After weeks of 24/7 building, making animations and rehearsals, it is finally ready. Tonight, is the premiere of "The Nutcracker & The Mouse King" at the R.I.P.A. theater.
The Nutcracker
is a classical ballet in two acts. It is based on E.T.A. Hoffmann's 1816 fairy
tale The Nutcracker and the Mouse King. It tells the story of a little girl who
goes to the Land of Sweets on Christmas Eve. Ivan Vsevolozhsky and Marius
Petipa adapted Hoffmann's story for the ballet. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky wrote
the music. Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov designed the dances. The Nutcracker was
first performed at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, Russia, on 18
December 1892. It was a modest success. Some people liked it, others did not.
Because of its reception, the ballet was rarely seen in later years.
About fifty
years later, Walt Disney used some of the Nutcracker music in his 1940 animated
movie Fantasia. People liked the movie and started to take an interest in the
ballet. Interest grew when George Balanchine's The Nutcracker was televised in
the late 1950s. The ballet has been performed in many different places since
then. It is loved by many people. Before the first performance, Tchaikovsky
took some numbers from the ballet to form the Nutcracker Suite. This work was a
great success on the concert stage, and is still played today.
Dance of the
Sugar Plum Fairy
Celesta
The
"Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy" is one of the most famous numbers in
The Nutcracker. It was written for the celesta. This instrument was new at the
time the dance was written. It looks like a small piano, but it sounds like
bells. Tchaikovsky discovered the celesta in Paris in 1891 while making a
journey to the United States. His publisher purchased one and promised to keep
the purchase a secret. Tchaikovsky did not want Rimsky-Korsakov or Glazunov to
"get wind of it and ... use it for unusual effects before me." Petipa
wanted the Sugar Plum Fairy's music to sound like drops of water splashing in a
fountain. Tchaikovsky thought the celesta was the instrument to do this. The
original steps for the dance are unknown. Antonietta Dell'Era was the first to
dance the part of the Sugar Plum Fairy. The character has very little
dancing to do so Dell'Era put a gavotte by Alphonse Czibulka into the ballet.
She then had something more to do.
2001: A Space
Odyssey is a science-fiction narrative, produced in 1968 as both a novel,
written by Arthur C. Clarke (16 December
1917 – 19 March 2008), and a film, directed by Stanley Kubrick. It is a
part of Clarke's Space Odyssey series. Both the novel and the film are partially
based on Clarke's short story "The Sentinel", written in 1948 as an
entry in a BBC short story competition, and "Encounter in the Dawn",
published in 1953 in the magazine Amazing Stories.
Clarke was
originally going to write the screenplay for the film, but this proved to be
more tedious than he had anticipated. Instead, Kubrick and Clarke decided it
would be best to write a prose treatment first and then adapt it for the film
and novel upon its completion.
Clarke and
Kubrick jointly developed the screenplay and treatment, which were loosely
based on The Sentinel and incorporated elements from various other Clarke
stories. Clarke wrote the novel adaptation independently. Although the film has
become famous due to its groundbreaking visual effects and ambiguous, abstract
nature, the film and book were intended to complement each other.
Film
The film was
written by Clarke and Kubrick and featured specialist artwork by Roy Carnon.
The film is notable for its scientific realism, pioneering special effects, and
provocatively ambiguous imagery and sound in place of traditional narrative
techniques.
Despite
receiving mixed reviews upon release, 2001: A Space Odyssey is today thought by
some critics to be one of the greatest films ever made and is widely regarded
as one of the best science fiction films of all time. It was nominated for four
Academy Awards, and received one for visual effects. It also won the Kansas
City Film Critics Circle Best Director and Best Film awards of 1968. In 1991,
2001: A Space Odyssey was deemed culturally significant by the United States
Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film
Registry.
Thus Spoke
Zarathustra: A Book for All and None (German: Also sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch
für Alle und Keinen, also translated as Thus Spake Zarathustra) is a
philosophical novel by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, composed in four
parts between 1883 and 1885 and published between 1883 and 1891. Much of the
work deals with ideas such as the "eternal recurrence of the same",
the parable on the "death of God", and the "prophecy" of
the Ãœbermensch, which were first introduced in The Gay Science.
The book
chronicles the fictitious travels and speeches of Zarathustra. Zarathustra's
namesake was the founder of Zoroastrianism, usually known in English as
Zoroaster (Avestan: Zaraϑuštra). Nietzsche is clearly portraying a
"new" or "different" Zarathustra, one who turns traditional
morality on its head. He goes on to characterize "what the name of
Zarathustra means in my mouth, the mouth of the first immoralist:"
Friedrich
Nietzsche
Friedrich
Wilhelm Nietzsche 15 October 1844 – 25 August 1900) was a German philosopher,
cultural critic, composer, poet, philologist, and Latin and Greek scholar whose
work has exerted a profound influence on Western philosophy and modern
intellectual history.
He began his
career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. He became the
youngest ever to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of
Basel in 1869 at the age of 24. He resigned in 1879 due to health problems that
plagued him most of his life, and he completed much of his core writing in the
following decade. In 1889, at age 44, he suffered a collapse and a complete
loss of his mental faculties. He lived his remaining years in the care of his
mother until her death in 1897, and then with his sister Elisabeth
Förster-Nietzsche, and died in 1900.
Also sprach
Zarathustra (Strauss)
Also sprach
Zarathustra, Opus 30 (Thus Spoke Zarathustra or Thus Spake Zarathustra) is a
tone poem by Richard Strauss, composed in 1896 and inspired by Friedrich
Nietzsche's philosophical novel of the same name. The composer conducted its
first performance on 27 November 1896 in Frankfurt. A typical performance lasts
half an hour.
The initial
fanfare – titled "Sunrise" in the composer's program notes – became
particularly well-known after its use in Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A
Space Odyssey.
The piece is
divided into nine sections played with only three definite pauses. Strauss
named the sections after selected chapters of the book:
Einleitung,
oder Sonnenaufgang (Introduction, or Sunrise)
Von den
Hinterweltlern (Of Those in Backwaters)
Von der
großen Sehnsucht (Of the Great Longing)
Von den
Freuden und Leidenschaften (Of Joys and Passions)
2001: A Space
Odyssey is a science-fiction narrative, produced in 1968 as both a novel,
written by Arthur C. Clarke (16 December
1917 – 19 March 2008), and a film, directed by Stanley Kubrick. It is a
part of Clarke's Space Odyssey series. Both the novel and the film are partially
based on Clarke's short story "The Sentinel", written in 1948 as an
entry in a BBC short story competition, and "Encounter in the Dawn",
published in 1953 in the magazine Amazing Stories.
Clarke was
originally going to write the screenplay for the film, but this proved to be
more tedious than he had anticipated. Instead, Kubrick and Clarke decided it
would be best to write a prose treatment first and then adapt it for the film
and novel upon its completion.
Thus Spoke
Zarathustra: A Book for All and None (German: Also sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch
für Alle und Keinen, also translated as Thus Spake Zarathustra) is a
philosophical novel by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, composed in four
parts between 1883 and 1885 and published between 1883 and 1891. Much of the
work deals with ideas such as the "eternal recurrence of the same",
the parable on the "death of God", and the "prophecy" of
the Ãœbermensch, which were first introduced in The Gay Science.
Friedrich
Wilhelm Nietzsche 15 October 1844 – 25 August 1900) was a German philosopher,
cultural critic, composer, poet, philologist, and Latin and Greek scholar whose
work has exerted a profound influence on Western philosophy and modern
intellectual history. 
