Dante Today
Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary and Popular Culture
Performing Arts Archive
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Downton Abbey, Season 3.6
When Edith and Matthew find Rose in a nightclub in London Matthew describes it as something akin to the outer rings in Dante's Inferno.
Tim Burton, Beetlejuice (1998)
"In the film Beetlejuice there is a scene in which the character Beetlejuice is terrorizing the house residents, and the case worker, Juno, creates a distraction: Dante's Inferno Room."
Contributed by Christopher Beckham (University of Texas - Austin, '16) and Karalee Shotola (University of Texas - Austin, '16)
Tina Landau, director
PROJECTS Recently, Paula Vogel's "Civil War Christmas" (New York Theater Workshop); now, Bill Irwin and David Shiner's "Old Hats" (Signature).
BEGINNINGS "I was like that kid in 'Annie Hall' who says, 'I'm into leather,' except I'd walk around as a 6-year-old and say, 'I'm into directing.' I was raised on, and fell in love with, Broadway musicals and later fell in love with more experimental forms."
AESTHETIC "I don't gravitate toward new plays set in middle- or upper-class living rooms or kitchens. I prefer giving voice to the outsider, the minority, the renegade, and I love texts with stage directions like, 'And then they fly to the moon and have a picnic with food that keeps changing color.' "
CHANGING TIMES "I've always experienced Off Broadway and Off Off Broadway as being hospitable to me and other women I know. That said, I didn't realize there were so many doing so much great work in New York right now."
DREAM PROJECT "My own adaptation (with many collaborators) of Dante's 'Divine Comedy,' with characters and stories transposed to contemporary culture, with music by folks like John Zorn, Ratatat, Janelle Monáe."
Eric Grode, The New York Times, January 31, 2013
Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, "Caesar Must Die" (2013)
"The Tavianis are now in their 80s, but at an age when most of their contemporaries have retired they continue making films, and in seamless unity. Their latest effort, "Caesar Must Die," which opens on Wednesday, is one of their most artistically ambitious productions: a fictional feature with elements of a documentary and the theater, about the staging of Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" in a maximum-security prison in Rome." [...]
""Caesar Must Die" was born when a journalist friend of the Tavianis urged them to visit a performance by the Rebibbia troupe. They were reluctant at first. "We thought, oh, it's going to be the same old thing," Paolo said. But once they saw the prisoners performing Dante and Pirandello, they changed their minds." [...]
Larry Rohter, The New York Times, February 1, 2013
Sean Curran Company, "Fireweather" (2013)
"How do they dance in hell? According to Sean Curran's new "Fireweather," the first half of his company's program at the Joyce Theater, the damned gravitate to the floor. Stretch and spring up as they might, something keeps pulling them down.
Both "Fireweather" and its score, Charles Wuorinen's "Mission of Virgil," are inspired by Dante's "Inferno." In a program note Mr. Wuorinen stresses that his atonal composition isn't narrative and that his attitude, like Dante's, is mocking. Mr. Curran's attitude is more reverent, and his dance much more like an illustration.
"Though there is no clear Dante or Virgil, there is a journey deeper into the circles of the underworld, with projected titles to announce each section. Warriors march and kick. Bodies mass into six-armed monsters. A naked Satan struts and stumbles. The adulterers Paolo and Francesca circle each other and kiss.
"Much of the choreography has a monumental quality that recalls the mythic works of Martha Graham. Tense tableaus are composed like the paintings of old masters. Yet despite strong dancing and choreographic craft, the work falls short of its august models. The titles that guide us set up expectations nearly impossible to fulfill."
[...]
Brian Seibert, The New York Times, February 1, 2013
Dante in Mad Men
Vulture.com, October 25, 2012
Contributed by Rebecca Ruquist
See also:
Why Is Don Draper Reading The Inferno? by Aisha Harris
"A few photos from the filming of the sixth season of Mad Men hit the web today, and one of them showed Don Draper indulging in a not-so-light beach read alongside his wife, Megan. The book? Dante's Inferno. The version in Don's possession is John Ciardi's English translation--specifically, the paperback version, which was first published in 1964. (The hardcover came out a decade before.) Ciardi's version remains highly respected and is still in print. So why is Don reading it? And when?" [...]
Slate.com, October 25, 2012
Contributed by Steve Bartus (Bowdoin, '07)
Ron Jenkins "To See the Stars" (2012)
Lynda Gardner, Saundra Duncan, and Deborah Ranger will give a reading of a new play at a Harvard University conference next week. A different kind of alma mater qualifies them for this appearance: York Correctional Institution in Niantic, Conn., a high-security state facility for female offenders.
While behind bars at York, all three joined theater workshops with Wesleyan University professor Ron Jenkins and students from his Activism and Outreach Through Theater course. They got to know Shakespeare and Dante, and it changed their lives.
"I spent my first six months [in York] trying to figure out ways to kill myself, and the next four and a half years trying to see how much more I can live,'' says Gardner.
Inspired by these three and other inmates he worked with, Jenkins wrote a play about their existence behind bars, "To See the Stars,'' which mingles inmates' stories with bits of Dante's epic 14th-century poem, "Divine Comedy.''
The women have their own perspective on "Divine Comedy.'' They tend to say that they are still working on its third part (Paradise) but that they are well versed in the first two (Hell and Purgatory).
"I've been in a lot of the circles of hell,'' says Gardner, 63. "It really isn't about hell; it is about hope. Climbing out of those circles.''
The trio will perform "To See the Stars'' on March 3 in a lightly staged reading at a Harvard conference on race, class, and education called Disrupting the Discourse: Discussing the "Undiscussable,'' sponsored by the Graduate School of Education's Alumni of Color. The Harvard performance is open to conference participants only, but the public can attend a free performance at Brown University's Lyman Hall in Providence on March 2 at 3:30 p.m. ...
Joel Brown, Boston.com, February 12, 2012
Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra New Works (2012)
"Deviating from a repertory angle, but not necessarily from a historical one, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra presents two new works from within its ranks. "God's Trombones," by the trombonist Chris Crenshaw, draws inspiration from the identically titled book of free verse sermons, by James Weldon Johnson, published in 1927. And "Inferno," by the saxophonist Sherman Irby, builds on the familiar theme by Dante, with music performed in collaboration with HopeBoykinDance."
The New York Times, May, 10, 2012
Ecstatic Alphabets, MOMA (2012)
"In a drawing from 1966, "Heaps of Language," Robert Smithson assembled a pyramid of words about words: "Language" at the apex, supported by "phraseology speech," "tongue lingo vernacular," and on down through a base of synonyms. The playful exhibition "Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language," opening on Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art, borrows Smithson's title and runs wild with his vision of words as materials..."
"One could spend a long time here, listening to poets and staring at Bruce Nauman's hypnotic flashing neon piece "Raw War." But that's all prologue; the show begins, in earnest, with a short printed text by Sharon Hayes -- one of four woven through the galleries and installed so close to the floor that you have to crouch down to read them. In these paragraphs Ms. Hayes puts herself forth as Virgil to the viewer's Dante, though she also assumes the roles of spurned lover, diarist and political agitator...."
Karen Rosenberg, The New York Times, May 3, 2012
Dante in "Level Up"
"Fearless and impulsive, Dante is a rebel who always gets into trouble for pulling pranks. Basically, if you need somebody to rush in blinding and hit stuff really hard, Dante's your guy." (The Cartoon Network)
"Level Up, a Cartoon Network show, is about Wyatt, Lyle, Dante and Angie trying to stop the evil wizard Maldark from escaping the MMO game known as Conqueror of All Worlds."
Contributed by Gianluca P., 3rd Grade
Reading of Dante's Inferno, Saint John of the Divine, NY
The annual reading of key selections from the Inferno by Dante Alighieri will take place on the evening of Maundy Thursday.
Join Us
Maundy Thursday
April 5, 9:00pm
The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine
1047 Amsterdam Avenue
New York, New York 10025
Margaret Edson
"MARGARET EDSON is the Harper Lee of playwrights. She has had just one play produced -- "Wit," which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999 and has been revived on Broadway in a Manhattan Theater Club production starring Cynthia Nixon -- and having said what she had to say, she doesn't feel any need to try playwriting again. She occupies herself these days with projects like learning the piano and setting the multiplication table to opera choruses. She reads Dante in Italian, a canto or so every day, and once made a scale model of Paradise with the Sun-Maid raisin lady holding a basket of souls." [...]
Charles McGrath, The New York Times, February 16, 2012
Background Image: Domenico di Michelino, Dante and His Comedy, 1465
