Word: tableaux
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...part of 20 years. They have also shown how art changes one's reading of other art. In the early 1960s, when Segal -the son of a New Jersey chicken farmer -first emerged as a sculptor, he was identified with Pop art. This happened because some of his tableaux had an aggressive, urban character and used real props: stacks of oil cans, winking beer neons, even the inside of a scrapped subway car, with seats, hanging straps, lights and all. Some 15 years later, after a revival of realism in American art that Segal, among others, helped...
Strong feeling does not necessarily make strong art, and Segal's tableaux might remain in the category of dramatic curiosities but for one quality: his laconic Tightness of arrangement. "In his use of space," one of the catalogue essays rather absurdly claims, "Segal is close to the minimalists," because, apparently, "Segal's figures energize their spaces." (And what sculpture, minimal or other, does not?) Nevertheless, Segal knows exactly how much distance to allot between one figure and another, how much emptiness should come between a silhouette in a bar and the profile of a metal letter...
SOME OF Drury's staging is quite effective. The set, a bare stage and a series of simple backdrops, is perfectly adequate as a frame for the Who's work. Some of the tableaux used by Drury early in the show are starkly evocative of the emotions of Tommy's early life. But the static presentation at the beginning of the show becomes boring. After more characters appear on stage, the drama becomes complicated enough to demand some movement on stage beyond that of a chorus wheeling in straight lines, or squatting, then standing, in unison...
...Lovesky have created a visually breathtaking production--they dragged 30 live birch trees from the Harvard Forest and ringed them around the spare, vast, white-draped stage. Huge birches and the bare exposed Loeb stage dwarf the actors and frame Sellar's epic interpretation. The Loeb production emphasizes the tableaux over the characters, but it does so with a brilliance in staging that brings out Chekhov's geometry and starkly, pictorially dramatizes the characters' relationship to each other. The operatic staging also serves to divorce the characters from the world outside the Prozorov mansion, emphasizing their isolation. Their grand gestures...
...that she is his redemptress. It is a straightforward story, but Ponnelle has turned it all into the lurid dream of a young steersman. This allows him to dress Senta in an elaborate richly embroidered bridal gown and to make the opera into a series of nightmares and arresting tableaux. As thoroughgoing iconoclasm requires, Ponnelle also flouts the libretto. Wagner's Senta leaps into the sea to prove her love; Ponnelle's walks rigidly up the decks io the ghostly Dutchman's cabin...