Andrew Sellon, President of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America, has partnered with Oxford-based Storypods Audiobooks to provide free audio downloads of the two poems that won Storypod’s 2010 Nonsense competition. Storypods launched the contest as a tribute to Lewis Carroll, and received many entertaining submisssions. To listen to the winners and download the audio files, click the image on the right. Enjoy!
Issue 48, Fall 2010, of Bitch Magazine, “The Make-Believe Issue,” includes “Alice in Adaptation-Land—How wanderer Alice became warrior Alice, and why.”
In the well-written article, Kristina Aikens makes the interesting point that the Carroll’s curious Alice is more of a feminist icon than Burton’s Alice that puts on armor, kills the Jabberwock, and seeks to colonize China.
Eight classical tales evoked by a double page with ingenious mechanism, in a magnificent book which associates technical exploit and artistic talent. Find the characters of the most famous tales: Alice, Pinocchio, Sleeping Beauty , Blue Beard, Peter Pan, The Little Red Riding Hood, Mrs butterfly , Poucette staged by Benjamin Lacombe and in volume by José Pons. At the end of the book, Jean Perrot’s point of view, an expert of the tales and the youth image, will come to light the work.
Many Lewis Carroll lovers have been awaiting Marilyn Manson’s promised Dodgson movie with varying degrees of dread. The latest news, according to contactmusic.com, is that the studio has shelved the project:
Viewers were left shocked after disturbing clips from The Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll hit the internet, with the 22 year old [Lily Cole] appearing as Alice [Liddell] in a story about the Alice In Wonderland author.
Studio bosses have since decided to shut down the entire project, which was directed by goth rocker Marilyn Manson and also stars Tilda Swinton.
A source tells Britain’s Mail on Sunday, “The trailer caused such a backlash that a decision was made to close down the project. It’s unlikely it will ever see the light of day.”
According to the publication, the film is now officially on ‘indefinite production hold’.
Of course, sometimes studio suppression can increase interest (remember Terry Gilliam’s Brazil?), especially with a famous director and juicy controversy – but, at least for the time being…. phew?
A writer named Steve A Wiggins (“part-time Academic” & “failed priest” according to his bio) wonders on his blog Sects & Violence in the Ancient Worldabout screenwriter Linda Woolverton’s choice in naming the caterpillar the biblical name Absalom:
Supposing this to be nothing more than the reassignment of a fated biblical name associated with failed attempts at kingship, I simply let the reference pass. Until the chrysalis scene. There he was, Absalom hanging from a plant, just like David’s son swayed from a tree according to 2 Samuel. This mysterious scene in the battle of Ephraim Forest had captured my attention before when I wrote an article on Absalom, eventually published in the Journal of Northwest Semitic Languages.
For all you Carrollian blog-happy readers, we’ve added a new page to the LCSNA site that brings together blog links listed in various other places of the site. This way, if you’re a fan of following blogs (in addition to this one, of course!), you now have one stop shopping. As always, please keep in mind that listing a site doesn’t necessarily mean we endorse its contents; we merely provide the links for your convenience and enjoyment. You can access the new “Carrollian Blogs” page from the Lewis Carroll menu of our site, or by clicking here.
If you know of more Carroll or Alice-themed blogs, please send us the link(s)!
There’s a new theater piece called Alice, premiering tonight at the Theatre of Yugen, 2840 Mariposa Street in San Francisco (running September 9th through 19th), directed and “imagined” by Allison Combs. As a work of “movement theatre,” it’s about 60% interpretive dance and 40% dialogue, easily juggling different genres of theater with different types of music, and varying levels of seriousness & silliness.
Alice, in her traditional blue outfit but played by a leggy adult actor/dancer (Megan Trout), is already exhausted on the stage when the audience is allowed to enter. (“Is that Alice?” asked a young girl behind me, Alice having already silently begun her opening number while an usher noisily hobbled past her to turn off a loud fan & the audience settled in.) This Alice starts out with grown-up anxieties, obsessive-compulsively counting numbers, and reassuring herself repeatedly “okay, okay, okay.” In contrast to the wildness she’s about to encounter, we realize that her troubled state of mind at the beginning is her supposed normalcy.
Then, instead of a white rabbit, she is shaken from her routine by a single playing card falling from the sky. A tribe of five strange savages in rags starts to mess with her by taking her thru the mind-and-body-changing adventures of Wonderland, loosely inspired by the stuff that happens in Carroll’s book. (While Alice was exploring the corridor, before it really gets going, the child behind me declared “This is upsetting because it’s boring.”) Growing, shrinking, falling, mushrooms, being stuck in a house, scary forests, and all manner of psychedelic abstractions are created by the weird tribe with their flexible interlocking limbs, in extremely creative ways. Only using their bodies, a caterpillar sits on a mushroom, and when he sucks on one of their fingers, the whole mushroom inhales & exhales. It’s most fun during the wild dance numbers, with their very cool choreography; it drags a little during the dialog, which like so many Alice in Wonderland adaptations, is always a lot less clever than Carroll’s original. For some reason, their amazing Cheshire Cat, very feline & Kabuki-ish, stuck closer to Carroll’s words, and was consequently much more powerful.
After Alice has gone native, a new square-peg (named Lewis) also finds himself lost in Wonderland, and by this time Alice has already become one of the weird savages. Lewis’s unhappy anal-retention makes us realize what Wonderland is to these people: everything ‘other’ in American society. Their Wonderland is part hippie, part hipster, part Burning Man, part mushroom trip, totally gay, multi-cultural and sexy. It has games with no rules, self-examination, community, humor, and of course lots of dancing and singing. It’s also dirty. Uptight Lewis rejects it outright, and even Alice eventually wakes up. But she’s definitely dirtier than before her trip to Wonderland (“Is she dripping sweat?” asked the child behind me.)
Atmos Theatre, a volunteer-run theater company in San Francisco, has adapted Alice in Wonderland for its ninth season of “Theatre in the Woods.” It’s been happening every Saturday & Sunday in August and through September 19th in Woodside, California (a few cities south of San Francisco.) “‘Alice in Wonderland’ is performed as part of a guided hike through our redwood-filled forest property.” It sounds beautiful but, unfortunately, the entire run is completely sold out!
The original adaptation is by Brian Markley and directed by Amy Clare Tasker.
Theatre in the Woods features two stages and a variety of performance spots along our trails. Our Main Stage, nestled with a beautiful backdrop of redwood trees behind it, features natural benches made out of redwood planks and stumps. Our Amphitheatre Stage at Harrington Creek features natural amphitheatre seating carved out of the hillside. We provide blankets on the earth benches for a perfect view of the forest stage opposite the creek. And the acoustics are fantastic!
We’re tempted to chalk this one up to a bad case of Engrish mistranslation from our friends across the Pacific. It’s easy to see how “Wonderland” could have been misread as “Waterland,” and the “Mad Hatter” may have been literally interpreted as “Angry Hat.”
In any case, how we are supposed to believe that they’re pouring a cup of tea underwater? How the hell are you going to drink it? Could they have made a more disturbing Alice in Wonderland cover?
I think all LCSNA members will know the answer to that last question.
UPDATE! Matt Crandall had a post on his Disney Alice blog last year featuring Alice in Waterland, with more pictures, and included a recording:
Andrew Sellon, President of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America, has partnered with Oxford-based Storypods Audiobooks to provide free audio downloads of the two poems that won Storypod’s 2010 Nonsense competition. Storypods launched the contest as a tribute to Lewis Carroll, and received many entertaining submisssions. To listen to the winners and download the audio files, click the image on the right. Enjoy!
Supposing this to be nothing more than the reassignment of a fated biblical name associated with failed attempts at kingship, I simply let the reference pass. Until the chrysalis scene. There he was, Absalom hanging from a plant, just like David’s son swayed from a tree according to 2 Samuel. This mysterious scene in the battle of Ephraim Forest had captured my attention before when I wrote an article on Absalom, eventually published in the Journal of Northwest Semitic Languages.
