Showing posts in the “Interviews” category
Zack Smith ·
5 Mar 2010, 6:08 PM ·
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Jodi Picoult (Photo by Gaspar Tringale)
On the phone about her appearance at Meredith College on March 8, Jodi Picoult is friendly, bubbly and frequently laughing. There’s no indication of the misery and tragedy visited upon the characters in her best-selling novels, including My Sister’s Keeper, Handle With Care and her latest, House Rules, which hit bookstores on Tuesday.
Picoult’s novels often involve such horrors as school shootings, execution, infanticide, date rape, sexual abuse, suicide pacts and more. The tales frequently combine courtroom drama with deeply flawed characters that don’t always make it through the story intact. (On the other hand, last year’s film of My Sister’s Keeper angered many fans of the book by cutting the last tragic twist, something Picoult says she was unhappy about.)
Though she’s closer to her characters than anyone else, Picoult has few qualms about what they go through in each book. “I don’t really feel bad about it, though very often I want to slap them. I want to say, ‘God, can’t you see the bigger picture?’” Picoult says with a laugh. “I wish they’d make better decisions, but if they did, I wouldn’t have much of a book.”
House Rules, Picoult’s 17th novel since 1992, deals with a teenager with Asperger syndrome who is accused of murder. The story uses the crime as a window into the teenager’s life and the effect his condition has on his family.
Picoult said that the idea for the story came from discussions with an attorney about how the legal system breaks down when there are problems with communication. “That got me thinking about what would happen if you had some sort of disability that made it difficult to communicate with law enforcement,” says Picoult, who has an autistic cousin.
“There’s always some kind of disconnect when someone who is autistic is brought in before a judge, or the police, or anyone in law enforcement, and I thought that was something people should know about.”
To research House Rules, Picoult not only shadowed CSIs, but met with nearly 50 children with Asperger’s and their parents, combining face-to-face interviews with a detailed survey.
Picoult says the surveys yielded hundreds of pages. “Many of the observations went into the book, because they said it better than I could myself.”
“The thing about a kid with Asperger’s is that while they might have trouble talking to you, if you ask them to write something down, they’re incredibly articulate, because they’re very bright, once you take away that fluster of being in a social situation,” Picoult says. “It’s one reason the Internet has been so important to people with Asperger’s, because in chat rooms, you don’t have to look anyone in the eye.”
Picoult has already completed her next book, a tale of embryo donation and gay rights called Seeing You Home, which will include a CD featuring songs “sung” by the main character (actually an actor-musician, of course). She believes the secret to her writing is the focus on the characters. “I think what attracts a reader is emotional honesty,” Picoult says. “Most readers can tell when a character doesn’t ring true, or the contrary, where the character rings so true that it almost hurts to read that part of the book. I think if you write with emotionally honesty, you can write about almost anything at all and you’ll be able to take an audience with you.”
Jodi Picoult appears at Jones Auditorium at Meredith College at 7:30 p.m. on March 8 to read from and sign copies of House Rules. This is a ticketed event; tickets are available with purchase of House Rules or her other works. For more information, call 528-1588 or visit www.quailridgebooks.com.
Interviews, Reading Aspergers syndrome, House Rules, Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper, Quail Ridge Books & Music
Byron Woods ·
17 Feb 2010, 5:00 PM ·
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STREB Extreme Action’s company name is truth in advertising: a group of seven superbly-trained athletes who appear to propel themselves into harm’s way, repeatedly—against walls and floors, off of trampolines and multi-story trapeze-like platforms, into and out of close encounters with a spinning industrial I-beam as it careens across stage, and much, much more. In this week’s story on the CHAT Festival at UNC-Chapel Hill, I described their edge-of-your-seat maneuvers, set to a pulsing techno soundtrack and accompanied by live and digitized video, as “a highly caffeinated remix of death-defying circus acts, gymnastics, motion-picture stunt work and modern dance.”
Choreographer, inventor, and action architect Elizabeth Streb
I spoke with choreographer, self-styled action architect—and MacArthur Foundation “Genius grant” award winner—Elizabeth Streb by phone on Feb. 6, a snowy afternoon in Philadelphia, between the company’s matinee and evening performances at the Annenberg Center’s Zellerbach Theater.
Carolina Performing Arts presents her company Friday and Saturday night in Memorial Hall. Click here for more information and tickets for the show.
Independent: How would you characterize your interest in technology in terms of the work you’re interested in doing on stage? What does technology enable you to do?
Elizabeth Streb: I would say it’s equal: My interest and passion in technology and hardware – mechanical, electronic, hydraulic, what have you – my love for those types for technology is equal to my love of movement. I see them completely similarly; they’re a congruency to me. For the idea of STREB, I started working with more quotidian objects back in the early 1980s: sticks, wood, hills, ropes and hoops. As I developed, I really started to get more metal and hardware devices involved in what I was doing.
It’s like music. As when someone, way back when, decided the human voice alone wasn’t sufficient to express everything the human might express in terms of pitch, key, melody and harmony, I felt that in a Newtonian universe, on the ground, the body’s biomechanical system, which lends itself to motion, was not, in itself, sufficient. Not to express all that can be expressed in terms of physicality.
So we invent hardware, and collaborate with a lot of different technicians, from MIT’s Media Lab and ASU Electronic Arts department to [trapeze artists and engineers] Noe and Ivan Espana, to create pieces of equipment that we can inhabit and develop new physical spatial and temporal vocabularies.
I don’t recall who defined technology as devices that extend the body’s various capacities. It sounds like one of your main interests involves extending the body’s abilities to do a number of things.
It’s sort of a funny thing. I think the initial, more basic question is, “What is the potential content of action?” Not the body doing movement, or machines working the beautiful way they work and function, or the utilitarian aspects of machines and the body, separately and together. But is there a language, exactly, that we can construct with physicality—whether it’s machine-based, electronically-based or physically-based—that will have its own grammar and syntax? That’s my goal.
I’m not just adding equipment and technology because I like it—although I really do. I do it because I think… [pauses] Okay. Let’s take just one aspect of what it means to move and talk about space. If I’m only 5 feet 7 inches tall, and I go into a theater that happens to be 30 or 40 feet tall, then I’m essentially ignoring the major hunk of that space. And for visual and physical reasons, I think that’s a disappointment to the audience and also sort of a tragedy.
When we have a wheel, an injection device, or cables and harnesses, that gets us up into that location. Otherwise, I feel that that location, that empty space, should not exist.
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Carolina Performing Arts, Dance, Interviews Byron Woods, CHAT Festival, Elizabeth Streb, Interviews, Memorial Hall, modern dance, STREB, UNC
Zack Smith ·
20 Nov 2009, 8:39 AM ·
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Celebrated, protean British writer Anthony Horowitz visits Quail Ridge Books & Music Sunday, Nov. 22. (Photo by Des Willie)
Anthony Horowitz is considered one of the top television dramatists in the UK, as the mind behind such shows as Foyle’s War, Midsomer Murders, numerous adaptations of Agatha Christie’s Inspector Poirot tales and, most recently, Collision, currently airing on PBS’ Masterpiece Contemporary (the miniseries concludes at 9 p.m. on Nov. 22; Part One encores at 2 a.m. on Nov. 21, for those with insomnia or TiVo).
But his biggest success hasn’t come from his reality-based dramas but a series of children’s books about a teen spy: Alex Rider, a teen James Bond-style secret agent whose latest adventure, Crocodile Tears, was just published in the States on Nov. 17. Horowitz will appear at Quail Ridge Books & Music in Raleigh on Nov. 22 for a signing-line ticket event at 2 p.m.
The series, which started with 2000’s Stormbreaker, pits 14-year-old Rider against a variety of spies, terrorists and evil billionaires; it’ll end after 10 books when the character turns 15. “I’ve aged 10 years to my character’s one,” says Horowitz in a call from England. “It really doesn’t seem fair.”
Horowitz had written numerous children’s books before the medium hit the big time with J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books. “It was a backwater, it was something you didn’t really do, but I was drawn to it because I loved story,” he recalls. “Children’s books have always had a sort of purity I’ve always liked-you can literally cut to the chase and get on with the action.”
He’s written more than 50 books for both older and younger readers, along with his TV work, the feature film The Gathering, and the play Mindgame, which was directed by gonzo filmmaker Ken Russell in an Off-Broadway production last year (Horowitz will only describe working with Russell as “memorable”).
How does he stay so prolific? “The discipline in my life is being able to stop writing and get out and doing other things and having a life,” Horowitz says. “I’m passionate about what I do, and when you’re by yourself like I am, seven hours is a long time, and you can get a lot done.”
He approves of how American television has adopted the more complex, long-form plotting of British TV: “I think in many respects, American television is now leading the world. It’s not hard to see why: American television has come of age. You have directors as good as Steven Soderbergh and Barry Levinson doing these shows, wonderful actors, and huge, cinema-sized budgets, which of course you can’t get over here. American shows like The Wire, Lost and 24 are the shows we’re talking about over in Britain, even more than most British TV shows.”
He admits that Collision owes a debt to Lost in its use of flashbacks, though he might not need to worry about American TV overtaking the UK: The New York Times‘ rave review of Collision said the series “raises an old question: Why are the British so much better at this sort of thing than we are?”
Horowitz says that books give him fewer restrictions than TV: “I can destroy the world, I can visit other worlds, and I don’t have to worry (about budgets). He considers it a “golden age” for children’s literature and looks forward to writing the further adventures of his teen spy: “I find Alex endlessly fascinating. It’s a journey I haven’t tired of, ever.”
Interviews, Reading Alex Rider, Anthony Horowitz, Collision, Crocodile Tears, Ken Russell
Byron Woods ·
22 Oct 2009, 8:11 AM ·
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I spoke with Ariel Dorfman about his play, Picasso’s Closet, for about 45 minutes in his office at the John Hope Franklin Institute at Duke, at midday on Oct. 13, 2009. Nasher Museum of Art will present a staged reading of the play in conjunction with its Picasso and the Allure of Language exhibit, Oct. 29-31, at 7 p.m. Tickets are available at the Duke Box Office website.
Independent: This must be a difficult script to produce.
Ariel Dorfman (Photo by D.L. Anderson)
Ariel Dorfman: This is an experimental play. Let’s say I’ve tried to do, modestly, in theater with time what Picasso does with space—which is to create many perspectives and break down the barriers of identity. Therefore it verges between the popular and the experimental.
As different characters place their viewpoints one after another, there are these interstitial planes of reality coming at each other…
Most biopics, say, tend to be rather linear. Or at least they go back and forth—childhood to adulthood to childhood to adulthood—
—the narrative of ping pong—
—and they’re very predictable in that sense.
I said to myself, “How can I possibly write a play about Picasso as if Picasso’s art had never existed?” It had to be influenced by Picasso; the greatest homage to him is really not the character on stage, but the art with which he’s being portrayed. It’s a post-Picasso play, whereas most plays about Picasso I’ve seen—most plays about artists I’ve seen—tend to act as if the artist had not influenced them at all.
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Interviews, Theater, Visual Art and Artists Add new tag, Ariel Dorfman, Byron Woods, Dorfman, Picasso, Picasso's Closet, Theater, theatre
