Lauren's Manifesto

We all have opinions, and different ways of expressing them. My father, for instance, prefers to preface his views with the statement "The thing about it is this..." and then continue on his tirade. My mother on the other hand, prefers to express her outlooks through facial expressions. No one can raise one eyebrow better than Mama Morgan.

Me, I lie somewhere in between. Writing has always been my primary mode of self-expression. As a student journalist, I've won awards for my column collections and editorials, but I feel that taking this class with Valerie Boyd has easily been the most beneficial class I have taken at the University of Georgia.

For the past four months, I've had the privilege of studying under a critically-acclaimed author, a woman who has made a pretty decent living at articulating her opinion of art. She has taught me how to construct reviews of the arts that are not only entertaining but also enlightening. She's also taught me to appreciate the role of the critic in mass media.

Now, looking back at my travels in Critical Writing, I believe the role the critic plays in our society is something similar to a godparent. God, or some other power, has entrusted this entity to guide her reader through the arts, hoping to educate this soul in pursuit of some higher form of existence through food, performance, music or books.

I can only hope to be a good god parent one day.

- Lauren Morgan

Allison's Manifesto

As a voracious consumer of books, movies and music, I depend on critics, from Manohla Dargis of The New York Times to my friend Jen, to guide my cultural appetite. Life is short, and the choice of what to consume grows as I write this. Without relevant, informed, entertaining criticism, we will all be hopelessly lost in the Information Age. But the voice of a trusted, opinionated critic will always rise above the din and guide us into unexplored territory.

As a fledgling reviewer whose shaky voice steadies by the minute, I promise always to remember that there is an artist on the other end of every review, that snarky pans are easy to write, and that good reviews stretch far beyond mere plot summary. Furthermore, I will refrain from slamming pop culture for the sheer elitist joy of it — ahem, The New Yorker — or praising inane indie projects that befuddle me.

Like any critic, all I have to offer you, lonely but no less valued reader, is my opinion. And I promise to do so with honesty, humor and a truckload of personal baggage. Happy reading.

-Allison Loudermilk

Anna's Manifesto

I once read in an Ernest Hemingway biography that he said he believed critics are like soldiers who walk into the streets after a battle and shoot the wounded. I disagree.

The role of the critic is to be a truthful assessor or works of art. The number of movies, books, CDs, concerts, etc. that are available for public consumption is overwhelming. People rely on critics to provide reasoned, well-researched analyses of the strengths and weaknesses of new works.

While it is true that everyone is a critic to some extent, this does not mean that everyone has the time to write critical reviews. A good review includes background information and well-though-out arguments. The critic has an obligation to do research and become educated about the art form and the history of the specific work they are critiquing.

I mentioned truth earlier and see this as vital to the critic. The critic must be honest about the quality of a work because many consumers base their purchasing decisions on reviews. However, the critic also must be honest in their negative criticism because they owe a fair assessment to the creator.

-Anna Fry

Performance Review: "Giselle"

"Giselle," A ballet at the Fox Theatre, Oct. 26-29, 2006.

Close your eyes and imagine the soft pitter-patter of feet, beautiful leaps and twirls, gentle music and brilliant costumes made to represent a past time. Got it? Well, you are either special or exactly like me. I couldn’t see that whole picture in my mind until I saw it with my own two eyes at “Giselle,” a ballet performed at the Fox Theatre.

I am no ballet connoisseur, but I can say that this performance entranced me from the very beginning.

Now for those of you who are like me and have not one clue what a rone de jamb e or pirouette is, don’t worry. You don’t need to know any of that stuff to feel the emotion and dynamics of this dance.

“Giselle,” an early 19th century story, is based around a triangle of lovers. In Act One, Giselle, the village beauty, falls in love with Albrecht, a disguised prince. Albrecht and Giselle claim their love for each other and their eternal faithfulness until Hilarion, who is also deeply in love with Giselle, discovers Albrecht’s disguise and reveals the Prince’s identity to Giselle. She then, being so overwhelmed and distraught by this claim, loses her mind and dies of a broken heart.

Act One was my favorite. The dances were upbeat and fun. The performers were fully clad in bright colorful dresses and many of the dances included the whole group with spurts of solos intertwined throughout.

However, the most important part was understanding the plot and message they were trying to reveal. I can’t imagine trying to evoke a message with no words, but the director, John McFall, did a wonderful job doing this in the first act.

Soft and hard hand and feet motions helped the dancers express their emotions. The music repeatedly switched from a light and soft melody to a loud thunderous roar allowing the audience to feel the struggle between the lovers and the set was constantly lightened and darkened to reflect the mood of the play.

Act Two was a little more confusing. The set and costumes were nicely done. You could definitely tell you were in a cemetery surrounded by a bunch of angry ghosts, but the story line was harder to follow. I actually had to look it up and see that they were trying to portray the afterlife of Giselle. McFall had more difficulty delivering the story to an audience member like myself in this act.

However, I did find out that the second act was supposed to depict Giselle and other angry women ghosts at the graveyard that were killed right before their wedding day. These ghosts kill all the men that enter the cemetery. Hilarion, the one who exposed the Prince, goes to visit Giselle’s grave and is killed in a dance battle and thrown into a lake by the spirit of an angry ghost.

A little bit later, Albrecht also goes to see Giselle’s grave and is attacked by the angry mob of ghosts as well. He however, passes the dance of death because of Giselle’s deep love for him. As they say their final farewell, Albrecht recognizes Giselle’s true love and is forever touched with the memory of the delicate and beautiful village girl.

Giselle, danced by Naomi-Jane Dixon, Albrecht, danced by John Welker and Hilarion, danced byTamila, gave stellar performances. These characters, along with the rest of the cast, made the show enjoyable, exciting and very emotional for me. This standout cast worked extremely well together, were consistently precise in their dance movements and genuinely looked like they were enjoying themselves.

Every element, whether it was the characters, set, costumes or music, caught my attention. My eyes clung to the performers for the whole hour and a half. So, in my first experience with the ballet I realized one important thing, even though I didn’t know exactly what they were doing, I still found myself really intrigued, amused, and dying for more.

-Reviewed by: Kim Malawy

Two Performance Reviews: "Enough"

"Enough!," A trapeze show at Chase Street Warehouse, Nov. 3-5, 2006.

"Since 1950, we Americans have used up more resources than everyone who ever lived on earth before then."

What does it take to force America to come to terms with its own habits? That is the question asked by Canopy Studio's "Enough!," its program quoted above. Come to think of it, it's not so much that this question is asked directly; it's more imagined.

The real question, as related by Artistic Director and senior dancer Susan Murphy, is "not whether we can afford to fix the problem, but whether we can afford not to."

But as one watched, the imagined question might just have come to mind.

Using trapezes, rope, streams of fabric, and even a box full of four dancers twelve feet off the studio floor, "Enough!" both assaulted and soothed the senses as its performers climbed, twirled, and swung through eleven acts of often exquisite artistic expression.

Murphy introduced the premise after her solo performance "Lost Garden," which evoked a poignant, yet sadly overused feeling of loss as the studio's projector shined an image of an ancient, massive tree being chopped down.

During the performance, Murphy danced across and then laid peacefully upon a large pair of branches hanging from the ceiling in the back of the studio (one wonders how they got the branches).

This is but one example of the many fascinating, dangling props used during the presentation, another of which was a box-frame hung over 12 feet off the studio floor while holding four dancers.

"Packaging," the number that used said device, was by far the most rousing and thought-provoking performance of the evening, and only the fourth at that. As the four ceiling-height performers shifted symmetrically from position to spinning position, one could not help but consider the wonder of the human imagination.

"Enough!" provoked the disturbing, inconvenient sentiment that there's too much population and not enough common sense in regard to the continuation of civilization as we know it. The performance ends up feeling bittersweet, as it has used the beauty and refinement of dance to illustrate a forthcoming doom of life as we have known it.

Unfortunately, it concluded on an unrealistically idealistic note, with all of the dancers (representing the human race) embracing each other after spending an hour convincing the audience that mankind is probably too foolish to change its ways before it's too late. Again, bittersweet.

If only that single word, the title of the show, yelled during the height of the final ensemble number "War," was really enough.

-Reviewed by: Miles Moffit

I took my program as I walked into Canopy’s Chase Street Warehouse studio on the evening of the second night of their newest production, "Enough!," removed my shoes as instructed so as not to scuff up the delicate bamboo surface of the floor-level stage that I was about to sit directly in front of, sat, opened the program, and commenced to wishing I hadn’t. I never even would’ve imagined it possible, but it appeared that I was about to bear witness to the truly audacious: a group of several human beings attempting to tackle the dimensions and ramifications of a complex socio-political issue via flying trapeze.

After this realization, it was immediately difficult to suppress an assumption that this was going to be at best a little pretentious and heavy-handed; at worst, outright suck to the point of comedy. I’d seen several Canopy productions before, and I have to tell you that trapeze is not known for being a particularly political medium. For example, a previous show tackled the general theme of “weather” compellingly and with panache. "Enough!’ s" ambition was considerably loftier: to explore the ecological damage that humans have caused, the physical and emotional consequences, and what might be done about it. On the flying trapeze. I can’t stress that enough. I did my best to suppress skepticism at the ability of people to express ideas about our greatest environmental and cultural strife by hanging upside-down from swings and politely folded my hands in my lap as the lights went down.

Unfortunately for "Enough!," things got off to a rocky start early on as the lights were cued twice before the performers and stagehands were ready for them, exhibiting an amateurism that is atypical of Canopy performances. The subtle hastiness of this small blunder betrayed a roughness that permeated the majority of the show’s 11 performances.

The eight performers in the first piece, for example, were never really able to synchronize their moves, though sometimes they got close enough that it was clear they were aiming to. "Enough!’s" artistic director and Canopy impresario Susan Murphy employed Joanna Haigood, a special choreographer from San Francisco, for the second piece. The result consisted of Murphy slowly climbing around on some actual tree branches that hung by ropes from the ceiling as video footage of forests played on a large screen behind her. Conceptually it was interesting, but visually it was just plain boring. Haigood is not credited in the notes of any of the other pieces. This means that she came to Athens from San Francisco just to help a woman figure out how to walk slowly (and without the actual appearance of choreography) on a tree branch, and it pains me to say that that is a little embarrassing.

Most of the other pieces were crushed similarly under the overambitiousness of the theme. Many of the performances had only a superficial adherence to the theme, such as the duo piece of Lauren Puls and Annette Byrd in which the two rode bicycles onto the stage, got off them, and spent the next five minutes performing individual trapeze moves while a giant video of people riding bicycles played in the background. In fact, the video overpowered the scene visually to the extent that I sometimes forgot there were people on the stage performing, and after enough repetitions of the 20-second clip over the course of several minutes it got more than a little old.

Of course, there were some triumphs. Melissa Roberts, Nicole Mermans, Lindy Pals and Megan Cattau all shined in their group performance contained entirely within the metal outline of a large cube suspended high above the floor. This piece appeared to have no adherence to the theme whatsoever, and was all the better for it. Chris Knightes and Cattau were magnificent in their duo piece performed on a ladder hanging from the ceiling. The crowd went wild for their perfect grace, and they too were unencumbered by the theme.

Most triumphant of all was Lisa Yaconelli’s modern dance performance, which contained no trapeze element whatsoever but the most well-executed adherence to the theme by far. Yaconelli danced around a clothes rack that had a large “Sale” sign in front of it, stopping occasionally to add clothes. All the clothes were the same—dull gray t-shirts—and yet as she added more, her accumulation of them became more frenzied and needy. Eventually she added two large coats and a hat to her attire and became so burdened with material excesses that she could no longer dance. It was a plain, strong message delivered with elegance.

Canopy Studio would do well to apply Yaconelli’s lesson to future theme shows. There is nothing wrong with being ambitious, and the tendency to want to use one’s talents to promote ideas that one feels passionate about is completely understandable. However, ultimately "Enough!" proved it pretentious to suppose that a trapeze performance is going to be an effective communicator of very complex socio-political concepts. With this show, Canopy Studio became so burdened by the weight of an ostentatious ambition that it, too, forgot how to dance.

-Reviewed by: Jace Bartet

Book Review: "The Children's Hospital"

"The Children's Hospital." A novel by Chis Adrian. McSweeney's 2006. $24. 615 pages.

More than at any other point in my life, it seems that people have been fighting and dying over some of the contents of their various major religious texts. This potentially makes using any of these texts as a source for literary inspiration a tricky proposition: will the author be branded evangelical and pushed to the fringe of niche publications? Might he be seen as taking a hard-line position in the currently boiling clash of civilizations? In his leviathan second novel "The Children’s Hospital," Chris Adrian dares to draw from the Bible in this time of highly politicized religion and comes away with a single story of persistence and humanity that triumphs beyond the trappings of self-righteous moralizing and preachiness that could so easily have marred it.

On the Earth of "The Children’s Hospitial," “the end of the world” does not really mean the total end. The apocalypse is one of the first things to happen in the novel, and where some writers might see global catastrophe as a difficult piece of exposition to top, Adrian hardly gives it a glance as it is happening. Within the never-named pediatric hospital that serves as the Ark for the characters, the Second Great Flood of Earth causes rumblings that could just as easily have been described as an earthquake or a blast from an explosion, except that they have the distinct impression that they are being lifted. By forcing his characters to note that the end has come but press on and continue with all of the work that they were doing before, Adrian forces himself to do the same as a writer. At the end of the world, the only thing left appears to be a children’s hospital floating atop seven miles of new ocean: you know that just from reading the back cover, Adrian concedes, so what next?

In his work to answer the thorny question of “what next,” Adrian tells us a kind of long fable, almost a sort of fairy tale, a story-behind-the-story that regards the end of the world exclusively in terms of the life of Dr. Jemma Claflin as the thread to which The End is tied and born. Six-hundred and fifteen pages of this rather whiny, almost unbelievably self-absorbed protagonist should by all rights become grating, but the considerable unpredictability of the plot keeps things moving fast enough that it’s easy to be distracted from whether or not Jemma Claflin is someone you’d ever want to know. In some ways, Jemma is one of the realest and most “normal” protagonists I’ve ever encountered, and this coupled with the sheer volume of things we learn throughout the novel about her rather abnormal life give her a strangely omnipotent humanity. The hospital holds 1,138 other inhabitants, many of whom play nearly as large a part as Jemma and who Adrian lends rich and distinctive voices. The author creates the necessary element of caring about the characters, and thus, the events that transpire among them.

I was 400 pages into the novel before I really noticed that it had taken a hold on me, and that I had some emotional stake in its conclusion. Some events can indeed come across as superfluous, tacked-on affairs that needlessly stretch the novel a couple of hundred pages beyond what seems necessary, though ultimately the author decides what is necessary for his purposes as a storyteller. I cannot deny that the book was easy to read in bursts of 100 or 200 pages because the weight of the plight of the characters—to survive for the sake of it in a new world that all along, they know, may hold no hope for them anyhow—is richly portrayed as the weight of our own lives as inhabitants of this not-yet flooded planet. The prose itself sometimes lack vibrancy, and there are more typos than are really acceptable in a widely-distributed professional publication, but these faults fail to detract significantly from the power of the mysterious, clearly constructed and executed plot.

It is unclear to what extent "The Children’s Hospital" might be a commentary on any of the events or particular components of our contemporary cultural world. With such fallible characters, though, Adrian avoids what would ultimately be the banal mistake of telling us so bluntly how we should live our lives. What is clear is that "The Children’s Hospital" has left me with the feeling that I have seen a rich and fulfilling picture of one unconventional view of the end of all things and beyond, and that through this picture I might come to love everything unpredictable and appreciate everything terrible in life and hold on even tighter to hope where it sometimes seems there is none.

-Reviewed by: Jace Bartet

Book Review: "Es Cuba: Life and Love on an Illegal Island"

"Es Cuba: Life and Love on an Illegal Island." A travel memoir by Lea Aschkenas. Seal Press 2006. $15.95. 342 pages.

Americans, meet Cuba.

If you’re like me, you probably don’t know all that much about the mysterious and often forbidden (American travel to Cuba is limited by the U.S. Treasury Department) Caribbean island just ninety miles south of our own nation’s borders.

That’s where Lea Aschkenas comes in. At the height of the Elián González ordeal, a time when the little Cuban boy’s face was all over American news and rallies in his name filled the streets of Havana, she ventured to the island nation to take a Spanish course and ended up spending nearly ten months there, split between two trips, and falling in love with both a country and a man. Her adventures became the captivating book "Es Cuba: Life and Love on an Illegal Island," allowing all who read it a thorough and enchanting glimpse into an otherwise cryptic culture.

Aschkenas’ book offers everything: depth and insight, plenty of factual information, strong writing, and a personal tale of love and discovery. Not just a book about a country, "Es Cuba" follows Aschkenas as she meets a Cuban man, Alfredo, falls in love with him, and struggles through the complications that arise when you’re involved with somebody from a completely different culture, especially when the two countries in question are the United States and Cuba. Her tale takes place in Havana, where she participates in a Spanish-language program, and elsewhere throughout Cuba as she and Alfredo travel around the island. This story serves as the backbone of her memoir, which is written as a travel narrative or a journal, but Aschkenas doesn’t shirk her responsibilities as a travel writer to make another culture come alive to her readers, blending these notes about her personal life with information about the country and people.

The title of her memoir, "Es Cuba"—“That’s Cuba”—stems from the oft-muttered expression Alfredo uses to shrug off the idiosyncrasies of his country, and there are many. Aschkenas shares them with us, providing fascinating insight into the country’s culture, history, economics, and politics, painting a vivid picture of Cuban life with a series of dancing, interwoven narratives. Seamlessly, she jumps around a bit, going off on tangents before returning to the more chronological story at hand, mentioning this anecdote or that encounter in a stream-of-consciousness-like flow that is actually easy to follow and appreciated in that the extra details enrich her story and our understanding of the culture.

And there’s so much to understand about this country whose character, she finds, is the “odd, seemingly contradictory mix of melancholy and optimism.” Drawing from her own observations and experiences, as well as from tales and accounts shared with her by locals—Alfredo is an especially rich source of insight into the life of a Cuban—Aschkenas tells of the lack of violence and machismo in Cuba, the free education and health care, the interest in learning. She talks about the odd economic system using both dollars (for tourists and wealthy Cubans) and pesos (for the average, poor resident), the fact that the country is continuously low on supplies because of the U.S. embargo, and the candidness and criticalness with which Cubans speak of their government. Then there’s the salsa dancing, the endless nightlife, and the frustration among locals over the fact that tourists have more rights than they do.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, just a sampling of the wealth of information she shares about a country that’s very foreign to most Americans. Even just a few pages in, I found myself reading with my eyes wide, amazed by all that I was learning about the fascinating culture that I’d never known much about, and the story is kept lively and entertaining by Aschkenas’ clear, easy-to-read writing style, the ongoing narrative of her relationship with Alfredo, and the fact that she doesn’t simply compile a list of observations. She wants to know why things are the way they are, and seeks to find answers as well as to carefully draw her own conclusions.

The result is a memorable, informative, captivating book about romance blossoming under unlikely circumstances and the resilience and optimism of the Cuban spirit. No longer will Cuba be a mystery after reading Aschkenas’ tale, a land known to Americans for its leader and the fleeing citizens scooped from the waters between Cuba and Florida. With clear writing and a knack for drawing out the essence of a people, Aschkenas introduces us to this new culture that she herself fell in love with.

-Reviewed by: Stephanie Crozier