"The Offending Classic" Series in The Massachusetts Review

[Helene]

I posted a topic on Deborah Jowitt's essay in The Massachusetts Review"'s "The Offending Classic" Series, but I think the series itself deserves a thread for the breadth of topics and opinions. 

The latest is by Mark Franko, who addresses, among other things, why some classical ballets have been put in the "classics" category, and options to perform.  His intro is key, where he gives an example from visual art.  Also, he's links to other important material.

https://www.massreview.org/node/9394

 

I'm having trouble finding a link to a series page, but links to other essays to date follow Franko's main essays.

[Kathleen O'Connell]

Thanks for starting this thread, Helene. I've started working my way through the essays in order, although I'm not sure they need to be read that way.

Here are the links to all of the articles in "The Offending Classic" series that have been posted thus far:

Tanya Jayani Fernando, "Introduction: The Classic and the Offending Classic"
Deborah Jowitt, "Sex and Death"
Juan Ignacio Vallejos, "On the Intolerable in Dance"
Joellen A. Meglin, "Against Orthodoxies"
Nicole Duffy Robertson, "Classic Sin: Ballet, Sex, and Dancing Outside the Canon"
Mark Franko, "The Offending Classic"

[Helene]

What's most frustrating to me in the art example is that there is every opportunity to couch that piece with written/signed context, just as the Museum of Natural History could remove the Roosevelt status as is, and house it as an exhibit of its own to address the historical context and damage those attitudes have caused and the impact of its presence outside the museum, just as an example.  The only option I can see for live theater would be to use supertitles or simultaneous translation machines to have an opt in running commentary, like directors' cuts/critical commentary version on film DVD extras.

But I wonder if the visceral, visual response would negate any written or taught context, before or even in realtime.

I just finished the audiobook of A Woman of No Importance, and there were vivid descriptions of the most grusome torture, always worse for women, that the Nazis perpetrated on suspected members of the Resistance during the French occupation.  My imagination was tempered by my coping mechanisms.  That would not have been the case had it been a film or live reinactment.