite play#Romeo and Juliet#performance history#fuck bowdler#fuck the Victorians#failed happy ending#fuck baz luhrmann#responding over here#theater#william shakespeare#Shakespeare#i have too many opinions#i have studied this intensely#close reading#catharsis#drama#in my feels
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saint sebastian tended by saint irene but they're both drag artists
felt like this might be something this site would enjoy
on stage: oleandro & delfi oraakel, photographer: peroksiid (on ig as oleandro_drag, delfi_oraakel and peroksiid)
#saint sebastian#st sebastian#drag#drag king#drag queen#saint irene#saint sebastian tended by saint irene#art#drag artist#religious art#queer#art history#homoerotic art#drag performer#queer art#trans#transgender#transmasc#saints#gay#gay art#trans art#lgbt art#christianity#catholic art#progressive christianity#queer christian#<- i'm currently too complicated abt god to have a label other than agnostic But i love yall and feel like you might appreciate this so. ta
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Mix Sahaphap gets to perform (and has the performance chops to perform) in a style that I’ve never seen any other male actor get to embody. Mix gets to unironically play the #strongfemalecharacter. The Beatrice, the Elizabeth Bennett, the Jo March. Strong-willed, emotional, kind-hearted.
Not only do the plot points line up, but Mix, more than any BL actor I’ve seen, fully leans into the embodiment of this archetype. In his roles, he rolls his eyes, pouts, banters flirtatiously, softens his posture and expression at small details. He doesn’t over-exaggerate and imposition other characters but his face also doesn’t hold back his character’s thoughts and judgments. And when the moments arrive, he lets all the hurt and anguish pour out in shatters of tears and visible heartbreak—the star-counting scene, anyone????—in a way that harkens to the operatic emotionality of well-done melodramas, soap-operas, and their contemporary Thai equivalent of Lakorn. It’s only that these have never been men’s roles in those.
It’s no surprise that one of Mix’s roles—Cupid’s Last Wish—is explicitly a gender body-swap, and Tian in A Tale of Thousand Stars is (albeit explicitly denied within the show) heavily connected to gender body-swapping. What Mix specializes in as an actor, and does exceptionally well, has been defined as feminine. To depict a kind of queer expression in this style is novel because it’s not camp, it’s not okama, it’s not a soft or femboy, it’s not a BL twink (Mix has been mostly excluded from the schoolyards and quads of the BL universe except for a role as a senior crush in Fish Upon the Sky). It’s too sincere and too adult for any of that.
In Moonlight Chicken we get to see, without the pretense of gendered mysticism, this performance style’s seduction, warmth, wit, and explosiveness within the framework of a general gay form of expression. It says that this kind of femininity might just be a gay thing. Not all gay men exhibit it, obviously—queer men aren’t a monolith. Still, it gives us something to consider about how we observe performance of queerness on screen, especially in front of an audience that puts so much more emphasis on ships, heat, and pairing chemistry to assess how well they perform a BL role. Could we look for other features to judge performance of queerness instead of how well they kiss?
Seme and uke roles would be the major performance style categories loyal BL fans assess actors with, yet even within the archetype his character’s fill within BL narratives, Mix’s performances differ from the typical uke depiction in BL because he really doesn’t perform them as passive. Rather, Mix’s characters and his portrayal of them are dynamic and demanding. It certainly fits certain stereotypes of ukes (Gilbert!) and their gay stereotype equivalent of bottoms as pillow princesses and brats. Mix’s characters, though, have more drive, agency, and compassion than that, and he plays them with all of those currents running underneath.
We certainly have openly gay writer/director Aof Noppharnach to thank for writing this kind of queer character for Mix to play in Tian and Wen. But for Mix’s specific commitment to the performance starting off with his (debut!?) role in ATOTS, we first have Earth to thank for believing in Mix’s ability and recommending him to portray the role of Tian, and then Aof’s acceptance despite his differing initial expectations for the character. Mix, Earth, and Aof have all been open about how Mix in his personal life and nature holds a lot of similarities to both his role as Tian in ATOTS and Wen in Moonlight Chicken. Some people might knock points off his performances because he’s like them. But his relationship to the characters, rather than dampening my enthusiasm for Mix’s performances, helps me appreciate his willingness to give an authentic performance in a style that hasn’t been encouraged on screens previously. It’s made more impactful that he chose to risk vulnerability to bring something personal that had previously been excluded from screens because of its gender deviance (and in broader society explicitly condemned). This doesn’t make a claim on Mix’s actual identity, but simply shows his willingness to understand and perform the expressions of his queer characters with an effort at empathy that many other actors would feel challenged to bring.
Some actors are chameleons, but some actors have a gift of a type within which they can explore depths and range that no one else can best. For me, that’s what Mix does in his work when directors and casting understands his talent. There’s a BTS video of Mix actually fainting during a scene while in Earth/Phupa’s embrace on the mountain that immediately brought to mind the wildly famous final scene in the film Camille where Greta Garbo as Marguerite dies in her lover’s arms.
For Mix, it was a serious incident due to regrettably extreme conditions and requiring the on-set paramedics, but these levels of theatrics, for me, are emblematic of what Mix is capable of as a performer, as well. After all, he had to faint in Phupa’s arms multiple times on purpose. It’s the kinds of Old Hollywood and heightened sentimental romance realms Mix takes his performances to! Then he can turn around and make it look easy to take that same character into grounded quips or dedicated everyday tasks. It only takes writers, directors, and audiences willing to see that men can feel this way and act this way. Mix has paved the way.
#mix sahaphap#earthmix#atots#moonlight chicken#cupid’s last wish#mlc#ossan’s love th#futs#fish upon the sky#ofts#Thai bl#queer history#queer performance#there’s a reason Mix can walk into the last five second of only friends and make such an impact#again I’m soglad to see more exploration of different queer embodiments in bls#but mix specifically changed my life#moonlight chicken was my second series after only friends#and I had just never seen a gay character in any media get to act like that with such earnestness#it was the first time I felt like I saw myself on screen#the jungle the series
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New Orleans Drag Queens on Bourbon St,
1975
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This is Amadeo, he's 20 years here. He was rescued from a brothel when he was 15, named named Arun then, I think. I cannot be sure. The abuse in the brothel was such that he cannot be sure that's what his parents named him. Arun. The parents that sent him to work on a merchant boat in Delhi when in actuality they had sold him into slavery to the ship's captain. All fragments. Shackled on the boat. The brothel. My maker's purchase. His renaming me. His reluctance to share the Dark Gift, knowing what it would do to his beloved Amadeo. I served him with all my heart. Basked in his mercy, his worshipful mercy.
Interview With The Vampire – 2.04: I Want You More Than Anything in the World
#interview with the vampire#cinematv#filmtvcentral#userthing#smallscreensource#dailyflicks#userstream#tvarchive#filmtvtoday#usersource#chewieblog#tvedit#assad zaman#goddd this whole speech was so harrowing and assad delivered it wonderfully#give this man his flowers his performance this season has been incredible#am i my history i have endured -> fuck what a line i need a moment
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Mick Jagger getting his makeup done before a performance, 1973 ♡ Photographed by Tommy Mardell
#mick jagger#the rolling stones#rolling stones#makeup#style#music#music performance#1973#70s#1970s#photography#rock photography#music photography#aesthetic#fashion#vintage#rock n roll#rock#rock music#70s music#70s aesthetic#70s style#70s fashion#1970s fashion#1970s music#1970s history#history#music history#vintage photos#vintage photography
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Cabinet card of two gentlemen and their absolutely delightful double-walking-stick-wielding dog, c. 1890s
#look at this good boy!! this is what peak fetch performance looks like#ok so it appears to be one walking stick and one stick off a tree stick but anyway he is helping#19th century#1800s#1890s#19th century fashion#1890s fashion#men's fashion#menswear#bowler hats#fashion history#historical fashion#19th century photography#cabinet card#19th century men#vintage men
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When prophecy fails, election polling edition
In Canto 20 of Inferno, Dante confronts a pit where the sinners have had their heads twisted around backwards; they trudge, naked and weeping, through puddles of cooling tears. Virgil informs him that these are the fortunetellers, who tried to look forwards in life and now must look backwards forever.
In a completely unrelated subject, how about those election pollsters, huh?
Writing for The American Prospect, historian Rick Perlstein takes a hard look at characteristic failure modes of election polling and ponders their meaning:
https://prospect.org/politics/2024-09-25-polling-imperilment/
Apart from the pre-election polling chaos we're living through today, Perlstein's main inspiration is W Joseph Campbell 2024 University of California Press book, Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in US Presidential Elections:
https://www.ucpress.edu/books/lost-in-a-gallup/paper
In Campbell's telling, US election polling follows a century-old pattern: pollsters discover a new technique that works spookily well..for a while. While the new polling technique works, the pollster is hailed a supernaturally insightful fortune-teller.
In 1932, the Raleigh News and Observer was so impressed with polling by The Literary Digest that they proposed replacing elections with Digest's poll. The Digest's innovation was sending out 20,000,000 postcards advertising subscriptions and asking about presidential preferences. This worked perfectly for three elections – 1924, 1928, and 1932. But in 1936, the Digest blew it, calling the election for Alf Landon over FDR.
The Digest was dethroned, and new soothsayers were appointed: George Gallup, Elmo Roper and Archibald Crossler, who replaced the Digest's high-volume polling with a new kind of poll, one that sought out a representative slice of the population (as Perlstein says, this seems "so obvious in retrospect, you wonder how nobody thought of it before").
Representative polling worked so well that, three elections later, the pollsters declared that they could predict the election so well from early on that there was no reason to keep polling voters. They'd just declare the winner after the early polls were in and take the rest of the election off.
That was in 1948 – you know, 1948, the "Dewey Defeats Truman" election?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_Defeats_Truman
If this sounds familiar, perhaps you – like Perlstein – are reminded of the 2016 election, where Fivethirtyeight and Nate Silver called the election for Hillary Clinton, and we took them at their word because they'd developed a new, incredibly accurate polling technique that had aced the previous two elections.
Silver's innovation? Aggregating state polls, weighting them by accuracy, and then producing a kind of meta-poll that combined their conclusions.
When Silver's prophecy failed in 2016, he offered the same excuse that Gallup gave in 1948: when voters are truly undecided, you can't predict how they'll vote, because they don't know how they'll vote.
Which, you know, okay, sure, that's right. But if you know that the election can't be called, if you know that undecided voters are feeding noise into the system whenever you poll them, then why report the polls at all? If all the polling fluctuation is undecided voters flopping around, not making up their mind, then the fact that candidate X is up 5 points with undecided means nothing.
As the finance industry disclaimer has it, "past performance is no guarantee of future results." But, as Perlstein says, "past performance is all a pollster has to go on." When Nate Silver weights his model in favor of a given poll, it's based on that poll's historical accuracy, not its future accuracy, because its future accuracy can't be determined until it's in the past. Like Dante's fortune-tellers, pollsters have to look backwards even as they march forwards.
Of course, it doesn't help that in some cases, Silver was just bad at assessing polls for accuracy, like when he put polls from the far-right "shock pollster" Trafalgar Group into the highly reliable bucket. Since 2016, Trafalgar has specialized in releasing garbage polls that announce that MAGA weirdos are way ahead, and because they always say that, they were far more accurate than the Clinton-predicting competition in 2016 when they proclaimed that Trump had it in the bag. For Silver, this warranted an "A-" on reliability, and that is partially to blame for how bad Silver's 2020 predictions were, when Republicans got pasted, but Trafalgar continued to predict a Democratic wipeout. Silver's methodology has a huge flaw: because Trafalgar's prediction history began in 2016, that single data-point made them look pretty darned reliable, even though their method was to just keep saying the same thing, over and over:
https://www.ettingermentum.news/p/the-art-of-losing-a-fivethirtyeight
Pollsters who get lucky with a temporarily reliable methodology inevitably get cocky and start cutting corners. After all, polling is expensive, so discontinuing the polls once you think you have an answer is a way to increase the enterprise's profitability. But, of course, pollsters can only make money so long as they're somewhat reliable, which leads to a whole subindustry of excuse-making when this cost-cutting bites them in the ass. In 1948, George Gallup blamed his failures on the audience, who failed to grasp the "difference between forecasting an election and picking the winner of a horse race." In 2016, Silver declared that he'd been right because he'd given Trump at 28.6% chance of winning.
This isn't an entirely worthless excuse. If you predict that Clinton's victory is 71.4% in the bag, you are saying that Trump might win. But pollsters want to eat their cake and have it, too: when they're right, they trumpet their predictive accuracy, without any of the caveats they are so insistent upon when they blow it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jDlo7YfUxc
There's always some excuse when it comes to the polls: in 1952, George Gallup called the election a tossup, but it went for Eisenhower in a landslide. He took out a full-page NYT ad, trumpeting that he was right, actually, because he wasn't accounting for undecided voters.
Polling is ultimately a form of empiricism-washing. The pollster may be counting up poll responses, but that doesn't make the prediction any less qualitative. Sure, the pollster counts responses, but who they ask, and what they do with those responses, is purely subjective. They're making guesses (or wishes) about which people are likely to vote, and what it means when someone tells you they're undecided. This is at least as much an ideological project as it is a scientific one:
https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-09-23-polling-whiplash/
But for all that polling is ideological, it's a very thin ideology. When it comes to serious political deliberation, questions like "who is likely to vote" and "what does 'undecided' mean" are a lot less important than, "what are the candidates promising to do?" and "what are the candidates likely to do?"
But – as Perlstein writes – the only kind of election journalism that is consistently, adequately funded is poll coverage. As a 1949 critic put it, this isn't the "pulse of democracy," it's "its baby talk."
Today, Tor Books publishes VIGILANT, a new, free LITTLE BROTHER story about creepy surveillance in distance education. It follows SPILL, another new, free LITTLE BROTHER novella about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/26/dewey-beats-truman/#past-performance-is-no-guarantee-of-future-results
#pluralistic#prognostication#polling#uspoli#elections#pollsters#fivethirtyeight#nate silver#george gallup#rick perlstein#history#past performance is no guarantee of future results#W Joseph Campbell#Lost in a Gallup
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Ana Mendieta was an amazing artist who incorporated the natural elements and her own body to create amazing works of art.
(PS rest in piss Carl Andre)
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just finished reading the secret history and WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?????? 'But you're not very happy where you are either'
just shoot me at this point, I fell victim to the morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs and now I'm in love with the book and hate the characters and I want more bc although I hated bunny at the beginning he didn't deserve to die, but I kept trying to justify their actions and like that's the whole deal, they're not justifiable.
#donna tartt mother i need more book#i don't condone their actions AT ALL but now i kinda wanna perform a bacchanalia#bc fuck getting high with sheet tunics and chanting in ancient greek sounds cool as fuck#no murder tho#bc im built different i wouldnt let that happen#the secret history spoilers#the secret history#richard papen#henry winter#camilla macaulay#charles macaulay#francis abernathy#bunny corcoran#tsh donna tartt#tsh
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Hi I was wondering whether we've ever gotten a black munk? (As in the actor is black, not a Munkustrap with a black costume)
I can't remember any first-cast Munkustrap who was Black off the top of my head - which doesn't mean there weren't any! (Both Munkustraps in the duration of the South African / World tour were white South Africans). But I know we've had some covers: Tarquinn Whitebooi in the 2014 Asia tour and Jordan Shaw in the London revival spring to mind!
And here's a list @uppastthejelliclemoon made a while back of Black and Asian actors for Munk and Tugger.
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If any of you fellow europeans have any backbone, you'll not watch Eurovision this weekend. If you have tickets, don't go to the show. I'm hoping the other countries refuse to perform, so they won't have a show to broadcast. Let eden and her sad little delegation perform her sad little act in front of an empty stadium.
#for context: israel has been provoking basically every other performer and their delegation#and joost (NL) had enough and allegedly got physical#he was prompty disqualified which is eurovision history no one has been disqualified before#apparently someone from the israel team made fun of joost's dead parents#that or made fun of dead people as a whole#idk exactly what's going on all i know is i stand with joost#fuck israel fuck the ebu fuck eurovision#eurovision#eurovision 2024#boycott israel#boycott eurovision
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elvis backstage on the steve allen show (1956) 𐙚˙⋆.˚ ᡣ𐭩
𐙚˙⋆.˚ ᡣ𐭩
#elvis#elvis presley#young elvis presley#young elvis#elvis aaron presley#50s elvis#1950s#50s#elvis fans#elvis the pelvis#elvis photos#elvis history#elvis music#black and white#vintage#elvis presley x reader#60s elvis#70s elvis#elvis imagine#big daddy elvis#elvis smut#elvisaaronpresley#elvis the king#elvis hated this performance#“new” elvis#elvis fanfic#elvis presley smut#50s elvis presley
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hozier performing butchered tongue at the choctaw theater in oklahoma (dedicated to the Choctaw people, 10/13/23)
(see this article for why this is such a significant dedication and performance of this song)
#i live in oklahoma. the indigenous history here and the atrocities against them is SUCH a huge part of this state#both its past and its present.#for hozier to perform this song for the first time in the US leg here and dedicate it to the Choctaw people the way he did#is hugely significant and really really means a lot.#hozier#butchered tongue#unreal unearth tour
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Modern AU: Hogwarts Legacy
Two seconds earlier...
A chance meeting in a bookshop📖✨
I really just wanted to draw Sebastian and Phoebe as if they were both living in North East London and are the most INSUFFERABLE, sustainable, soft boy/girl versions of themselves lol (and that isn't complete without the secret history, sally rooney and THOSE tote bags)
I had to really fight giving Seb a moustache
(and because everyone and their uncle is reading intermezzo atm)
#you cannot tell me seb wouldn't be completely insuffrable if he was born today lmao#and he would so have a daunt books tote#and he would read intermezzo performatively on the tube#and phoebe DEFINITELY has a pret subscription lol#the secret history because its autumn and they are both going for the dark academic aesthetic ofc#ALSO SECRET HISTORY BECAUSE ANCIENT MAGIC IS THE SECRET HISTORY??????#every bose over the head headphone girlie needs their airpods man#I SEE THE BARBICAN AND DAUNT TOTE BAGS EVERYWHERE (can't lie i want them both)#i keep drawing phoebe left handed so she is ambidextrous now#hogwarts legacy#modern au#sebastian sallow#phoebe honeyball#fanart#hogwarts legacy mc#hogwarts legacy oc#sebastian sallow x mc#no one cares but i really struggled with the hands so these ones are based on my own weird double jointed ones that r weirdly long so enjoy
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