Tag: theatre
Benjamin Wistar Morris and a new Metropolitan Opera House
10 June 2022
Benjamin Wistar Morris and a new Metropolitan Opera House10 June 2022
A recent acquisition of six drawings by the American architect Benjamin Wistar Morris reveals his long involvement with one of the most important urban projects of the twentieth century. Morris’s role in this project was a highlight of his career although he has not been widely associated with it. A… Read More
Hans Poelzig: Decorating the Empty Centre
1 June 2021
Hans Poelzig: Decorating the Empty Centre1 June 2021
‘Artists such as Poelzig, prevented from building in real life, have been driven to create Expressionist cinema architecture […] But in the long run, pasteboard fantasy creations […] can never be satisfying fodder for the architect; he has an inner urge to conceive and erect buildings in which real people… Read More
Flores & Prats Sala Beckett International Drama Centre (2020): REVIEW & EXCERPTS
30 March 2021
Flores & Prats Sala Beckett International Drama Centre (2020): REVIEW & EXCERPTS30 March 2021
Review Making a book about making a building creates a special narrative challenge in the constant battle between reality and myth that vibrates through non-fiction publications and the ways in which we as readers engage with and interpret them. This is complicated even more when making a book about a… Read More
Hans Poelzig: Der Golem
11 March 2021
Hans Poelzig: Der Golem11 March 2021
I gaze at the screen, engrossed in the German horror film Der Golem (originally released in 1915 and reworked for reissue in 1920), a masterpiece of performance art. This cinematographic journey is my latest odyssey into the work of Hans Poelzig. The film catalogues his lesser-known work in the art… Read More
Drawing the Curtain: Entangling rendering and theatrical space
2 February 2021
Drawing the Curtain: Entangling rendering and theatrical space2 February 2021
Pliny the Elder recounted the following story in Naturalis Historia: The two great painters of classical Greece, Zeuxis and Parrhasius staged a contest to determine the greater painter. When Zeuxis unveiled his painting, the grapes he depicted appeared so real that a bird flew down to peck at them. When… Read More
Aldo Rossi: Divination of a Drawing
18 January 2021
Aldo Rossi: Divination of a Drawing18 January 2021
‘With the instinct of a water-diviner, he begins to search, and that which is inside… begins to simmer to the surface.’ – Giorgio De Chirico This is a short meditation on an enigmatic drawing by Aldo Rossi. The drawing is framed as a stacked layering of three architectural elements whose… Read More
Writing Prize 2020: The Anatomy of an Oyster Theatre
14 December 2020
Writing Prize 2020: The Anatomy of an Oyster Theatre14 December 2020
In the beginning, there was only a shell. An empty shell. But we could already sense the contours of its elliptical shape, its multilayered protective envelope, stratified, laminated, like the bark of a tree (a). Slowly, the outer flaps of the carapace would move away from each other, vertically sweeping… Read More
Outside In
23 November 2020
Outside In23 November 2020
Music plays from behind a curtain. Lights come on and you see that the curtain runs along two sides of a carpet whose centre hosts a leopard skin cushion. There is a chair at one side of the carpet and at the opposite end, a single column. Not before long… Read More
Tom de Paor: On Hans Poelzig’s Grosses Schauspielhaus, Theater der Massen, Berlin, 1919
9 February 2019
Tom de Paor: On Hans Poelzig’s Grosses Schauspielhaus, Theater der Massen, Berlin, 19199 February 2019
The drawing is thinking, the same mark used over and over, up and down, hurdling scales quickly, the pulled edge of the sheet mimics the line. There is one idea – on the right, closer up – a study after or rehearsal for the three-quarter view bleached out from the… Read More
Dance Dance Revolution
30 December 2018
Dance Dance Revolution30 December 2018
In 1788, the art theorist and critic Quatremère de Quincy devoted a long entry of the Encyclopédie méthodique to the arabesque, ‘forms of ornament that are often the most capricious, fantastical, and imaginary, whether in sculpture or painting, that architecture employs in the decoration of walls, panels, door-frames, pilasters, friezes, and sometimes even… Read More
Behind the Lines 6
13 August 2018
Behind the Lines 613 August 2018
Richard Bentley cracked open the red seal, smiling as he always did at the peculiar crest of a man in a ridiculous long-tasselled hat, and folded out the letter. His mood was anxious; he scratched his head nervously with one hand and knocked over the ink on his drawing table with… Read More
Joan Littlewood’s Memos to Cedric Price
21 November 2022
Joan Littlewood’s Memos to Cedric Price21 November 2022
– Ana Bonet Miró
In this text, Ana Bonet Miró reflects on the memos written by Joan Littlewood addressed to her company of actors, and to Cedric Price during their collaboration on the Fun Palace project. For more on Littlewood and Price’s collaboration, listen to Ana Bonet Miró and Matthew Blunderfield in conversation for… Read More
correspondence letters ephemera theatre