Dante Today

Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture

Emio Greco and Pieter C. Scholten, “Popopera” (2009)

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“After presenting their highly acclaimed HELL, based on Dante’s Inferno, Emio Greco | PC has completed [purgatorio] POPOPERA which will have its NYC premiere at The Joyce Theater. The company takes its inspiration from Dante’s literary depiction of a geographical place and feeling of transition that provides the opening for inner transformation. Greco and Scholten have said, ‘whereas in HELL we let our dancers wander round the same circles each time, in [purgatorio] POPOPERA they break out of them. The will, the need to live and especially the hope for the future are the essential motives. In [purgatorio] POPOPERA we try to show the audience other images than it expects of those overly familiar themes that cling to the concept of purgatory (catharsis, purification through suffering, …) in order to approach these themes from new angles.’ The company invites audiences to witness the transformation and synergies between dancers’ bodies and the lustrous black electric guitars they carry in this performance that melds dance with rock concert. The piece features original music composed by Bang-on-a-Can founder Michael Gordon, performed live by the dancers and soprano Michaela Riener.” [. . .]    —Off Broadway, September 16, 2009

The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision

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“…Inside the building that tranquillity gives way to a comic-book version of Dante’s Divine Comedy, with strict divisions between various worlds. Visitors enter via an internal bridge that crosses over an underground atrium. From here, a vast hall conceived on the scale of a piazza leads to a cafeteria overlooking the calm surface of a reflecting pool. On one side of the hall looms the ziggurat form of the museum; on the other, a wall of glass-enclosed offices. Here the spectral glow of the interior of the cast-glass skin evokes the stained-glass windows of a medieval cathedral.”    –Nicolai Ouroussoff, The New York Times, May 26, 2007

Contributed by Darren Fishell (Bowdoin, ’09)

“The Fall of the Damned” Lampshade by Luc Merx

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the-fall-of-the-damned-lampshade-by-luc-merx-of-gadget-international“Dutch architect Luc Merx’s lampshade is an algorithmic mass of writhing nudes that recalls the classical motif of the fall of the damned. He imagines the lamp hanging above a dining table, the shock of the frozen, terrified bodies disturbing diners with age-old questions of guilt and morality, issues usually kept behind closed doors.” [. . .]    –Costas Voyatzis, kostasvoyatzis, April 19, 2007

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Coggeshall, Elizabeth, and Arielle Saiber, eds. Dante Today: Citings and Sightings of Dante’s Works in Contemporary Culture. Website. Access date.

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