Dante Today
Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary and Popular Culture
Performing Arts Archive
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Vladimir Kobekin, "Hamlet of the Danes, Russian Comedy" (2009)
"...Mr. Kobekin's Hamlet of the Danes, Russian Comedy, is hardly a comedy, except perhaps -- as the composer observed -- as the word was used by the likes of Dante. Nor, apart from language, is it notably Russian. It is a brash re-telling of Shakespeare's play in contemporary words..."
George Loomis, "Moscow's Second Stage Revels in the Homegrown," The New York Times, November 17, 2009
Joan Jonas, "Reading Dante" (2009)
"One of the highlights of Performa 09 is Joan Jonas's "Reading Dante II," which began its five-night run (with one matinee) at the Performing Garage Tuesday night. It amounts to a 60-minute multimedia collage in the round with moving parts and a smorgasbord of audio accompaniment. This includes music, loud crashes, traffic noises, and voices reading fragments of the work's inspiration: the Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso of Dante's Divine Comedy. ...
Roberta Smith, The New York Times, November 11, 2009
See also:
Joan Jonas on Dante in Artforum
Performa: The Performing Garage
33 Wooster St, New York
Contributed by Aisha Woodward (Bowdoin, '08)
Emio Greco and Pieter C. Scholten, "Popopera" (2009)
"After presenting their highly acclaimed HELL, based on Dante's Inferno, Emio Greco | PC has completed [purgatorio] POPOPERA which will have its NYC premiere at The Joyce Theater. The company takes its inspiration from Dante's literary depiction of a geographical place and feeling of transition that provides the opening for inner transformation. Greco and Scholten have said, 'whereas in HELL we let our dancers wander round the same circles each time, in [purgatorio] POPOPERA they break out of them. The will, the need to live and especially the hope for the future are the essential motives. In [purgatorio] POPOPERA we try to show the audience other images than it expects of those overly familiar themes that cling to the concept of purgatory (catharsis, purification through suffering, ...) in order to approach these themes from new angles.' The company invites audiences to witness the transformation and synergies between dancers' bodies and the lustrous black electric guitars they carry in this performance that melds dance with rock concert. The piece features original music composed by Bang-on-a-Can founder Michael Gordon, performed live by the dancers and soprano Michaela Riener..."
Rene Migliaccio, "Dante's Inferno" Blackmoon Theatre Company (NYC, 2009)
"In this new adaptation of Dante's Inferno, Artistic Director Rene Migliaccio creates a multicultural, multidisciplinary and multimedia visual and aural work that positions performers within video projections, redefining traditional theatrical boundaries. Physical Theatre, Music and Poetry in the Italian language create the ritualistic experience of Dante's journeys through the nine circles of Hell. Canto after canto, Italian performer Alessio Bordoni portrays the character of Dante leading the audience throughout his descent into Hell. The different realms of sin are portrayed through images: moving fragments of collages by critically acclaimed Collage Artist India Evans. Cellist Aminda Asher performs a classical score, a pre-consciousness of Dante's journey into Hell. In 'Dante's Inferno', the traditional concept of Hell as a place of eternal tortures is re-defined as a condition of spiritual anguish caused by separation from the Sacred."
The New York International Fringe Festival
August 14th-30th, 2009
Contributed by Patrick Molloy
Peter Greenaway & Tom Phillips, "A TV Dante" (1989)
From Movierapture:
"Based on Dante Alighieri's poem, The Inferno, Peter Greenaway's A TV Dante is a daring, unique, and genuinely brilliant work of art.
"Rather than dispensing with the actual text of The Inferno and depicting the actions its central characters, Dante (Bob Peck) and Virgil (John Gielgud), are described as performing, Greenaway instead provides the viewer with a recitation by his actors of an English translation of the first eight cantos of the poem.
"Even the visual elements that accompany their words do not portray the characters' activities. Instead, the director unfolds to the viewer a variety of evocative images, including visions of hell, the faces of his protagonists speaking their lines, superimposed designs, intertitles, and inset screens. The last of these are often windows which each contain the head of some academic or critic who is thus able to make comments on particular aspects of Dante's poem, his religion, or the world in which he lived. With his presentation of this complex universe of elegant words and gorgeous but horrific images, the director has fashioned a potent masterpiece that is not only remarkably beautiful but also profoundly disturbing."
Tage Danielsson, "Mannen Som Slutade Roka" ("The Man Who Quit Smoking") (1972)
From the Internet Movie Database:
"Young Dante Alighieri inherits 17 million of his father the sausage maker on one condition - he has to give up smoking in 14 days. But the days go on and he simply can't quit. He hires a detective agency to physically stop him. He has an uncle, who inherits the money if Dante fails, and the uncle tries to keep him smoking."
Viewing the process as a kind of personal hell, this Dante has much in common with his Florentine namesake - including a love interest named Beatrice.
Stan Brakhage, "The Dante Quartet" (1987)
From Senses of Cinema:
"The Dante Quartet is in fact the end result of Brakhage's almost lifelong fascination with The Divine Comedy. It is a brief but spectacular filmic attempt to find a visual equivalent or rhyme for the four stages of the ascent from hell depicted by Dante: divided into 'Hell Itself,' 'Hell Spit Flexion,' 'Purgation,' and 'Existence is Song.' For Brakhage, this visualization is achieved by "bringing down to earth Dante's vision, inspired by what's on either side of one's nose and right before the eyes: a movie that reflects the nervous system's basic sense of being." Thus, his vision of Dante is experiential, grounded in the transformative realities of earthly existence; for Brakhage "heaven" or "god" is to be found in the physical reality or materiality of the world."
Tim Barsky & Everyday Ensemble, "The Bright River" (2004)
From Everyday Theater:
"The Bright River is a hip-hop retelling of Dante's Inferno by a traditional storyteller, Tim Barsky, with a live soundtrack performed by some of the best hip-hop and klezmer musicians in the Bay Area. A dizzying theatrical journey through a world spinning helplessly out of control, the show sends audiences on a mass-transit tour of the Afterlife. Guided by a fixer named Quick, and moving through an urban landscape that is at once both intensely real and fantastic, the show is a deep-rooted love story, a profound meditation on mass transit, and a passionate commentary on the current war in Iraq."
Ruth Virkus and Brenna Jones, "Dawn's Inferno -- A Divine Comedy" (2009)
"Part way through her life's journey, Dawn Ahlgren finds herself in a dark wood... Darkwood, MN. Returning to her hometown for her ten-year high school reunion, Dawn is trapped in the Inferno Bar & Grill, surrounded by classmates determined to prove that Hell is indeed other people. Based on The Inferno by Dante Alighieri, Dawn's Inferno is an innovative and hilarious update of Dante's classic trip through Hell, re-invented as another kind of divine comedy."
The Flower Shop Project Theatre, Minneapolis, MN
Performances at the Bryant Lake Bowl Theatre, July 9-25, 2009
Minneapolis, MN
Sante Maurizi, "Paolo e Francesca" (2000-2001), La botte e il Cilindro theater, Sassari (Sardinia)
"Paolo e Francesca" is a journey through the different ways in which the story told by Dante in Inferno V has be represented in visual art, theater, poetry, etc.
Click here for information on the play, "Paolo e Francescsa" by Sante Maurizi.
See also this link for a wonderful collection of illustrations on the "Paolo and Francesca" scene of Inf. V.
"Dante's Inferno Documented" (2009)
From the film's website:
"Dante's Inferno Documented, now in final stages of post-production, started filming in Italy (Rome, Florence and Bellagio) in February, 2008 and continued in Los Angeles, United States in March, August, December 2008, January 2009 (including its narration) and finished additional filming in February of 2009...
"Dante's Inferno Documented is an introduction to Dante Alighieri's journey through the first part of the afterlife, Inferno. It is a four-quadrant compelling film organized circle by circle and presented in an unprecedented and unique way that no other documentary has done up until now. Dante's Inferno Documented is a visual and narrative journey to Hell told by over 30 scholars and artists who were interviewed on Dante's Inferno, in both Italy and the United States. It features over 50 black and white illustrations by Gustave Dore, over 50 original color illustrations from the upcoming Dante's Inferno comic book and magazine series and a few dramatic animations from the upcoming animation short film..."
See also these related websites:
http://dantesinfernocommunity.com/
http://www.dantealighieri.name/
Roberto Benigni, "TuttoDante" in the US
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/23/theater/23dant.html?emc=eta1
"...Next week he will begin a short North American tour of TuttoDante, a monologue about Dante's Divine Comedy that mixes literary insights with off-the-cuff political jokes. In Italy, where he has been doing the show regularly for three years, it has drawn more than a million people..."
Ben Sisario, The New York Times, May 22, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/23/theater/23dant.html?emc=eta1
Contributed by Pamela Montanaro
See also
"Hell's Kitchen" by Stephan Faris, The New Yorker, June 1, 2009
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2009/06/01/090601ta_talk_faris
"For the record, the Italian actor Roberto Benigni does not believe that New Yorkers are going to Hell. 'I hope they go to Paradise, every one of them,' he said last Thursday, in the back seat of a taxi, blinking against the swish and roar of traffic. But that might be because he thinks it's a journey the city's residents have already made. 'This is the beginning of Hell,' he said. 'The deeper we go, the greater the range of utterances of grief and fury we will hear. Different colors of people. Slang! Obscenity! Curses! Sighs! Keening!' He paused while a van blasted its air horn. 'This is really the sound of Hell,' he said. 'But we need to pass through the Inferno to reach Paradise.'..."
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2009/06/01/090601ta_talk_faris
Contributed by Patrick Molloy
Background Image: Domenico di Michelino, Dante and His Comedy, 1465
