Dante Today

Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture

Playwright Margaret Edson

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“MARGARET EDSON is the Harper Lee of playwrights. She has had just one play produced — ‘Wit,’ which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999 and has been revived on Broadway in a Manhattan Theater Club production starring Cynthia Nixon — and having said what she had to say, she doesn’t feel any need to try playwriting again. She occupies herself these days with projects like learning the piano and setting the multiplication table to opera choruses. She reads Dante in Italian, a canto or so every day, and once made a scale model of Paradise with the Sun-Maid raisin lady holding a basket of souls.” [. . .]    –Charles McGrath, The New York Times, February 16, 2012

Merce Cunningham Dance Company

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“…The music critic Charles Rosen, observing that difficulty in the arts has characterized most great music and literature for centuries (Dante and Beethoven as well as Schoenberg and Stravinsky), wrote, in 1998, ‘A work that 10 people love passionately is more important than one that 10,000 do not mind hearing.’ Cunningham’s career exemplified that. And among the first 10 people to follow his work passionately were the artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.”  [. . .]    –Alastair Macaulay, The New York Times, December 22, 2011

Artist Maruizio Cattelan’s Final Project

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“The time has come: sooner or later it arrives for everyone. It’s not a painful moment and not even traumatic, it’s the natural evolution of a path of spectacular appearances and equally as many escapes, attempts to hiding away and revelations: Maurizio Cattelan is bowing out with one last exhibition. The retrospective All (from November 4th to January 22nd) at the Guggenheim Museum of New York (that Nancy Spector, head curator of the museum, has called “one last hanging”) is his most radical and visionary project. The reverse cone of Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture thus transforms into a seventeenth-century transposition of a sort of Dante’s Inferno, crowded by thousands of sinners: the exhibition combines all of Cattelan’s works, suspended from the museum’s skylight in a new, total and extreme project that transforms visitors into lost souls and the tour of the exhibition into a descent into the underworld. It’s also true that the great conflicts between right and wrong, Paradise and Hell have been in the heart of Maurizio’s career.”    –Paola Manfrin, L’Uomo Vogue, November 2011

See also: L’Uomo Vogue’s interview with Maurizo Cattelan.

Learn more about Cattelan’s exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum.

Contributed by Patrick Molloy

Dante Project, Wesleyan University – Prison Outreach

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dante-project-wesleyan-university-prison-outreach“. . .Dr. Jenkins, who has taught in Wesleyan’s theater department for 11 years, introduced prison outreach into the curriculum in 2007, bringing students to the York Correctional Institution, a women’s prison in Niantic, to work with inmates on literary classics. In 2009 and 2010, they began concentrating on ‘Inferno’; this year, because of construction at York, the class took place at the men’s facility in Niantic, the J.B. Gates Correctional Institution. . .
The semester culminated with performances. The Gates inmates presented their work to their peers, and at Wesleyan, the students performed the writings of the inmates for the college community. In the classroom at Sing Sing, the inmates performed for the Wesleyan students, and then the students presented the Gates men’s words, for which they received a standing ovation from the inmates. All of the performances ended with the same line, the last of the poem: ‘E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.’ “And then we emerged to look again at the stars.” [. . .]    –Susan Hodara, The New York Times, December 24, 2010

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How to Cite

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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