many fans assume the house was a set, but the movie's main party location was the real Los Angeles home of Christopher Martin ("Play").
one of the wildest facts: the famous dance battle scenes were shot in silence. the actors and dancers performed to counts and choreography, and the music was added later in post-production. actress/choreographer A.J. Johnson helped create the iconic routines.
Lais Ribeiro styled by Ilaria Niccolini, hair by Martin Christopher Harper, make up by Carolina Gonzalez, photographed by Enrique Vega for Numéro Russia May 2019
Currently on view until May 20th, 2023 at Hashimoto Contemporary in San Francisco, California is artist Christopher Martin's solo exhibition, "VOID."
In "Void," the artist expands his visual language by blending imagery from the African Diaspora, personal mythology, and American Traditional tattooing into striking figurative and text-based banners. One piece, "Black With White Stripes," reinterprets the Pharaoh's Horses tattoo design, which originates from the biblical story of Moses parting the Red Sea. Martin's rendition features three zebras in motion, symbolizing strength, fear, and power - qualities that reflect the human spirit. The inverted palette on the banner's reverse side emphasizes the zebra's black skin with white stripes.
Martin addresses contemporary injustice by incorporating cotton as a primary medium, pointing to the Atlantic slave trade and his Southern roots. His large-scale, hand-cut, painted, and sewn black-and-white banners tackle themes of religion, captivity, and freedom. Drawing on his tattooing background, Martin's bold imagery tells stories of the African American experience. His work, deeply rooted in history and respect for the written word, establishes a new lexicon for Black culture. The artist describes the exhibition as a truthful portrayal of unseen stories, encompassing real-life experiences, dreams, emotions, and morality tales that are both magical and universal.
“...Early modern England maintained a deeply ambivalent outlook toward old age, whose inception was variably set anywhere from about forty onward: gérontocratie in its formal ideology, the society simultaneously displayed a "pessimistic" or even disdainful regard for a stage of life associated with "a wretched time of physical deterioration." Moreover, women in this setting experienced if anything a compounded version of such conflicted attitudes. Freed from the substantial physical hazards of parturition and often from the dependencies and demands of earlier life stages, as Amy M. Froide has argued, single women of the day were perhaps "best positioned to enjoy a positive old age," yet those who had avoid ed marriage altogether "faced derogatory epithets such as ‘old maid’ and ‘ superannuated virgin’ that made direct reference to their advanced age."
Exploring the social impact of menopause in sixteenth-century culture, Lynn Botelho likewise refocuses the emphasis on physical appearance with which women in the era especially had to reckon: "the end of regeneration probably did not signal the beginning of old age to early modern society," she observes, "but menopause did coincide with a host of culturally significant visual changes that resulted in women being labelled old at this stage." Given the unquestionable centrality of "outwardly observable signifiers of status in early modern England," Botelho concludes that "A woman became old when she looked old." This notion takes an expressly humiliating turn in the gerontophobic, antifeminist bias informing contemporary pictorial traditions that rendered figures like Helen, Cleopatra, or even Lucretia as elderly grotesques who might never have exerted the power they did over men could they have been envisioned in their decrepitude.
Keenly sensitive to such contexts, Elizabeth as head of state appreciated how the need to manage constructions of her appearance was a matter of political order. From early in her reign, she aimed to exert as much control over this critical domain as possible, an impulse that took on ever greater urgency amid the growing generational animosities that came to mark her regimes later decades. Educated in the multiform terms of Elizabeth’s public iconography, we have yet to investigate adequately the queens complex sense of her own physical body as it aged. As a result, darker evaluations of the "Mask of Youth" convention so prominent toward the end of the reign have come to overdetermine modern judgments.
As early as 1563, after all, her council had circulated a draft of a proclamation "to prohibit all manner of other persons to draw, paint, grave, or portray her majesty's personage or visage for a time until, by some perfect pattern or example, the same may be by others followed." Our readiness to read her later self-representations as governed by vanity rather than strategy in many respects invests too literally in Ben Jonson's famous sneer that "Queen Elizabeth never saw herself after she became old in a true glass." Wallace MacCaffrey’s more generous construction of the monarch's own designs puts only a slightly more positive spin on this late "posturing": while Elizabeth's (failed) effort to institute a homogenous portrait had intended clearly "to display to her subjects an unchanging, ageless countenance," he feels that such "outward manifestations are faithful reflections of a fundamental inward reality."
Whatever else we know about this "inward reality," however, we cannot doubt the profound circumspection that Elizabeth brought to all her political endeavors, the formulation of a public image not least among these. We need to resist presumptions that the elder queen was so casually seduced by her own propaganda, and to be willing to recognize her discreet capacity to embrace the advanced age that her body duly registered, less as a physical liability than as an index of the experience that empowered her reign. Always protective of the way others saw fit to represent her for supportive or derogatory purposes, she knew what her subjects expected, and within reason was willing to honor their demands. Beyond this, answerable only to herself, she knew how to project her fully embodied sense of self with a disarming authenticity.
In age as in youth, Elizabeth had the common sense to discern that, however much control a public figure exercised over her own representation, she could never fully govern her audiences response. Over the course of her long career, she grew adept at parrying the "narrative of decline" with which she increasingly had to contend. Interestingly, the first serious critical foregrounding of public discussion about her age came in response to French marriage prospects of the late 1570s, when she belatedly appeared to entertain the Duke dAlençon, over twenty years her junior, as a serious political match. However sincerely and to whatever end Elizabeth pursued the engagement, it indisputably drew national attention specifically to the subject of her years. As far back as 1570, Alençon's older brother, who would go on to take the throne as Henry III, had rejected any suggestion of courtship with such "an old creature."
A decade later, English subjects proved no less tactless in their own violent enmity to the subsequent venture. So respectful a minister as Ralph Sadler delivered a speech in which he boldly recalls how "The inequalyte of yeres" between the parties was such that "her majestie myght be his mother," where John Stubbs in his Discoverie of a Gaping Gulf lodged an even more egregious protest against the unhealthiness of matching "youth with decrepit age." But for all her public fury at such presumptuous commentary, Elizabeth in her correspondence acknowledged the age discrepancy freely. When the French king and queen mother first proposed the marriage in the summer of 1572, Elizabeth was the first to remark repeatedly on "the youngness of the years of the Duke of Alençon being compared to ours," insisting on a personal conference before anything can proceed since "nothing can make so full a satisfaction to us for our opinion nor percase in him of us in respect of the opinion he may conceive of the excess of our years above his."
She later indulges Alençon with wry self-caricatures of "the poor old woman who honors you as much (I dare say) as any young wench whom you ever will find" (CW, 251). Even apart from her most remarkable lyric reflection, the poem "When I was fair and young," which likely dates to the period following the courtship, we have sufficient evidence that Elizabeth harbored no vain illusions about her perpetual youth. Between the demise of the Alençon affair and the year of de Maisses embassy, Elizabeth faced down an almost continuous sequence of reminders of time's corrosive force. The stress of Mary Stuarts increasingly desperate plots and eventual execution in 1587 clearly took a heavy toll, provoking Essex's prediction to James VI of Scotland "that hir Majeste could not lyve above a yere or ii by reson of sum imperfección."
She of course weathered this event and the even grander trauma of the Armada that it helped precipitate the following year, only to witness the deaths of such long-standing ministers as Leicester, Walsingham, Mildmay, and Hatton ushering in what John Guy has termed the queen's "second reign." Alongside the deaths of three more trusted members of her privy council (Puckering, Hunsdon, and Knollys) in 1596, she was then forced to suffer another, more emphatic wave of commentary on her senescence as she achieved the "critical" climacteric of her sixty-third year, when an array of well-intentioned but exasperating sermons taxed her patience. Bishop Anthony Rudd, for instance, preached before her on the way Samuel “cast a right account of his yeares, who when he was become olde, made his sonnes Iudges of Israeli, because he was not able to beare the charge."
After offering for meditation an extended catalogue of the effects of bodily decline, he startlingly presumes to ventriloquize the queen herself in reflection upon her "long temporall life": "Lord, I have now put foote within the doores of that age, in the which the Almond tree flourisheth: wherein men begin to carry a Calender in their bones, the senses begin to faile, the strength to diminish, yea al the powers of the body daily to decay." Sir John Harington reported how Elizabeth, "perceiving wherto it tended, began to be troubled with" the discourse, and rebuked the preacher that "he should have kept his arithmetick to him selfe," but also reports how she later relented, protesting annoyance "Only, to show how the good bishop was deceaved" in his ageist presumption.
John Manningham's diary adds Elizabeth's sardonic but composed remark to Rudd afterwards, "M[aste]r D[octo]r, you have made me a good funeral sermon; I may dye when I will." Cultivating the "wisdom" pose she had taken up at least since the mid-1580s, when she expressed confidently to James that "we old foxes can find shifts to save ourselves by others' malice" (CW, 262), Elizabeth had by 1597 become inured to her role as elder stateswoman. She proudly wore her "years," conjuring them as leverage over her junior subjects, as we find in her 1593 assurance to the MPs that "having my head by years and experience better stayed (whatsoever any shall suppose to the contrary) than that you may easily believe I will enter into any idle expenses, now must I give you all as great thanks as ever prince gave to loving subjects" (CW, 332).
In July 1597 she reprimanded Essex's impetuosity, reminding him how "Eyes of youth have strong sights, but commonly not so deep as those of elder age" (CW, 386), Her famous rebuttal to the Polish ambassador that same month likewise sniped at his master's youth: "seeing your king is a young man and newly chosen," she answered the emissary's presumption in perfect Latin, "that doth not so perfectly know the course of managing affairs of this nature with other princes as his elders have observed with us, so perhaps others will observe which shall succeed in his place thereafter" (CW, 332-33). At the same time—and another extreme altogether—she would remain the subject of fetish and fantasy, in spite of if not because of her age.
If she could not have known Simon Forman's notorious erotic dream of her in age, presented by A. L. Rowse as evidence of the "erotic stimulus that the menfolk derived from having a Virgin Queen upon the throne," she could not have ignored the very public allegation of the executed Jesuit Thomas Portmort that his persecutor Richard Topcliffe had claimed intimate familiarity with the queen's naked features, claiming hers "the softest belly of any womankind." She was aware, in other words, of the broadly various reactions that the sight of her body might have provoked from even so amicable and compliant a character as de Maisse.”
- Christopher Martin, “The Breast and Belly of a Queen: Elizabeth After Tilbury.” in Early Modern Women
