Burning Mahatma
These giant opera puppets are some of the craziest things I’ve ever seen — Westchester billionaires meet Burning Man. They’re from Satyagraha by Philip Glass, an opera at the Met, and they represent Indian collaborators with the British.
The libretto is comprised of Bhagavad Gita chants in Sanskrit, without subtitles. Hindu weddings really are like German opera, interminable and baffling:
In the wings Alexander Harvey strapped on stilts… He slipped on a backpack frame attached to the puppet and put a stick that controls the head into a pouch dangling from a tool belt around his waist. The pouch held the head’s weight while he turned it back and forth… Harvey stilted up a ramp to the stage, stepped over a lip, turned sideways and then had to keep his balance on the stage’s downward slope, mindful of the danger that a head sloping too far forward could send him crashing down. [Link]
The British art scene’s Gandhi worship rolls on. Tibetans have their Lama, we’ve got our own magical macaca.
(thanks, Shireen and chickpea)
From the video:
on Friday, April 11th, 2008, 3:17 am in History, Music, Photographs, Theater › 
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“Hindu weddings really are like German opera, interminable and baffling”
Interminable, perhaps; but baffling? C’mon - use the bean…
From the NYT:
10 lbs makes all the difference. ^__^
(Also: I need to look a bit more closely at the production photos, but — despite the fact that the opera tells the story of Gandhi’s trip to South Africa — I’m not seeing any desi or Black actors. No, wait… there’s one, eight pictures down.)
The shlokas sure are if you don’t speak Sanskrit.
One of the puppeteers quoted in the story is desi.
what did you call me punk!
;)
“Gandhi” via Cirque de Soleil & Jim Henson’s Creature Shop
Trend spot: Every Hindu wedding I have attended in the past few years - including my own- now has the pandit explaining the shlokas in Hindi /English for the benefit of this Sanskrit- challenged generation
None of us are willing to swear undying allegiance without knowing what we are promising !
But was it as fascinating as that other use of the Gita without subtitles?
My ‘brick just went monolith.