love.
Source: tmagazineYou’re going to want to see the rest of this striking mid-19th-century London home, shared by designer Harriet Anstruther and her husband, the photographer Henry Bourne.
As T’s design editor Pilar Viladas writes, “Wherever you look, traditional is engaged in conversation with modern, old furniture and art with new, and bold colors with white walls.”
Source: lareviewofbooks
Today The Dial is guest-written by playwright John Steppling, who has produced an evocative, idiosyncratic, wide-ranging set of “Notes on Theatre,” from which I have extracted the following series of aphorisms. They hearken back to the manifestos of the modernists in their radical rethinking of their subject and their manic and principled disregard for what you or I might think. Enjoy.— Tom Lutz JOHN STEPPLING
Notes on Theatre
We cannot know what we are doing. We can only know when we are doing it wrong.
Theatre was born of the sermon, and a deep-seated need for audience. A deep-seated need for collective experience. Theatre has always been the target of religious conservatives, for it rivaled the church in its imitation of salvation.
We have to return to salvation. Theatre has to now enfold the language of allegory; that is, it has to provide an experience that entails the spectator: not the autonomous artwork of bourgeois culture, not artwork that reinforces the position of the spectator, of his social position and worth, but theatre. For theatre is inherently collective.
The text creates the space on stage. We see the space after language. A language that is literal or ideological kills that space. To announce a theme and occupy an abstract position is false. It is kitsch. Kitsch, as Greenberg said, is vicarious experience. It is the familiar. It is generalization.
A wheel, if painted indistinctly, appears to be moving. Painted clearly it does not move. Technology, from photography to film to computers, has pushed experience further away. But the ‘object,’ obdurate thing-in-itself, has returned from nowhere. The real, naturalism, realism, are all exactly NOT those things, and they are all exactly NOT the thing itself. They are the end product of that movement that learned from painting the wheel in motion.
