Arts & Society

Mary Bird • April 8, 2016

On March 18, Ambassador of Denmark Lars Gert Lose and his wife Ulla Rønberg hosted a reception at their residence to celebrate the Initiative to Educate Afghan Women in conjunction with International Women’s History Month. Christine Warnke and John McCarthy co-chaired the host committee. Keynote addresses were delivered by Mrs. Lael Mohib, wife of the Afghan Ambassador and Founder of the Enabled Children Initiative, and Lyric Winik, author of “We Are Afghan Women: Voices of Hope,” among others.

Gary Tischler •

This is William Shakespeare’s year, and April is William Shakespeare’s month.

In April, we celebrate both the Bard’s birth and his death. There is no official birth date for Shakespeare, the world’s most celebrated playwright and writer, but he was baptized April 26, 1564, and he died April 23, 1616, at the age of 52.

All of which makes the Folger Shakespeare Library a great place to be this month. Throughout 2016, the venerable American institution of all things Shakespearean is celebrating 400 years of Shakespeare with exhibitions, performances and other special programming under the umbrella of “The Wonder of Will.”

The whole country will be able to see the touring exhibition “First Folio! The Book That Gave Us Shakespeare.” Copies of the 1623 book — of which the Folger owns 82 of the surviving 233 in the world — will tour all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, landing at 23 museums, 20 universities, five public libraries, three historical societies and a theater. At selected sites, a touring production of “The Gravedigger’s Tale” will also be seen.

At the Folger, on Capitol Hill just past the Supreme Court and the Library of Congress, the big birthday party will be Sunday, April 24, with face painting, wandering minstrels, clowns, jugglers, a cake and the presence of Queen Elizabeth (the first, not the second) herself.

The day before, Saturday, April 23, the Folger will host a day of international live streaming, in which actors, scholars, artists and community leaders will share their connections to Shakespeare.

On April 7, the Folger will open “America’s Shakespeare,” which will focus on how Shakespeare has become America’s Bard through letters, costumes, books, photographs and film. It closes July 24, to be followed by “Will & Jane: Shakespeare, Austen and the Cult of Celebrity,” beginning Aug. 6.

On April 8, 9 and 10, the Folger Consort will be performing “Shakespeare and Purcell: Music of The Fairy Queen and Other Works.”

The Folger gala will be Monday, April 18. A few days later, the wacky Reduced Shakespeare Company will return for the world premiere of “William Shakespeare’s Long Lost First Play (abridged),” running April 21 to May 8. In May, the Folger will wrap up its theater season with Aaron Posner’s “District Merchants,” a contemporary version of “The Merchant of Venice,” directed by Michael John Garcés.

“We still pay attention to Shakespeare because, no matter how networked our world becomes, he remains one of the ultimate connectors,” said Michael Witmore, director of the Folger. “In a sense, Shakespeare wrote the preamble to modern life.”

Shakespeare remains, is, was and will always be the most contemporary of authors. Directors, adapters and performers try to find ways to contemporize Shakespeare’s plays, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, although — forsooth and in truth — they don’t need it. I may be irritated to hear the word “prithee” time and again in the plays, because it sounds like a forced anachronism, but then again we may yet feel the same way about David Mamet’s four-letter explosions someday.

Some people still doubt that the Bard was the Bard. Personally, I have no doubt that William Shakespeare wrote the plays — for money, for esteem, for profit and prosperity and perhaps for posterity. Someone once said that a man who doesn’t know he’s a genius probably isn’t. I think Shakespeare may have guessed that he was special in his talent but probably didn’t think of himself as a genius. I think he thought of himself as a man of the theater, the modern version of which he practically invented.

The words certainly were the point of it all — the stories he purloined from ready-made sources — but there are musical, operatic, and vaudeville versions of Hamlet (not to mention a wordless one recently at the Washington Ballet).

Shakespeare to this day does what show business does: entertains us and makes us laugh, saddens us and makes us cry buckets and, most of all, without trying, makes us think of our own humanity. In his plays, we are not just at the theater, but on stage ourselves. In every play, there is something for someone: a pratfall, a joke, a fairy queen, a monster, a magician losing his magic, a king losing his kingdom, the outsider trying to find his way in an alien society and a parade of hypnotic, strong, beautiful female characters, which their swains and male contemporaries never quite understand.

That is the wonder of Will, just like today.

Georgetowner •

In April, we celebrate both the Bard’s birth and his death. There is no official birth date for Shakespeare, the world’s most celebrated playwright and writer, but he was baptized April 26, 1564, and he died April 23, 1616, at the age of 52.

All of which makes the Folger Shakespeare Library a great place to be this month. Throughout 2016, the venerable American institution of all things Shakespearean is celebrating 400 years of Shakespeare with exhibitions, performances and other special programming under the umbrella of “The Wonder of Will.”

The whole country will be able to see the touring exhibition “First Folio! The Book That Gave Us Shakespeare.” Copies of the 1623 book — of which the Folger owns 82 of the surviving 233 in the world — will tour all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, landing at 23 museums, 20 universities, five public libraries, three historical societies and a theater. At selected sites, a touring production of “The Gravedigger’s Tale” will also be seen.

At the Folger, on Capitol Hill just past the Supreme Court and the Library of Congress, the big birthday party will be Sunday, April 24, with face painting, wandering minstrels, clowns, jugglers, a cake and the presence of Queen Elizabeth (the first, not the second) herself.

The day before, Saturday, April 23, the Folger will host a day of international live streaming, in which actors, scholars, artists and community leaders will share their connections to Shakespeare.

Having just completed the exhibition “Shakespeare, Life of an Icon,” on April 7 the Folger will open “America’s Shakespeare,” which will focus on how Shakespeare has become America’s Bard through letters, costumes, books, photographs and film. It closes July 24, to be followed by “Will & Jane: Shakespeare, Austen and the Cult of Celebrity,” beginning Aug. 6.

Musically, the Folger Consort will be performing “Shakespeare and Purcell: Music of The Fairy Queen and Other Works,” April 8 to 10.

The Folger gala will be Monday, April 18. A few days later, the wacky Reduced Shakespeare Company will return for the world premiere of “William Shakespeare’s Long Lost First Play (abridged),” running April 21 to May 8. In May, the Folger will wrap up its theater season with Aaron Posner’s “District Merchants,” a contemporary version of “The Merchant of Venice,” directed by Michael John Garcés.

“We still pay attention to Shakespeare because, no matter how networked our world becomes, he remains one of the ultimate connectors,” said Michael Witmore, director of the Folger. “In a sense, Shakespeare wrote the preamble to modern life.”

Shakespeare remains, is, was and will always be the most contemporary of authors. Directors, adapters and performers try to find ways to contemporize Shakespeare’s plays, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, although — forsooth and in truth — they don’t need it. I may be irritated to hear the word “prithee” time and again in the plays, because it sounds like a forced anachronism, but then again we may yet feel the same way about David Mamet’s four-letter explosions someday. The Bard doesn’t date, the plays and the writing are a bottomless well from which our modern times continue to echo outward and upward.

People still make the argument that the Bard wasn’t really the Bard. Personally, I have no doubt that William Shakespeare wrote the plays — for money, for esteem, for profit and prosperity and perhaps for posterity. Someone once said that a man who doesn’t know he’s a genius probably isn’t. I think Shakespeare may have guessed that he was special in his talent but probably didn’t think of himself as a genius. I think he thought of himself as a man of the theater, the modern version of which he practically invented.

He not only invented theater, but profoundly influenced the performing arts. The words certainly were the point of it all — the stories he purloined from ready-made sources — but there are musical, operatic, and vaudeville versions of Hamlet (not to mention a wordless one recently at the Washington Ballet).

Shakespeare to this day does what show business does: entertains us and makes us laugh, saddens us and makes us cry buckets and, most of all, without trying, makes us think of our own humanity. In his plays, we are not just at the theater, but on stage ourselves. In every Shakespeare play, there is something for someone: a pratfall, a joke, a fairy queen, a monster, a magician losing his magic, a king losing his kingdom, the outsider trying to find his way in an alien society and a parade of hypnotic, strong, beautiful female characters, which their swains and male contemporaries never quite understand.

That is the wonder of Will, just like today.

Ari Post • April 4, 2016

We live in a time when photographs are not sacred. And that’s okay. In a lot of ways, it’s actually incredible.

If by some mechanism of science-fiction fantasy we could go back in time and suggest to the late 19th century that photography, one of the most recent and game-changing inventions in history, would become so commonplace over the next 150 years that each citizen personally carries the technology in his or her back pocket, I’m sure it would raise a few eyebrows.

The proliferation and convenience of digital photography has changed the way we interact with the world. There is no longer the requirement to develop the photographs, there is basically unlimited storage space and an endless supply of “film.” We can take as many pictures as we want whenever we want. It’s an instantaneous and expendable medium in a way that it never was.

I don’t believe it is inaccurate or controversial to say that — in a broad-stroke sort of way — as a society we no longer really consider the value of a single photograph. Or perhaps it is that a single photograph (with occasional and obvious exceptions) simply does not carry much value. Instead, we want lots of them, all the time.

This presents a real challenge to actual photographers, particularly artists who deal with photography as a visual medium and a history in itself. How can one make the experience of a photograph unique and singular again?

Another strange dilemma of our generation’s gluttonous relationship to photography is how it effects the way we see older photographs. Considering history inevitably requires understanding of and empathy with the knowledge, values and beliefs of a time period. So when looking at a photograph from the turn of the 20th century, it requires an act of willful distortion; we must try to imagine what it felt like to see a single beautiful image in a time when a photograph was comparatively rare — when people did not look at hundreds a day — when we were still learning about how to look at them and what they could teach us.

The National Gallery of Art is confronting these ideas with two complementary exhibitions that offer a provocative, multifaceted exploration of the history and present state of photography as art.

Through Sept. 13, “The Memory of Time: Contemporary Photographs at the National Gallery of Art” presents work by contemporary artists who investigate the richness and complexity of photography’s relationship to time, memory and history.
In the neighboring gallery, through July 26, “In Light of the Past: Twenty-Five Years of Photography at the National Gallery of Art” showcases some 175 masterpieces from the Gallery’s photography collection (initiated 25 years ago), highlighting exquisite 19th century works and turn-of-the-century pictorialist photographs, exceptional examples of international modernism from the 1920s and 1930s and seminal mid-20th-century American photography, as well as photographs exploring new directions in color and conceptual art from the 1960s and 1970s.

An interesting aspect of the “The Memory of Time” shows us how contemporary fine-art photographers are exploring the science and history of their medium. Part chemists, part anthropologists, photographers like Sally Mann, Myra Greene, Adam Fuss, Idris Khan and many others are producing gelatin silver prints, daguerreotypes, salted paper prints, ambrotypes; they are using camera obscuras, experimenting with long and primitive exposures. These artists are pointing historical lenses at a modern world, and the results are quite simply breathtaking. This exhibition is a spoil of austere, tonal beauty.

It would be remiss not to mention Moyra Davey’s “Copperhead” series, a wall of nearly a dozen near-microscopic views of Lincoln’s face on the US penny — part of a series of 100 photographs — exhibiting the deterioration, gouges and discolored, molding and mottled surfaces of the coins. It is Lincoln defaced, ravaged by time and relegated to the least valuable unit of currency. The exhibition text suggests that this points toward the devaluation of history in contemporary culture, but that strikes me as dramatically curmudgeonly. I would offer that, as concepts go, this is merely the fate of all history, as it gets rolled, spat about and distorted through time and distance. It is a sad and beautiful image.

As I walked through the next exhibition, “In Light of the Past,” this notion stuck with me. I saw the iconic series of a running man by Eadweard Muybridge, the Photo Secessionists Steichen and Stieglitz, the breathtaking Depression-era subway portraits of Walker Evans. Beyond that, there was the glamour and thump of carnivals, the hazy bars and urban development of the post-war era and the unraveling of that ecstatic era into Richard Misrach’s 1983 photograph of a flooded marina in the Salton Sea — where the defunct remains of a ’50s-era gas station sit submerged in a shallow ocean.

Georgetowner •

While governments dither about homelessness, N Street Village has been opening its doors to homeless women for 40 years, honoring and helping them with their struggles, providing hope and real hospitality for these women. N Street Village celebrated and honored them with its annual gala, as all the women there — supporters and honorees — sighed in the presence of super movie star Richard Gere. The gala raised over a million dollars for N Street Village. [gallery ids="117083,117079,117067,117073,117090" nav="thumbs"]

Georgetowner • April 3, 2016

Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey’s “Circus Xtreme” has arrived at Verizon Center in downtown Washington, D.C., and with its famed elephants’ final show.

The show features artists, according to Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey, “who redefine the word extreme in everything they do, magnifying traditional elements of the circus and combining them with never-before-seen spectacles, original fast-paced performances and incredibly hilarious moments. Audiences will be dazzled and astounded by the beautiful Bengal tigers, double-humped dromedaries ridden by brave Mongolian women and, for the last time, the most popular members of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey family: the magnificent Asian elephants.”

“The ultimate family entertainment experience features high-wire wizards, spectacular strongmen, BMX trick riders, trampoline daredevils, inconceivable contortionists, a high-flying human cannonball, a bungee aerial skydiving display and an international assembly of more than 100 world-renowned artists.”
 
The company also noted, “The show is also the last opportunity for local residents to see the treasured Asian elephants before they are moved to their permanent home at the Ringling Bros. Center for Elephant Conservation in Florida in May 2016. The elephants’ move to Ringling Bros. Center for Elephant Conservation will allow the company to focus on its Asian elephant conservation program and the pediatric cancer research partnership with Dr. Joshua Schiffman of Primary Children’s Hospital and the Huntsman Cancer Institute in Salt Lake City, Utah.”

The circus is at Verizon Center through April 3 — and will be at EagleBank Arena in Fairfax, Virginia, April 6 through April 17. 
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Mary Bird • March 30, 2016

In 2002, Julia Sevilla — daughter of Nicaraguan ambassador to the U.S. for 36 years, Guillermo Sevilla Sacasa — founded the Future of Nicaragua Foundation to provide the best possible medical care throughout Nicaragua. Guests gathered at the Embassy of Nicaragua Jan. 29 to celebrate the success of programs that include the provision of surgical care for children with facial deformities, dental care and delivery of wheelchairs. Ambassador Francisco Campbell spoke of the foundation’s impact. Guests enjoyed an elegant buffet, music by violinist Cal Morris and the eloquent remarks of the Reverend Bishop Mario Dorsonville, who quoted Pope Francis: “The future is about solidarity.” [gallery ids="102239,129402,129390,129412,129384,129397,129407" nav="thumbs"]