"The Shakespeare Requirement" (2018) and "The English Experience: A Novel" (2023), by Julie Schumacher

Julie Schumacher has grown as a narrator; she reads both books and excels in the second one, especially when inhabiting the voices of jaded female students. Her forte is not the plot but shifting spontaneously among perspectives from disparate points of self-absorption. Schumacher understands that time is the ultimate scarce resource, and that self-expression is the ultimate urge. Her protagonist, Jason Fitger, pays with the precision of his prose for the reader's scarce attention to Fitger's self. Fitger succeeds. So do some of his students in The English Experience; they make up with sincerity for what they lack in fluency. Janet fails.

Writing is trading in time and over time, with others and with one's future selves. The writer sinks time so that others do not have to. The writer thinks so that others can think better.

Deseo

(12 November 2023, Un Teatro)

A modern ballet tells ten different stories in parallel. One experiences them develop all at once, just as one hears chord progressions in a musical piece. Interpret a dance performance too soon, before the experience of watching it has coalesced, and you have destroyed nine stories out of ten by singling out just one. Do so publicly, and you have robbed other spectators of their stories. It is best not to interpret. If one could interpret, then the medium of dance would be redundant.

What may be more profitable is to describe how watching a ballet has changed one. And even if one is unchanged, one’s sensibilities may be selectively awoken, if only for a moment. That, too, may be worthy of description. Perhaps the latter phenomenon is exactly what the incantation “you can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep” in the motion picture Asteroid City meant. To be consumed by theatre or dance is to succumb to sleep. To wake up is to walk out of the theatre with one's sensibilities sharpened. 

In a typical novel or a film, the protagonist follows a positive character arc. First, he is desperate to satisfy his wants. Then, in the course of the story, he learns that his wants are at odds with his needs. He changes course. He grows. This perspective on storytelling suggests supremacy of needs over wants and a conflict between the two.

In Deseo, needs and wants are in harmony; the characters follow flat arcs. It is the audience whom the dancers invite to become heroes each complete with a conflict and a positive character arc. To this end, Act 1 prompts the audience not just to think of wants but to actually want. Act 2 parts the curtains slightly and invites the audience to walk through for a glimpse of the ultimate needs: connection and beauty.

Jessica Sandoval, Deseo's choreographer and director, along with Estefanía Villa and Tathanna, the dancer duo, define these needs with extraordinary precision. They do so in the language that few speak and fewer still speak fluently but everyone understands: the language of dance. What is even less common is that the artists know exactly what they want say. And they will not repeat the definitions; the production has a limited engagement. The audience members are uniquely responsible for learning the supplied definitions and for living out their assigned character arcs.

Drawing the audience in like this requires a powerful connection with the ballet's creators. Jessica Sandoval reveals the secret: “On stage, one must be free. Free means vulnerable. Vulnerable is open. Openness generates a connection.”

Deseo thus introduces connection at two levels. The dancers connect with the audience. The dancers also connect with each other. Beauty nourishes both connections.

To live is to want. To live intensely is to want passionately. To live is to live in the moment; there is nowhere else.

"Dear Committee Members" by Julie Schumacher (2015)

Life is a fight against the second law of thermodynamics. Life wins fight after fight, and yet, as it wins, it edges ever closer to losing the war. The second law is immutable.

The second law is immutable. As life creates order, elsewhere chaos intensifies. Life is a negative-sum game, in entropy terms. A certain degree of parochialism is required to root for life. 

Human flourishing is the pursuit of beauty and interestingness---a fight against ugliness and monotony. What is considered beautiful and interesting is inherently subjective, parochial, too.

Morality calls for just the right amount of parochialism.

Julie Schumacher's Dear Committee Members is a paean to beauty---the beauty of saying things. The tragedy of the piece---should one be inclined to read it as a tragedy rather than a triumph of the word over matter---is in the English professor's lopsided emphasis on beauty over interestingness.

Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour (2023)

It is surely a sign of superior civilisation when night after night stadiums are filled with crowds eager to cheer mellow musicians with whom the crowd has no chance of copulating and whom the crowd has no prospect of feeding to a lion or sacrificing to competing blood-thirsty musicians. Capitalism is a cult of creators, not thieves and destructors. Taylor Swift is the ultimate creator. She reads the room so well that one is ready to forgive her reading the room so well. She has talent, she has grit, and she is free.

To Kill a Mockingbird

(CIBC Theatre, 8 August 2023)

"Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others," is the principle attributed to Groucho Marx. But is it a good principle? And if it is not, what about the others?

The world in which every soul assesses every situation on a case-by-case basis and in accordance with his or her private ethics may be unpredictably slow and bureaucratic or unpredictably fast and chaotic but definitely unpredictable and---by failing to treat equals equally except in the arbitrariness of the manner in which justice is administered---unjust. At the same time, work-to-rule is a time-honoured tool for industrial action. At best, it sabotages production. At worst, it begets evil, a product of the failure to think, as illustrated by the story of Eichmann in Jerusalem. One cannot outsource all thinking to the past, to the founding fathers, and fear no adverse consequences.

Even though it may be wise not to commit to principles, it may be profitable to commit to a stance that would adjudicate among competing principles. Liberal Democracy is such a stance. The democratic component of the liberal democracy infuses the political process with a degree of inertia that invites deliberation and mitigates the coercion of the masses by the elites. The liberal component of the liberal democracy holds the promise of injecting political process with just the right amount of elitism to give the demmocracy a promising direction.

Liberal democracy does not obviate the juggling-in-principles act at the individual level, though. Nor does it absolve the individual of the responsibility for violating (or failing to violate) one’s own principles, the prevailing laws, or social norms.

It is better to be loyal than disloyal, mostly to principles rather than to people, although the two loyalties will mostly align under the right principles. And one ought to never stop examining one’s principles.

Richard Thomas as Atticus Finch and Aaron Sorkin, the playwright, carry the production into the territory of the excellent. Thomas has just the right amount of drawl, and his sprightly kinematics lets him (age 72) pass for a fifty-year old father. His speech is clear, and his bearing is confident. He makes Atticus's part seem easy to inhabit. 

Sorkin has stepped aside and then forward a hundred years in order to write for the ages, which is what one needs to do in order to have a chance to succeed in the moment.

The choice to cast adults as children is artistically questionable. Perhaps, American children lack the free-range childhoods that would enable them to absorb enough life in order to be able to project theatre parts with any degree of authenticity. The adults in the children’s parts did not do much better than this counterfactual, though. They tried hard to act as children, while what children usually do is try hard to act as adults. After the first couple of scenes, though, the suspension of disbelief takes hold (possibly because Steven Lee Johnson joins the company onstage, and he is good), and the Thomas–Sorkin miracle manifests itself.

Le Saint-André in Rue Danton

America deals in extremes. In America, one is either Amish or glued to a cell phone to devour the latest in goods, services, and political fashions.

Paris projects the third way. Its denizens are neither too fat nor too fit. They neither give up nor breathe just to compete. Other people aren't a nuisance for them but the reason to exist. They don't punish the past and won't hasten the future. They get a glimpse into both by sitting down at a cafe with a tea and a pain au chocolat and watching the world being carried away into the future against the scenery that has stayed put for generations.

Is that world that one observes from a corner cafe more real, more compelling, or more engaging than a social-media feed? There's that thrill of a chance that the world in the street will scroll back at you. It is this thrill that makes it worthwhile to engage with that world, which is not trying to hide from you behind the gorilla glass and that trusts you to look, to judge, to interject, and to neglect.

Barbie (2023)

While, unexpectedly, the movie took some risks (the dance numbers and the dreamy sequences), it desperately avoided others by pandering to the target audience's prejudices. These prejudices likely run deeper and truer in the non-Western world, thereby reflecting the movie's ambition to become an international blockbuster.

Margot Robbie is a good actress. Ryan Gosling had too much makeup to tell. 

The colour pink was good.