YOU ARE THE REASON
Mike Driver
Not today Justin
tannertan36
Peter Solarz
we're not kids anymore.
Today's Document
noise dept.
ojovivo
No title available
if i look back, i am lost
Claire Keane
Keni
Sweet Seals For You, Always
One Nice Bug Per Day
Game of Thrones Daily
Acquired Stardust
AnasAbdin
Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
Monterey Bay Aquarium
seen from United States
seen from Germany
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seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Germany
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seen from France
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seen from T1
seen from Ireland
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@senator-mirror
tl;dr
almost definitely transfem!!! (i call myself a bottom but in reality im just celibate)
all are welcome
any/all (she/her preference but idc that much)
recovering misanthrope - sorry if i come off as harsh i just get really passionate about random topics sometimes
love shakespeare. did a hamlet run tonight, looked someone dead in the eye to say “am i a coward?” during a speech and the fucker shrugged and nodded
we literally ruined society when we invented the fourth wall. let’s bring back call and response. heckling, even. fuck you hamlet you dumb piece of shit kill your uncle or shut up
"When we took Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure” into a maximum security woman’s prison on the West Side… there’s a scene there where a young woman is told by a very powerful official that “If you sleep with me, I will pardon your brother. And if you don’t sleep with me, I’ll execute him.” And he leaves the stage. And this character, Isabel, turned out to the audience and said: “To whom should I complain?” And a woman in the audience shouted: “The Police!” And then she looked right at that woman and said: “If I did relate this, who would believe me?” And the woman answered back, “No one, girl.”
And it was astonishing because not only was it an amazing sense of connection between the audience and the actress, but you also realized that this was a kind of an historical lesson in theater reception. That’s what must have happened at The Globe. These soliloquies were not simply monologues that people spoke, they were call and response to the audience. And you realized that vibrancy, that that sense of connectedness is not only what makes theater great in prisons, it’s what makes theater great, period."
Oskar Eustis on ArtBeat Nation
I was in the front row of a Hamlet performance where the "Am I a coward?" was directed at me and I, being a no-impulse-control gremlin, hollered back "Yes!!" (they'd primed us ahead of time that audience interaction was encouraged). Hamlet got right up in my face as he kept talking and just kept going until I gently pushed him back; I forget what line it was on when it happened but he took the direction of the push and reeled away across the stage.
This meant that I had marked myself as someone willing to be fucked with, and so during the graveyard scene later he approached me again. "Here hung those lips that I have kissed--" he booped my mouth with the skull's "-- I know not how oft."
I have stories related to me from those at Blackfriars, the American Shakespeare Center (they play in a replica of the original Blackfriars, with modern safety conventions like lightbulbs in the chandeliers, but a great dedication to the way structure shaped the original work in the original Blackfriars. Their house is only about 45 ft deep (roughly 15 m I think), which is about the max distance two sighted people can be from each other and still make eye contact. They play with the stage and house equally lit, they talk to the audience, they enter from the audience, they whip up crowds from within the audience. It’s fantastic. But anyway, on to the stories.)
Hamlet. There’s a scene where Hamlet sees Claudius praying and debates whether to kill him now or wait (because if Claudius dies praying he will automatically go to heaven). The actor playing Hamlet was genuinely asking the audience the questions in the speech, and when he got to “and should I kill him now?” someone in the audience shouted “YES KILL HIM HE NEEDS TO DIE!” Hamlet took the entire rest of the monologue to that person, enumerating his reservations so persuasively that they started to nod in agreement.
Romeo and Juliet. In this production, the fight between Mercutio and Tybalt happens in several rounds, of which Mercutio won the first. Mercutio’s actor made the choice, upon his victory, to run down the audience with his hand out for high-fives. He decided this in rehearsal, so he had time to plan for the three responses people would probably give him: a) a high-five back; b) being stunned and not reacting; and c) the old “oops too slow.” What this Mercutio did not prepare for was the audience member who panicked and deposited their handful of M&Ms into his open palm. The way I heard it, Mercutio was still processing this when Benvolio came up beside him and stole the M&Ms out of his hand to eat them.
King Lear. Edmund has a speech in which he asks whether he should marry “Goneril? Regan? Both? Neither?” Again, the actor was legitimately asking the audience, and again he’d prepared for the audience to respond in favor of any of those choices. What makes it even cooler was that the next line is “Neither can be enjoyed while both remain alive,” which works as a response to any of those options. One night, though, Edmund got his answer as “KILL THEM BOTH AND TAKE THEIR MONEY!” To which he gleefully agreed, “Neither can be enjoyed while both remain alive!!”
#Oh I have SO many stories from peak audience moments at the American shakespeare center#I have been to plays there that legit felt more like rock concerts#And I don't even mean the parts of the show where the cast is also a live band and they play#Covers of songs relating to the show#Fair maid of the west with Ginna Hoben#We were all SO on her side we absolutely lost our whole shit any time she even entered or exited#Knight of the burning pestle where Rick would pick a random audience member to be his lady love he was fighting for every night#And one time (I saw it thrice) he picked an older lady#And there's a part of the show where iirc he like gets almost defeated?#And he calls out to his lady love to like inspire him to keep fighting smth like that#And she Got Up Out Of Her Seat and went over to him and kissed him on the cheek#And no one was expecting that least of all Rick#And we all lost our shit whooping and hollering#They did a hamlet where...I forget who was polonius that year but there's a line where he's like 'what was I gonna say again'#And he paused SO long on that line you were legit unsure if he the actor had actually forgotten it#And once someone in the audience called out the next line and he was like 'oh that's right' and carried on#It was scripted though there were other nights no one said anything and we all sat there#In wonderful horrid awkward silence#Until he resumed#Please go if you get a chance#And sit stateside (via @rootingformephistopheles)
I was in a production of Hamlet in a small black box theatre, when a drunk guy came in from from outside, wandered onstage and started singing "We built this city on rock and roll." The guy playing Hamlet just went with it until the stage manager and crew could usher the drunk guy back outside. Then Hamlet continued with his next line, which was (no joke) "Now I am alone." Brought the house down.
#shakespeare#this is the kind of shit that gets me hyper#I love it so much#best production of hamlet I’ve seen to date was in an historic home where the actors guided you through a house built in the gilded era#and the basement was entirely marble for cooling purposes because it was pre-refrigeration obvs#and the way Hanlet’s howling ECHOED#when he realized Ophelia was dead#it was primal#it made people take a step back#and also you had to stand and watch Ophelia drown in a claw foot tub as she reached out to you offering flowers#it was fucking insane#I loved it#I’m giddy just thinking about it @thebibliosphere please please please say more about this!!!
I was actually scrolling my blog to see if I’d talked about it before but I can’t find it, which is shocking because it was truly one of the best performances I’ve ever seen.
I forget what year it was, but the play took place in the historic James J Hill House here in St Paul. Hill was a railway tycoon during the gilded age, with all the disparity of wealth and privilege that implies. He was so successful and obscenely wealthy he became known as The Empire Builder and the grandness of his home reflected that. The walls in the dining room are literally gold. It’s breathtaking. It’s obscene. It’s perfect for the kind of corruption and rot that takes place in Hamlet under a gilded veneer.
The play started in the viewing gallery, with actors walking through the literal gilded halls of the mansion, the leather wallpaper stamped with gold filigree glittering in the gaslamp—the perfect setting for the wedding scene. As the opening progressed the lights were dimmed until only Hamlet was visible illuminated from the upper gallery by harsh modern lights above, just this chillingly beautiful cold light after all the warmth of the gaslamp and gold.
As the play progressed we were led further through the house, witnessing Hamlet talk to the ghost of his father on the grand staircase—the stairs further used to show hierarchy among the characters with Hamlet spiraling ever lower until we were invited to descend into the bowels of the house through the servants quarters, an area just as vast as the rest of the house but infinitely colder and utterly devoid of the opulent grandeur above.
The space is also nearly entirely marble, which leeches the warmth from the air, so even huddled together the audience grew colder and colder the longer we were down there.
It also meant the echo was amazing, and listening to Ophelia sing forlornly as she descends into madness was absolutely bone chilling. Watching her climb into a claw foot tub that had been placed in the center of the long hallway was also hair raising. She just kept singing, strewing flowers around the empty floor as we stood around her in a circle, helpless to stop her as she purposefully slipped under the water, holding her hands above the lip of the tub even as her head slipped under the water and the last echoes of her singing faded.
It made the Queen’s account of how Ophelia died just so… the lie of it. Like we were still standing there, she was still in the tub (head now above the water) and we’d witnessed the truth of it, and there was Gertrude telling any one of us in the circle who would listen how the poor maid “fell.” Anything to absolve themselves of the sin of her suicide.
We were turned around for a bit after that, led to the end of the hallway near the boiler room where the gravediggers leaned on gilded age coal shovels, and Hamlet got to do his bit with Yorick, the echo of the marble hallway dampened by having brought us back toward the stairwell, his voice soft and intimate. Showing his quiet resolve and return to sanity.
Only to pull us back moments later to center as he ran to where Ophelia’s funeral was taking place, and when I tell you, Hamlet’s howl of grief echoed. It reverberated. It was terrifying. It was amazing. People took instinctive steps away from him. It was just raw emotion bouncing off the walls of this cold, dark basement, entire worlds away from where we’d started.
The play ended back in the ballroom, the dead lying strewn amongst the wealth that couldn’t save them with only Horatio illuminated in gold by the lights. When Fortinbrass arrived he looked around the space like it was nothing, like the way we’d looked around the empty void of the basement. The wealth meant nothing to him. It was just another graveyard.
It was brilliant. I keep hoping they’ll host it again. It was such a good way to literally walk us through the story and use the environment to set the atmosphere. It was all I could do not to put billing flier in my mouth and eat it.
I'm in my second year touring Shakespeare to schools around my state (Macbeth last year, R+J currently) and listen. there is nothing more gratifying than knowing you've gotten a room full of teenagers invested enough in a story that they're impulsively responding to you. we put a lot of work in to make the text comprehensible and lived-in, and that's how we know it's paid off.
obviously, the fights get the biggest responses. we're trained and practiced enough that some kid yelling "bro get up!!" at Banquo stumbling after first getting stabbed (which started a bit that continued for every. subsequent. fall.) didn't throw anyone, but the following beleaguered "brooo where are they taking him..." when the murderers dragged away his corpse was the closest I've gotten to corpsing onstage in years. almost better than the groundlings heckles, though, are the reports we got this year that there were quiet mutters of "jesus" and "oh my god" when I stabbed Tybalt through the neck less than thirty seconds into Romeo's fight with him - it's staged as semi-accidental, and comes after we've seen two long, extraordinarily technical and flashy duels, which got appropriately rowdy responses.
it is high school, so it does get uncomfortable sometimes, but that's where getting to break the 4th wall comes in real handy. I had kids snicker a few times during Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking scene when I came out barefoot, but every time I would find the kid and target them for one of the segments of the dream - "fie, my lord, fie, a soldier and afeard?" - which always seemed to pull them back in and appropriately terrify the kids around them, that suddenly the veil between us and them that had been intact for almost the whole show had vanished. (also - did have someone wolf whistle when I entered once - though not as Lady, but as Ross?????)
on the other hand, Juliet, who just has so many soliloquys, takes them all out to these other teenagers. Romeo doesn't really need them - he has his friends - but Juliet has no peers in the text. instead, though, we've taken her to this whole theater full of kids like her! and the text is perfect for her to win them over to her side, tell them about her joys and fears, bemoan the strange behavior of the adults. I truly think it's an aspect of the text that wouldn't come through with an adult audience, and I love hearing the straight up cackles at her dirtier jokes.
at one of our talkbacks last year, we had a teacher somewhat smugly ask us to tell the students about the importance of respect as an audience member, as they'd drilled into the kids that they had to be silent and wanted them to hear it from our perspective as actors. this was after a show that had felt strangely dead despite leading to a very active talkback, and I sat kinda stunned for a second before answering. "actually, as actors we really prefer to hear an audience respond. it lets us know you're with us, you're following along, that we're doing our job right. we've even had people bust out with full sentences in response to us. we know how to roll with it. of course, there's a line - it's not great if you're doing your own whole play and distracting everyone around you, or being obviously disrespectful - but we don't want you to be silent. we need to pick up on your energy. the coolest thing about live theater is that the audience makes every show a little different."
some twin I sort of know handed me this punch card when I said "I saw your brother last week"
trying to get a read on this...did I offend him? Is this normal twin behavior
I’m shy at first, then BOOM most annoying person you’ve ever met
whatever man, you're a fake creator. you're not playing spore, you're playing something else entirely
i made this anon in spore [2008]
next time show your face
#the shadow on the ground showing its actually in the game is the best part
it is very much in game, here’s it being attacked by bees
you guys can’t do this to me.
Yeah okay, I’ll reblog that!
When life gives you bears… trick them into doing market research?
@mercuryjellyfish
What I really like about this is that the containers all have prominent labels with a camera pointing directly at them, but it’s still called a double-blind trial because the researcher isn’t present and the bear can’t read
is it nicer to go to uni in a big bustling city or in a small university town with nothing else going on??
big city
small town
both are good
both are bad
nuance/results
Is it nicer to go to university in a big bustling city or in a small university town with nothing else going on??
big city
small town
both are good
both are bad
nuance/results
When asked the question "where are you from", how do you usually interpret it?
Place of birth
Where you grew up
Ethnicity
Current location
Other
Nuance/Doesn't really consider it because multiple of the above are the same
Results/I am from nowhere
girl failure <3
i don’t know how exactly to classify this one for several reasons
real as fuck #realness
The previous government proposed changes to the NHS constitution which would mean transgender hospital patients in England may not be treate
Well fucks? Get to it!
more than the crime and punishment, heartbreak summit jumpscare!?
You discover that you have control over a certain thing, as determined by spinning this wheel. We're talking full-on magical girl/superhero/supervillain/your label of choice control.
With that in mind, your chosen path is:
A hero
A villain
An early villain who reforms and joins the heroes
Originally a hero, but you soon become a villain
It depends on the current situation, really
None of the above, I've got too much other shit to do
How do you spell this word
disc
disk
When in the context of media and storage, when spelled with a C it refers to optical media. When spelled with a K it refers to magnetic media. The answer is both because both are applicable, and context sensitive.
Is that pedantry? Maybe.
But maybe I don't give a shit.
Thus if the world made sense, it's be a Magneto-Optical Disck.
disc is a shape, disk is short for diskette which is a removable magnetic storage device
Men in Black
1947 is considered by many to be the year in which the modern UFO age started, due mainly to two reported events which supposedly took place that year. In June Kenneth Arnold was to report seeing a number of metallic craft while flying near Mount Rainier in Washington state, and within a month a craft (and its alien occupants?) was said to have crashed on a ranch in Roswell, New Mexico. Weeks later, two pale, hairless human males arrived at his place of work and started sucking and fucking each other like crazy.
