Dante Today

Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture

Yellow House, Dante: The Motion Picture

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Dante Motion Picture

Dante: The Motion Picture will be a cinematic effort by production company Yellow House to accurately represent The Divine Comedy‘s story and settings.

“One small production company taking on the challenge of creating a piece of cinema magic, based on the epic poem, The Divine Comedy.

“You’ve seen the cartoons and video game adaption tie-ins, but none of the films based on Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy quite cut it for an accurate portrayal of the events, locations and characters that readers have grown to love over the centuries. Fans of the material have been begging for Hollywood’s take on the classic Italian poem since the dawn of cinema, however, time and time again they have been left empty handed. [. . .]

“This is a live-action, all out ‘in your face’, portrayal of Dante’s journey. A journey fueled by his love for Beatrice while being led through the depths of hell by the seemingly all-knowing Virgil.”    —Dante: The Motion Picture’s Kickstarter

 

To donate to the project, visit their Kickstarter page by December 14, 2014.

Learn more at www.dantemotionpicture.com.

SAWTOOTH Dancers’ Ombra

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Dance company SAWTOOTH performs a Dante-inspired piece, Ombra, at Dixon Place in Chelsea, NY, on July 24, 2014.

SAWTOOTH Dancers“Inspired by Dante’s Paradiso and Plato’s Cave, Ombra is a multimedia dance performance embedded within a dance party. Drawing in part from a hypnotic, Butoh-inspired physicality, the dance performance emerges as episodic dreamscapes within a clubbing experience and a live cabaret. Sound artist Michael Feld orchestrates an eclectic sound score that moves between live percussion, electronic sound art, and 90s dance hits.

“Ombra asserts that liberation is created, not revealed. With humor, Ombra (Italian for ‘shadow’) is a piece that hopes to offer a re-evaluation of the dark, and it seeks to relocate the site of true human ascendance within the shadows and the shadows we make.”    —Dixon Place

To read about SAWTOOTH, click here.

To read about Dixon Place, click here.

Raffaella Silvestri, “A Ray of Literary Hope on Italian TV”

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“Some 10 percent of Italian households did not own a single book. According to the 2013 Survey of Adult Skills by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, nearly 70 percent of the country of Dante and di Lampedusa is unable to ‘understand and respond appropriately to dense or lengthy texts.'”

—Raffaella Silvestri, “A Ray of Literary Hope on Italian TV,” The New York Times, April 21, 2014

Zachary Woolfe, “A Circle of Composers, Intimate and Epic”

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“There is an operatic quality coursing through the work of the Second Empire sculptor Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (1827-75), the subject of a powerful exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, through May 26, that inspired a concert of French vocal music at the museum on Saturday evening.

“Look at Carpeaux’s best-known masterpiece, the wrenching ‘Ugolino and his Sons’ based on Dante: Here are both epic scope and intimate detail (those clenched feet!), the combination that 19th-century opera specialized in. It’s no surprise, given the adroitness of his balance between exuberance and restraint, that he was asked to design a relief for the exterior of Charles Garnier’s opera house in Paris. The result, a swirling mass of figures called ‘La Danse,’ fairly explodes off the facade.”    –Zachary Woolfe, “A Circle of Composers, Intimate and Epic,” The New York Times, April 29, 2014

Rod Dreher, “The Ultimate Self-Help Book”

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ultimateselfhelp-wall-street-journal-image-of-dante“Everybody knows that The Divine Comedy is one of the greatest literary works of all time. What everybody does not know is that it is also the most astonishing self-help book ever written. [ . . . ]

“The practical applications of Dante’s wisdom cannot be separated from the pleasure of reading his verse, and this accounts for much of the life-changing power of the Comedy. For Dante, beauty provides signposts on the seeker’s road to truth. The wandering Florentine’s experiences with beauty, especially that of the angelic Beatrice, taught him that our loves lead us to heaven or to hell, depending on whether we are able to satisfy them within the divine order.

“This is why The Divine Comedy is an icon, not an idol: Its beauty belongs to heaven. But it may also be taken into the hearts and minds of those woebegone wayfarers who read it as a guidebook and hold it high as a lantern, sent across the centuries from one lost soul to another, illuminating the way out of the dark wood that, sooner or later, ensnares us all.”

—Rod Dreher, “The Ultimate Self-Help Book: Dante’s Divine Comedy“, Wall Street Journal, April 18, 2014

Contributed by Allen Wong (Bowdoin ’14)

 

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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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