This weekend I got a chance to attend New York City Ballet (NYCB) and see the work by Lauren Redness at Lincoln Center. Floor to ceiling the hallway was covered by portraits of 100+ people who organize these spectacular performances - anyone from the head of security to shoe room supervisor (yes, shoe room supervisor, who oversees 6,000 pairs of pointe shoes annually).
For the past 5 years, every winter, NYCB had organized ‘Art Series’ - collaboration with various visual artists that gives them an opportunity to create a site-specific work at Lincoln Center. The work of Lauren is a testament, that it might “take a village to raise a child”, but it takes the huge multi-disciplinary teams to pull something truly great like NYCB productions. The project is an amazing manifestation of how much collaboration and teamwork is required to make something spectacular.
** also very sad that I was not aware of the program in 2014 and have missed installation by JR
One of the performances at NYCB was the production of Firebird with costumes designed by Marc Chagall. In the performance, a prince is lost in an enchanted forest and a sorcerer’s evil kingdom. It is hard to describe how original were the costumes and how vivid and sensational were the monsters in the evil kingdom. However, the performance made me think about the diversity of mediums that Chagall has created in:
* Paintings (obviously, that’s what he is most famous for)
* Stained Windows
* Ceilings
* Engravings
* Mosaic
* Printmaking
However, what’s remarkable, is that regardless of the medium, Chagall’s art always takes us to the land of dreamy childhood memories and fairytales.
The ship of Theseus
is a philosophical paradox and a thought exercise. It is supposed that the famous ship sailed by the hero Theseus in a great battle has been kept in a harbour as a museum piece, and as the years went by some of the wooden parts began to rot and were replaced by new ones then, after a century or so, all of the parts had been replaced. The question then is if the "restored" ship is still the same object as the original.
In a way, this thought exercise questions the nature of identity. Here is another long list of lists of Ship of Theseus examples from Wikipedia.
Have attended a lecture by Jeremy Heimans, the author of the book New Power, where he shared his thoughts on the concept of power in 21st century. He used current events and topics to explain some of the power dynamics in society used by institutions and interest groups alike. He makes a case for the superiority of open, mass participatory movements that challenge the traditional monolithic power bureaucracies. He listed some interesting examples by Pope Francis’s Vatican and the National Rifle Association. In a way it reminded me of a classical framework (like BCG Growth share matrix or Porter’s Five Forces) , that can cleverly interpret selective history, but the question remains, whether it can predict the future and help shape the present.
Side Notes:
I have finally finished my essay about climbing Cotopaxi and published it on Maptia: Cotopaxi: second chances Your feedback is always welcome - I am notorious for typos. It is also baffling that it took me over 10 hours to write under 1000 words that I usually tell as a brunch story under 10 minutes.