Word: poem
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Singer-songwriters are as old as literature itself. Before any poem was committed to paper, it was the object of the bard, the oral poet, who, accompanied by instrumentation, entertained willing audiences. A little before the turn of the first millennium B.C., the mysterious Homer gave birth to Western literature with song as his medium. For many years thereafter it was unthinkable to hear poetry without accompanying music...
Growing up, I’ve often lamented that I missed out on the zeitgeist of the 1960s. For better or worse, I think I might have enjoyed the frothy exuberance and moral drama. As an undergraduate in the early 1990s, I even once wrote a fairly maudlin poem that listed all of the things I’d like to have done if I had been alive then. It included such items as looking forward to the next Beatles album, sneaking a sophomore out of her dormitory window after curfew, sitting around the television with my family when Neil...
...Staging the obscure poem might seem an unusual career choice for producer and director Wilson, a native of Texas who has long been pre-eminent in the highbrow world of experimental theater. His production of Philip Glass's Einstein on the Beach, presented at New York City's Metropolitan Opera in 1976, was a breakthrough for avant-garde theater in the U.S. Since then he has become best known for his austere, abstract interpretations of the classics, from Shakespeare to Wagner...
...germination of the show dates to 1995, when New York City-based filmmaker Rhoda Grauer was traveling in Sulawesi to research a documentary about the Bugis and learned about the epic poem. Dazzled by its dramatic potential, Grauer decided to bring the work to the stage, and recruited her friend Restu Kusumaningrum, a dancer and the creative director of Bali Purnati. Both women had previously worked with Wilson and they wanted him to stage their discovery. After their presentation at his summer workshop in Water Mill, New York, Wilson agreed to take on the project...
...production has ignited enormous interest in Indonesia's intellectual circles. In February, the influential Bali-based arts journal Latitudes devoted a special issue to I La Galigo?the poem and the show. Indonesian actress and icon Christine Hakim is filming a documentary about the production. Yet it is unclear whether the show will ever be performed in its home country. No theater in Indonesia has the technical resources to stage it, and the cost of renting and hauling the necessary machinery even to Jakarta is prohibitive in a nation that spends very little on culture...