An engaging if overstuffed work that describes the tools performers use to create a lasting effect.
A professor of sociology and the humanities investigates many forms of performance, from theatrical to political.
Sennett, who began his latest book as right-wing demagogues came to power, notes that the most distressing of them was Trump, whose “malign performances...draw on the same materials of expression as do prayers, Bach cantatas or the ballets of George Balanchine.” By comparison, he cites a Roman god and states that “art made in the good spirit of Janus focuses on process rather than a finished and fixed product.” Drawing on extensive research and his experience as a cello player, Sennett “considers the unsettling, ambiguous, dangerous powers of performed expression.” In these far-ranging pieces, the author touches on the importance of ritual; cites Diderot’s The Paradox of Acting in stating that “the less deeply a performer feels, the more they can make an audience feel”; notes the troubling phenomenon of dramatized violence that is “larger than life,” like the ridiculous outfits people wore during the storming of the U.S. Capitol, which “can be accepted, and enjoyed,” thus inuring people to a tragedy’s severity; details the ways in which demagogues manipulate audiences by “playing on their hurt”; and shows how expertise at staging, as with Bayard Rustin and the 1963 March on Washington, can be “a challenge to power.” Sennett’s examples are so wide-ranging—from commedia dell’arte to Noh theater, Hannah Arendt to Merce Cunningham—that he sometimes obscures his central thesis, but that doesn’t diminish the power of much of the text. Many details are unforgettable, as when he writes that a problem in the early days of enclosed theaters is that they stank: “People bought chicken wings and sausages from roving vendors, and peed in the plentiful pissoirs located in the corridors.”
An engaging if overstuffed work that describes the tools performers use to create a lasting effect.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780300272901
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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