RE: RAT THE SUPERBOWL?

[Cara Rosson <cgr9456@garnet.acns.fsu.edu>]

>Lucie, I really wish you had actually seen the halftime show. It was
>terrifying and wonderful and banal all at once. It was beautifully designed
>and horribly staged. It had this sense of Epic Ritual and spirital Renewal,
>with Phil Collins, perhaps the least exciting performer of the past half
>century, in a polar fleece pull over in the the center of it all. It went
>beyond bad and into the realm of...alien-ness. But it was obviously
>influenced by Dance Theater and Contemporary Opera. Thats why its worth
>discussion. It was theater. It was bad, expensive and pointless but it was
>very theatrical and everyone saw it.

I have to ask this question: was it "horribly staged" or horribly
televised??  It was one thing to watch people in puffy plastic bags twitch
their shoulders from @ ten feet away, but what was the "big picture".
Fifty people in glowing plastic seen from 100 or so feet up and away could
be intense, but how are we to know.  There is something very "big, cheap"
about the half time show, but was our televised view the ideal view, the
view indended by whatever director/directors/coordinators orchestrated the
glorious thing?

If anyone was actually there in the Georgia Dome, please fess up and tell
me what it looked like from the stands!  There were precious few shots from
the beer blimp of what I think the show was intended to look like.

When Robert Wilson stages, do you think he sees the close up on Nixon's
face?  Or that huge monolith from fifty feet away in Black Rider?  The big
spectacle, I think, is supposed to be the point.  So I feel cheated when
they provide any sort of close up on anything (except for the signed
ballet, someone else noticed and cried Peggy).

Maybe Wilson or Sellars should have directed it.  At least they are usually
consistent in their vision and might have demanded all long shots, zero
close ups.

Cara Rosson, forced by marriage into football fanship