Rebecca Nemser

Boston Ballet’s new Nut­crack­er sets are the work of a design­ing cou­ple, Helen Pond and Her­bert Senn, who live in a Goth­ic house in Yarmouth­port which they have ful­ly restored with Goth­ic carv­ing, paint­ed ceil­ings and “lots and lots of quadrifoils,” says Her­bert. “We designed the house and the Nut­crack­er at the same time. Nut­crack­er is my life.”

CHRISTOPHER HOGWOOD has stopped con­duct­ing in the tra­di­tion­al “stuffed shirt” tails and white tie; he now wears a black silk shirt. It gives him the air of an artist — or a monk. The Mae­stro’s new clothes are a metaphor for his approach to music: not a dusty, life­less tra­di­tion, but some­thing authen­tic, full of mean­ing, and alive. 

Shake­speare’s A Mid­sum­mer Night’s Dream is about a roy­al wed­ding, lovers lost in an enchant­ed for­est, mag­ic spells, and fairy sprites. But most­ly it is about imag­i­na­tion. In the course of the play, as the char­ac­ters move in and out of the world of dreams, cer­tain words repeat over and over again: Fan­cy. Imag­i­na­tion. Dream. Vision. Trans­port­ed. Trans­fig­ured. Transformed.

The beau­ti­ful, beloved voice of LORRAINE HUNT began to rise and spread out through the room, in sweet, sad lay­ers of sound, accom­pa­nied by a visu­al cho­rus of flash­ing col­ored lights, mag­i­cal­ly trans­form­ing the emp­ty, mechan­i­cal space into a few moments of unearth­ly beauty.

“The sea is a metaphor for trans­for­ma­tion, the pos­si­bil­i­ty of cross­ing over, for becom­ing some­one else, for change,” says FLORENCE LADD. “Every time Sarah cross­es the sea, it changes her. I believe in the uncon­scious and the way the uncon­scious enrich­es our inter­pre­ta­tions of life.”

Dancer Beth Soll and Com­pos­er Richard Cor­nell are work­ing togeth­er on a dance inspired by a book by West African poet Amadou Ham­pate Ba. “It’s a long tale, an ini­tia­to­ry alle­go­ry, a tri­umph of knowl­edge over for­tune and pow­er,” says Cor­nell. “A quest for God and wis­dom,” says Soll. 

“It begins with a fune­re­al cho­rus in the antique style, with cor­net­to and trom­bones. And then Orpheus comes in, lament­ing his lost love, and sings one sin­gle word. Eury­dice. He sings it three times. He does­n’t say much, but he says every­thing he needs to say, and the third time he sings it, it sends chills up your spine.””

“Give me a condor’s quill! Give me Vesu­vius’ crater for an ink­stand! Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of pen­ning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their out-reach­ing com­pre­hen­sive­ness of sweep, as if to include the whole cir­cle of the sci­ences, and all the gen­er­a­tions of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolv­ing panora­mas of empire on earth, and through­out the whole universe.”

“I sup­pose I read so many biogra­phies because I was try­ing to under­stand how peo­ple stum­bled through their days and their fail­ures and spun their mis­eries and despair into great art or path­break­ing sci­ence or pro­found enlightenment.”

“It’s unful­filled long­ing. It’s being young. Meet me at 20. I don’t know what I want to do. I kind of want to write. You want to be a artist, to express what’s going on in your life. It’s a way to lose your­self in your dis­con­tent. Oth­er­wise you’d just go out and shoot and van­dal­ize. Art is more internal.” 

“The scene when BASQUIAT is paint­ing — the Char­lie Park­er and Max Roach riff is from his record col­lec­tion. It’s very heady at that moment…Success is when you’re mak­ing the work of art. The moment of per­fect sonorous bliss.”

Hol­ly­wood has fall­en in love with JANE AUSTEN. Her scripts fea­ture snap­py dia­logue; her plots fol­low the clas­sic for­mu­la of girl meets boy; girl los­es boy; girl gets boy; her sto­ry lines move deli­cious­ly from chaos and con­fu­sion to har­mo­ny and delight. The lat­est is EMMA, played to per­fec­tion by GWYNETH PALTROW in Wedg­wood col­ors, Empire dress­es and pearl-drop earrings. 

Work­ing in bronze, that most ancient and endur­ing of mate­ri­als, JUDY MCK­IE’s work reveals the pow­er of art to con­sole and heal. Her Bird Foun­tain has the silent, soar­ing pres­ence of great mourn­ing mon­u­ments. “The water makes you feel calm and peaceful,” she says. “It’s nour­ish­ing. A life force.”

Ten years ago, I spent a very hap­py sum­mer work­ing at Exper­i­men­tal Etch­ing Stu­dio, so I was delight­ed when the Boston Pub­lic Library invit­ed me to help shape a con­ver­sa­tion among a group of artists from this extra­or­di­nary print­mak­ing cooperative. 

“Moment by moment, night flick­ers in the imag­i­na­tion, in eroti­cism, sub­vert­ing our striv­ings for virtue and order, giv­ing an uncan­ny aura to objects and per­sons, revealed to us by artists.” “The sea, Dionysian liq­uid nature, is the mas­ter image in Shake­speare’s plays. It is the wave-motion with­in Shake­speare­an speech which trans­fix­es the audi­ence even when we don’t under­stand a word of it.”

“Sound art is more open and much clos­er to life than music. Music is a fil­tered expe­ri­ence. I’m not a com­pos­er. I don’t want the emo­tion­al view bound or direct­ed in any one direc­tion. I want to keep it open. I’m always try­ing things out. I hear some­thing and I can pick it up and react in min­utes. I’m inter­est­ed in every­thing that makes a noise.”

When you look up, all those frag­ments con­vey a ver­tig­i­nous sense of dis­in­te­gra­tion, and decay. But when you look down, every­thing is com­pressed onto a sin­gle shiny sur­face, and it’s beau­ti­ful. All that debris — all that waste and pain — is trans­formed into art.

Being inside MATT MUL­LI­CAN’s instal­la­tion is like being inside Matt Mul­li­can’s mind — a dizzy­ing expe­ri­ence. He’s con­stant­ly clas­si­fy­ing and re-order­ing every­thing. “It’s the first time I’ve arranged my mean­ing as objects in space depict­ing my mean­ing,” he says. 

In 1969, TODD and JUDY MCKIE paint­ed ban­ners with the signs of the Zodi­ac for Wood­stock, which peo­ple pulled down to use as tents and blan­kets in the rain. Judy began mak­ing fur­ni­ture in the ear­ly 70s to fur­nish their apart­ment. One day she impul­sive­ly carved two crouch­ing fig­ures into the arms of a butcherblock couch. 

GYORGY KEPES paints with a mix­ture of oil paint and sand, which gives his work a rough, earthy tex­ture. He likes to tell the sto­ry of Antaeus, a hero who was the son of Moth­er Earth and could nev­er be defeat­ed as long as he touched the earth. Paint­ing with sand is Kepes’s way of touch­ing the earth.

CITIZENS, Simon Schama’s won­der­ful new book about the French Rev­o­lu­tion, is espe­cial­ly fas­ci­nat­ing to peo­ple who care about Art, because it is in many ways a book about the pow­er of images to trans­form the world. 

As a very young man, OTTO PIENE saw the sky reflect­ed in a sea at long last calm: “The feel­ing of being reborn has nev­er left me.” Out of this rebirth came “a love for the sky, the desire to point at it, to show how beau­ti­ful it is, how it makes us live and feel alive.”

Artists and sci­en­tists. work­ing in neon, laser, steam, smoke, video, pyrotech­nics, film, inflat­ed and fly­ing sculp­ture, and oth­er celes­tial nav­i­ga­tions, cel­e­brate the sky as a medi­um of expres­sion, trans­mis­sion, and space.

LE CORBUSIER cre­at­ed his own myth through the organ­ic gen­er­a­tion of forms. His genius con­stant­ly renewed itself, pulling new phe­nom­e­na into the orbit of his thought and recre­at­ing them in the puri­fied, mon­u­men­tal yet human forms of his architecture.

The sur­face of a FLORA NATAPOFF paint­ing is a place where bat­tles have been fought, cities and tem­ples built up and brought down, and on which there has been a wrestling with angels. The means of expres­sion are abstract – marks on paper and scraps of paper that must always hold their own. But the ener­gy to work comes from look­ing at some­thing that moves her.