Dante Restaurant, Boston, MA
Contributed by Krista Gladman (Bowdoin, ’11)
Louis Andriessen, “La Commedia” (2008)
“On Thursday, April 15, 2010 at 8:00 p.m., Andriessen’s extraordinary new opera La Commedia (based on Dante’s Divine Comedy) makes its New York premiere in Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage in a concert performance by the Asko Schoenberg ensemble…
According to the composer, ‘I see Dante’s La Commedia as one of the highest points ever reached in literature and philosophy. It combines complexity, intellectualism, horror, beauty, multi-layering, allusions, historical and mythological references, and, above all, irony. I selected sequences of material in the same order as in Dante’s book. So the first two scenes take us from the City of Dis down through Inferno to the deepest regions of hell where we meet Lucifer in the third part. This is where Adam’s Fall is described. We then pass upward through the lighter-hearted Garden of Earthly Delights until we reach Paradise in the final section, Eternal Light.’
La Commedia was premiered in June 2008 at the Holland Festival by many of the same musicians performing in the Carnegie Hall presentation.” [. . .] —Broadway World, March 1, 2010
See also, Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, April 1, 2010
Contributed by Patrick Molloy
Fort Lewis College Theater, “Dante’s Inferno” (2008)
“Written by Dante Alighieri.
Adapted for Stage by Desiree Henderson & Kurt Lancaster.
Directed by Kathryn Moller.
Winter 2008: Throughout history, poets and philosophers have struggled to define true love. In the Phaedrus, Socrates explains that love is not simply the act of being caught passionately by a beautiful body or face, but by the eternal form of beauty itself. In Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet, Romeo describes love as, “too rough, too rude, too boisterous, and it pricks like thorn.” And even today, pop stars, authors and actors struggle to define and relate this elusive emotion in a tangible way. Dante Alighieri embarked on a similar quest. In this contemporary stage adaptation of Dante’s Inferno, Dante journeys into the pits of hell searching for the beauty of love which touched him for only an instant. Each circle of hell reveals tragic, and sometimes violent exchanges between people who are damned to repeat their sins again and again.” —Fort Lewis Theatre
Contributed by Katherine Avery
Elisabeth Tonnard, “In This Dark Wood” (2008)
“This book is a modern gothic. It pairs images of people walking alone in nighttime city streets with 90 different English translations I collected of the first lines of Dante’s Inferno. The images, showing a crowd of solitary figures, are selected from the same archive as used for Two of Us (the extraordinary Joseph Selle collection at the Visual Studies Workshop which contains over a million negatives from a company of street photographers working in San Francisco from the 40’s to the 70’s).
The book is set up in a repetitious way, to stress a sense of similarity, endlessness and interchangeability. The images are re-expressions of each other, and so are the texts.” —Elisabeth Tonnard
Contributed by Guy Raffa (University of Texas – Austin)
Walt McGough, Dante Dies!! And Then Things Get Weird (2008)
“Seven hundred years ago, Dante Alighieri began writing one of the world’s most compelling and imaginative texts. This June, we respectfully screw it all up.
“Sideshow Theatre proudly presents the world premiere of Dante Dies!! (and then things get weird), a new play by Walt McGough oh-so-loosely based on Mr. Alighieri’s Inferno. Partway along the journey of his life, Dante finds himself mourning a lost love, feeling morose and, for some reason, in Hell. Trying to find his way home, he encounters incredible suffering, infernal bureaucracy, some sins of his own, and the aggressive attention of a competitive hot dog eater. Each step downward brings him closer to a personal reckoning with his own story, and maybe a chance to find an answer or two. Enacting the story single-handedly, versatile performer Matt Fletcher brings over fifteen different characters to life as he tracks Dante’s progress through the nine circles of Hell in this unexpected and epic adventure.” — Sideshow Theatre
Contributed by Patrick Molloy
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