Don Quixote at the Joffrey Ballet
by Stella Atrium

Attending ballet in Chicago is all about going to the Auditorium at Roosevelt University, often claimed in our reviews as America's most beautiful theater. Nestled among the buildings for Roosevelt, Columbia College, and DePaul University, the Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan masterpiece is a banquet of arches and ornamentation.

The jeweled setting puts the patron in a mood for great art, and the Joffrey Ballet seldom disappoints. 

Yesterday we attended the matinee for Don Quixote where the aging Spanish knight doesn't dance.  He is shown on his deathbed three times, so jumping up to perform leaps and turns would seem awkward. 

The sidekick Sancho Panza (Derrick Agnoletti) completes some slapstick, and they have an oversized puppet horse that looks like a theatre school group project.  The elements of the story are pushed aside anyway, so the star dancers Carlos Quenedit, who plays a barber named Basilio, and Victoria Jaiani as the baker's daughter Kitri can shine. 

This somber story is enlivened by scenes in the square where a street dancer, played by Joanna Wozinak, and toreador Matthew Adamczyk provide the few moments of Spanish flavor.  These are almost in competition with the romantic leads who barely acknowledge their presence. 

 

But, we attend ballet for pretty girls in tutus and high leaps from men wearing 18th century military uniforms.  The several solo bits from Basilio and Kitri displayed a commitment to high discipline, taut physicality, and displays of prowess for practiced movements that brought frequent applause and hoops of delight from the audience. 

Often for ballet I sit down front at the Auditorium to absorb the details of set decoration and costume design.  This ballet, though, is just as enjoyable from the mezzanine. 

Feminism in Science Fiction
posted 9/2/2011 by Stella Atrium 
author@stellaatrium.com,  www.StellaAtrium.com
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A personal polemic about approaches to writing action adventure stories with women protagonists:

As a young person, I struggled with the label of feminism. I could not identify with leaders of the movement among wealthy married liberal (white) women who expressed outrage at being excluded from high-paying jobs. I also didn't embrace the liberal causes that allocated my limited resources for new citizens or to the less fortunate.




What really burned me (then and now) is that liberal women claim to speak for all women. I know advances for health care and job opportunities have been gained due to their work, but the organizations actively REJECT views from women with different political agendas.

I could not call myself a conservative, though, since I embraced independence for women in areas of finances, pay rates, travel, property ownership, and reproductive rights. I spent time as a young person arguing for nuanced definitions about the differences between liberated and liberal.

Additionally, since I live in Chicago, many groups for women were populated by women of color who brought with them old rhetoric from the civil rights movement, like they are locked in a time warp or something. I felt unwelcome, more than pushed out, since I was viewed as automatic competition for the few empowerment jobs the movement could carve out on a local level.

Just the same, in my stories I was actively solving problems for female characters  and how they perceive/ define/ object to/ and address the world outside of family circles. I wanted to spout the party line for empowerment; I just didn't agree with it.

The few principles I had identified and wanted to implement in my stories included:

• Women make decisions in groups so the reader needs to meet the sister, auntie, daughters, cousins and friends of the heroine
• Stories about women take place over decades and are often resolved by a grown son who finally addresses a long-simmering outrage
• Women must solve problems using limited resources and with no voice in the public square
• Women are often undercut by other women
• With all these obstacles, women draw culture through hard times (while the men are killing each other) and make-do with the remnants of holocaust

Recently, I have been heartened by what I find among feminist bloggers in the sci-fi world who have noticed the slights toward women in formula stories that are the daily fare of sci-fi novels and movies. Here our views about empowerment of women overlap.

One example is the Bechdel test that demands more scenes in movies where the female characters interact with each other.

Another discussion asks why sci-fi stories that take place on new worlds ignore where babies come from and why that's important.

Time was... the outrage I felt when reading a novel or viewing a movie in my favorite genre was not reinforced by friends. The classic example is Princess Leia in Star Wars who, as it turns out, was a twin to Luke Skywalker. In the first movie, Darth Vadar, later identified as their father, held Leia hostage on the unfinished death star and ordered her torture. Vadar didn't feel movement within the force while in her presence even though he was aware of Luke from two solar systems away. Go figure.

My recent exploration of the expanding world of book bloggers has been a delight. While I am glad to find I am not isolated due to my ideas about how female protagonists see/feel/address the world, I began to suspect I had found a cache of women among sci-fi feminists who as a group are isolated.

Part of the reason I cannot call myself a feminist is because I fear the adults will send us to another room to complain while they go about the business of managing the world. Until you have been disregarded in a business setting as not ready to sit at the table where decisions are made, or automatically called a trouble-maker, this sense of righteous indignation may escape you. I make no apology.

Professor Kay Vandergrift from Rutgers University supplied a few answers that settled my suspicions, especially about women and literary criticism.

"In the past several decades both literary criticism and the theory that supports that criticism have shifted from a base in the literary community of readers and writers to the scholarly community of professors and university students. In the process, literary theory has become more fragmented and, many would say, more isolated, both from the literary works themselves and from the readers and writers connected to those works in the non-academic world."

Vandergrift offers a few parameters [bullet points added] for developing literary criticism, talking most closely about stories for young people.

• "Theories are judged by their applicability and their usefulness.
• As new phenomena are created or discovered or existing ones perceived in new ways, theory is revised to assimilate this new information...
• Each theory opens our eyes to new perceptions and new perspectives, but
• [each theory] conceals as well as reveals certain aspects of the literary work and the literary experience.
• Each offers a system of useful, but incomplete, organizing constructs which continually lead to new solutions, new problems, and new theories."

These standards articulate the measures by which I want to critique stories about women, and the standards offer good direction for how I want to develop action adventure stories with female protagonists.

For example, a few stories find an audience because they are about the silence of women. The first that comes to mind is The Piano.

SYNOPSIS: A mute woman along with her young daughter, and her prized piano, are sent to 1850s New Zealand for an arranged marriage to a wealthy landowner, and she's soon lusted after by a local worker on the plantation. (source: internet movie database)

A good friend claimed the story was about a woman who was raped, so he didn't have to care since the movie belonged in the category of women's issues. One sequence in the movie does show a sexual assault by the husband before he cuts off one of the mute wife's fingers so she can no longer play the piano.

In truth the story is about how Ada McGrath (the Holly Hunter character) overcame oppression. She overcame sleepwalking. She gained security for her daughter. She gained the lover she wanted. She gained a better living situation where she could indulge her musical talent. The rape was an act of control from the husband and only symptomatic to the larger oppression.

So stream of incidents don't classify The Piano as a rape movie similar to The Accused where Jodie Foster's character is gang-raped in a bar.

Can you describe movies that meet a similar standard for changing attitudes toward women? Let's discuss...

Why No Bio-Pic?
Stella Atrium 10/22/11

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Article update:  Angelina Jolie to play Gertrude Bell.  See The Washington Times article 11/20/11.
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I'm looking forward to the premiere of the bio-pic for Gertrude Bell developed by Ridley Scott. 

Ms. Bell is certainly deserving of the attention from our filmmakers who are our myth-makers.  Here's why...  Atlantic Monthly article from 2007 reviews a biography by Georgina Howell

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/06/the-woman-who-made-iraq/5893/


The outspoken Bell was in the middle of world events then that led to our current morass.  She spoke out in the company of Winston Churchill and was in community with many Middle Eastern leaders at a time when women were without voice in those countries. 



A critique from a stage play about Ms. Bell included this observation:

"Ms Bell meddled in Middle Eastern politics well into the modern era, playing a significant role in persuading warring Sunni and Shia tribesmen to subsume their tribal identities into the fragile, cobbled-together state of Iraq. Ultimately, Bell was disillusioned and then disconsolate to see the unraveling of her hopes, and to face the mutant harvest of her life's work. To an uncanny degree, her words echo the concerns raised since day one about the wisdom of current American military intervention in Iraq."

"Gertrude Bell describes a dawning awareness of her own and her country's naive entanglement in ages-old loyalties and blood feuds,"

http://www.voiceoftherivervalley.com/why-gertrude-bell-haunts-my-dreams-aug-23-sept-2/

So here's my question...   What other women who impacted history deserve a bio-pic?  Who has been overlooked in your opinion? 

Prime Suspect as Newest in Lineup of Women as Cops and Lawyers
9/23/11 by Stella Atrium

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Maria Bello has been on TV episodes of cop shows so often, she seem familiar to the audience in her first starring role in Prime Suspect as Det. Jane Timoney, a tough homicide detective who gives as well as she has to take from the sexist boy's club in the NYC squad room.

Somehow Bello comes off as older and meaner that Kelli Giddish as Annie Frost in Chase, and with none of the personal quirks that enliven Kyra Sedgwick's performances in The Closer. 

Bello is often cast as the female heavy, in fact.  She played the hard-nosed dog trainer in Jane Austen Book Club who gets the sweet guy almost in spite of herself.  She has been cast opposite A-list actors in the movies, often as the unhelpful wife.

Johnny Depp -- Secret Window - unsympathetic wife
Mel Gibson - Payback - junkie ex-wife
Viggo Mortensen -A History of Violence - long-suffering wife

Prime Suspect is placed in a NYC squad room with alcohol slurping, snide comment dropping, probably cursing, definitely resentful co-workers.  Even Aidan Quinn, as Bello's boss, looks like he gained 20 pounds to fit the stereotype of Irish Catholic cop.

Bello's snap-brim hat is a nice touch, but too reminiscent of a 1960 cop show with Frank Sinatra titled The Detective.  The new series seems stuck in the previous decade because Jane Timoney is the ONLY woman at work.  Her female nemesis, the mother of the boyfriend's son, folds her hand with the first threat. 

This addition to the lineup of women as cops and lawyers is the more gritty, harder-hitting, less forgiving flavor.  At least it's not Charlie's Angels that premiered the same night. 

Nim's Island & The Tempest

9/23/2011 by Stella Atrium
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Nim's Island as a Remix of Shakespeare's The Tempest : a comparison to show the dominance of archetypes

I have written elsewhere that story archetypes are a straight jacket where especially women characters are relegated to a limited number of roles.  Some formulas for action adventure stories are so rigid we can see them work across genres.  The example offered in that earlier discussion was the similar plotlines for the first Muppet Movie and The Outlaw Josey Wales.  (see explanation below)

Another example of how old stories are reworked for fresh audiences can be found in Nims' Island, especially the 2008 movie based on the novel by Wendy Orr. I assert this story (perhaps unconsciously) is a re-working of The Tempest by Shakespeare, which is itself a reworking of archetypes from fairy tales. The similarities are striking.

(see response from Wendy Orr below)

In Shakespeare's final play, Prospero is an old sorcerer exiled with his daughter Miranda to a Mediterranean island where he frees Ariel (a water spirit) and enslaves Caliban (a lost tribesmen).  Prospero protects Miranda from the truth about his past by keeping her isolated, and he does NOT train her as a sorceress. 

Even when the story is handled by a female director (Julie Jaymor in 2010) where Prospero becomes Prospera (played by Helen Mirren), Miranda is NOT trained in sorcery. Prospera spends considerably more time guiding Ariel into new dimensions than she spends with her daughter's education.  The archetypal princess must be kept unschooled and without work in order to keep her sexually innocent.  But... we speak to gender bias extensively in other discussions. 

On Nim's Island in the South Pacific biologist Jack Rusoe (played by Gerald Butler) leaves his young daughter alone while he goes on a two-day excursion to find glow-in-the-dark plankton. They have a pact to keep the island a secret and both fear the return of a ship called the Buccaneer that carries the taint of knowledge of the world. 

Novelist Wendy Orr invests Nim with curiosity and problem-solving skills beyond her maturity, and allows Nim to manage saving the new turtles, connecting the internet, and blogging with a pulp fiction writer in San Francisco named Alex Rover (played with little humor by Jodie Foster).

Nim Ruscoe (Abigail Breslin from Little Miss Sunshine) spends the time alone with favorite pets that include a dancing sea lion named Selkie that does the heavy lifting for rescuing stranded sojourners in shark infested waters, and a pelican named Galileo that flies back-and-forth between the island and Jack Rusoe who has got himself lost in a sinking sailboat. Jack works magic by using the tools at hand to make a raft and limp home.

We can easily see how Selkie serves as Caliban, and Galileo is Ariel from The Tempest. Galileo is the hero of the story, in fact. He piles fish in the boat for Jack to eat. He snatches Jack's tool belt away from Nim on the island so Jack can rig a sail before Galileo guides Jack home.

Now the good part. 

In The Tempest, Prince Ferdinand is separated from the other sailors who have "undergone a sea change" and wash up on the island.  Ferdinand "exchanges eyes" with Miranda and, by way of Prospero's magic, becomes her slave like Caliban is Prospero's slave.

Of course, Alex Rover and Nim Rusoe cannot provide sexual tension similar to the plotline in The Tempest, because the audience knows from the get-go that Alex Rover is for Jack Rusco.  The fictional character featured in all of Rover's novels is played by Gerald Butler, just in case the viewer could miss the archetypal assumption. This imaginary friend is, in fact, her slave.

In the absence of Nim's father, then, Alex Rover provides advice about keeping a wound clean and commits to leaving her own comfort zone in San Francisco to tolerate the many travel venues, including a sinking rowboat, to undergo a sea change (leaving behind her agoraphobia and dependence on an imaginary friend) and get washed up on the island. 

In fact, Alex Rover spends a few hours on The Buccaneer with the troublesome captain and the events director (similar to the separate story line of Stephano and Trinculo) before she is separated from the other sailors and arrives alone and without technical support to begin to solve real world problems alongside Nim. 

Alex Rover and Jack Rusco don't meet until the final scene of the movie because, in these archetypal fairy tales, all tension flows away when the mating couple touch (read: Sleepless in Seattle). In The Tempest, the final act is about reconciliation and wedding preparations.  Although the speeches are very fine and often quoted, the story unravels into a simple masque.

Even Peter Greenway's engaging version titled Prospero's Books with the aging Sir John Gielgud spent two-thirds of the movie time with images of a less-than-traditional wedding feast while a peeing cherub sang in a painful octave. 

So an additional scene of fragmented storyline is inserted in Nim's Island when the Buccaneer arrives while Nim is alone. The captain and events director bring tourists ashore who treat the pristine beach as a backdrop for a Hawaiian luau.  The tourists obligingly run for the lifeboats when Nim catapults lizards and geckos into their midst from the safety of the treeline. 

Inside this action scene one tourist, a boy about Nim's age named Edmund (Maddison Joyce), sees her and enters the jungle to confront her about what she's doing to his parents and the other "pirates".

In this well-written scene, Nim claims that Edmund and all real people aren't what she had imagined from the stories she read. These would be the stories written by Alex Rover who studiously avoided contact with real people while writing in San Francisco. Nim and Edmund seem to argue, but are really engaged in discovery, even touching each other's face for assurance the other is real. 

Critics complained that Nim's Island provides too many "plastic" events such as Nim riding the back of the sea lion through the island surf. But I feel the level of improbable events is on par with the original work by Shakespeare, and the farcical elements also mirror the precursor story.

The real change here, or growth in our use of archetypes, is that Nim has intelligence, curiosity, warmth, problem-solving skills, and a community of helpers who allow her to make decisions in committee. 

Kudos to Wendy Orr!

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Kermit as Josey Wales

In the first Muppet Movie, Kermit is pushed from his equilibrium in the swamp by bad guys who want him to serve as spokesperson for selling froglegs.  Kermit goes on adventure and accumulates several sidekicks including a love interest in Miss Piggy, all the time relentlessly pursued by these same bad guys. Kermit and friends find a new place to settle, but first must negotiate with the tribes who already populate Hollywood.  Before Kermit can win the love interest, he must confront the ultimate bad guy and vanquish him. 

Watch The Outlaw Josey Wales and see if you can find the exact same sequence of events.