On Photography
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- Published on Tuesday, 26 February 2013 23:30
Susan Sontag
A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race, and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats. The camera’s twin capacities to subjectivize reality and to objectify it, ideally serve these needs and strengthen them. Cameras define reality in two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society: as a spectacle (for the masses) and as an object of surveillance (for the rulers). The production of images also furnishes a ruling ideology. Social change is replaced by a change in images. The freedom to consume a plurality of images and goods is equated with freedom itself. The narrowing of free political choice to free economic consumption requires the unlimited production and consumption of images.
About This Theater
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- Published on Thursday, 25 October 2012 23:50
New City is an ensemble theater and its artistic signature is made by 1982 founding artists: director John Kazanjian, actress Mary Ewald, and designers Lindsay Smith and Nina Moser. J. Kazanjian also curates the Resident Artist Events: an independent artist is invited to stage a new work of her / his choice with full creative freedom. The New City aims to cultivate a multiplicity of artistic, aesthetic, and socio-political points of view.
Audient Kate Golden on the 2012 production of TINY KUSHNER by Pulitzer playwright Tony Kushner:
That kind of quality theater experience enlivens, awakens, and encourages real conversation about real human issues.
Misha Berson of the Seattle Times on the 2012 production of HAPPY DAYS:
The production lays before us a major Samuel Beckett work rarely produced here, due to its daunting degree of difficulty. It is a fitting anniversary present from New City Theater, which for 30 years has taken risks onstage worth the taking…Mary Ewald’s virtuoso work in HAPPY DAYS, staged meticulously by John Kazanjian, reminds us what a superb interpreter of poetic texts this seasoned Seattle player is.
Obie Award, Guggenheim, NEA national playwright Len Jenkin following New City’s commission and premiere production of PILGRIMS OF THE NIGHT:
New City exists for living American Theater artists, and provides them, and their audience, with freedom, and sanctuary. It does this with no fuss, not a lot of money, and with great energy and grace. This theater is the genuine article and no bullshit. The people of Seattle are lucky to live in its town, and I am proud and privileged to work here.
CURRENT PROGRAM INFO @ - www.newcitytheater.org & (206) 271 - 4430
Susan Sontag on Samuel Beckett
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- Published on Sunday, 05 February 2012 07:00
Beckett is dealing with emotions, however abstractly, and there is a progress from one emotion to the next that feels inevitable. Not only are his plays narrative but, as Joe Chaikin once observed, Beckett has actually discovered a new dramatic subject. Normally people on stage reflect on the macrostructure of action. What am I going to do this year? Tomorrow? Tonight? They ask: Am I going mad? Will I ever get to Moscow? Should I leave my husband? Do I have to murder my Uncle? My Mother? These are the sorts of large projects that have traditionally concerned a play’s leading characters. Beckett is the first writer to dramatize the microstructure of action. What am I going to do one minute from now? In the next second? Weep? Take out my comb? Stand-up? Sigh? Sit? Be silent? Tell a joke? Understand something? His plays are built on reflections leading to decisions, which imparts to his dramas a real narrative push.
"I sometimes think of what future historians
will say of us. A single sentence will suffice
for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers."
Albert Camus
"My work is a matter of fundamental sounds made
as fully as possible, and I accept responsibility for nothing else.
If people want to have headaches among the overtones,
let them."
Samuel Beckett