SEPTEMBER 2005

Tender for Artist Liaison

Wexford County Council, in partnership with Carlow, Kilkenny, Wicklow and Waterford County Councils and the Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon, invite tenders from interested parties who have experience as an artist, arts practitioner, arts researcher or arts consultant, to undertake the research and pre-development stage of the formation of a South East Professional Development Forum for artists of all disciplines. This contract will require the Artist Liaison to work with the Arts Officers in each participating county in compiling a definite, achievable and realistic strategy as to how the Professional Development Forum will be realised.

Requirements

The Artist Liaison will have:

Ø     A third level (and ideally a post-graduate) qualification in any art form, desirable but not essential;  

Ø      At least five years experience in the practice of any art form;

Ø      A background as an arts practitioner and /or an arts manager;

Ø      A demonstrated commitment to continuing professional development through his/her own practice;

Ø      A developed knowledge and understanding of the aesthetic and artistic environments of the arts both nationally and internationally.

Tenders should include:

Ø      An up to date C.V.;

Ø      Statement of Interest;

Ø      Detailed submission outlining interpretation of and approaches to the implementation of the brief;

Ø      Detailed budget breakdown.

The deadline for receipt of tenders is 5.00 p.m., Thursday, September 29^th. COMPLETED TENDERS ARE TO BE RETURNED TO THE COUNTY SECRETARY’S OFFICE, WEXFORD COUNTY COUNCIL, COUNTY HALL, WEXFORD, WITH ENVELOPE CLEARLY MAKED TENDER FOR ARTIST LIAISON. The successful tenderer will be awarded a Contract for Services by Wexford County Council and will be required to furnish the Local Authority with a current Tax Clearance Certificate. As tenders may be shortlisted on the basis of information supplied, please ensure that information given is sufficiently comprehensive. Details of all relevant information relating to experience, qualifications, response to the brief etc. must be supplied. Failure to include this information may result in tenders not being shortlisted. Please supply FIVE COPIES of your completed tender. Incomplete and/or late tenders will not be accepted. Tenderers may be invited to attend for interview. Wexford County Council or any of the named local authorities are not responsible for travel costs incurred by the tenderer in attending for interview. For a copy of the detailed brief, please contact: The Arts Department, Wexford County Council, County Hall, Wexford. P: 053. 76500, ext. 6369 / 6441 F: 053. 43532 E: arts@wexfordcoco.ie W: www.wexford.ie

This initiative is funded and supported by Carlow, Kilkenny, Waterford, Wexford and Wicklow County Councils in partnership with the Arts Council/ An Chomhairle Ealaíon.

fILM:OLIVER TWIST BY ROMAN POLANSKI


New 'Oliver Twist' rejects old stereotype
By MJGross,New York Times, Aug 24

Toward the end of Roman Polanski's "Oliver Twist," set for release in late September, Oliver pays a visit to the imprisoned villain Fagin. He comes not to offer a righteous gesture of forgiveness, as in the Dickens novel, but simply to thank him. "You were kind to me," the boy says.  

 This departure is a tribute to a character who - as reinvented by Polanski and his screenwriter, Ronald Harwood, and played by Ben Kingsley - delivers the movie's central moral lesson. "You know what I consider the greatest sin in the world, my dear?" Fagin says at a key moment. "Ingratitude."  



 And with such change comes a redemption that has been almost 170 years in the making.  Born in 1837, Dickens's Fagin was larded with ethnic stereotypes from his first appearance as "a very old, shriveled Jew, whose villainous-looking and repulsive face was obscured by a quantity of matted red hair." The author also described him as a figure of fun who protects and cares for Oliver, although this "merry old gentleman" (a traditional name for Satan) finally proves to be a Judas, conspiring to corrupt the orphan.    Through more than 20 movie and television versions, not to mention a stage musical, Fagin usually remained a bit less than human. Alec Guinness, in David Lean's 1948 version, spoke in a droning lisp and appeared with hooded eyes and an enormous prosthetic hook nose. The look was modeled on George Cruikshank's illustrations for the novel's first edition, but it also resembled anti-Semitic caricatures in Der Stürmer, the weekly newspaper that had been published by Julius Streicher in Nazi Germany.    At a theater in Berlin the audience was so offended by Fagin's characterization that it rioted; the protests ended only when the theater manager promised to withdraw the film. In the United States, objections by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith and the New York Board of Rabbis prevented the film's release until 1951, after seven minutes of profile shots and other offending scenes were cut.

   In 1960, for the London stage premiere of Lionel Bart's musical "Oliver!," the actor Ron Moody drew milder but similar criticism.  His Fagin had a stereotypical nasal inflection and chanted songs in the style of Jewish folk music, mannerisms that were toned down or dropped in Carol Reed's 1968 film version. Instead, he played with gay stereotypes, mincing his way through "Pick a Pocket or Two" and twirling a frilly pink parasol in "I'd Do Anything."  

 If Polanski and company have finally put such cartoons to rest, it was more by instinct than conscious choice. "We've lived long enough to know that certain things should be done for certain reasons. Without analyzing it. Which would be embarrassing, you know?" said Polanski, who is 72, in a recent telephone interview.    "There is no completely bad man," he added. "Fagin, with all his villainy, is still giving the children some kind of home, you know. What was happening to these kids in the street was just unbearable."    The current Fagin first took shape on Polanski's sketch pad, the director explained. He drew Fagin's face, costume, and makeup; he also collected tape recordings of Jewish cockney for Kingsley to study.    The actor, who did not recall seeing the sketches, said of the tapes: "He may have passed them on to an assistant, but I never listened to them. I grow from the inside out. I said to Roman, 'I met this man, I met him when I was Oliver's age."'    Kingsley's model for Fagin was the proprietor of a junk shop in Manchester in a neighborhood called the Shambles on a street called Withey Grove. "I used to stare up at this man who had teeth like a horse, a very, very grimy face, and he wore an old coat, on top of an old coat, on top of an old coat, on top of heaven knows what, and it was tied 'round the waist with rope."    Kingsley recalled that when his little brother asked the shopkeeper for a Penny Black, one of philately's rarest treasures, the man softly crowed, in a voice that sounded like Fagin's: "Ohhhh, yer askin' for the moooon! Yer askin' for the moon!"    Other visual inspirations had been acquired when Kingsley was in Krakow, Poland, for the filming of "Schindler's List." There he purchased a stack of sepia photographs of Jews taken in the late 1800s and early 1900s, which he gave to the makeup and costume designers on "Oliver Twist." He also gave them 19th-century engravings of Edmund Kean in the role of Shylock in Shakespeare's "Merchant of Venice," a performance that Kingsley called "the first naturalistic and non-anti-Semitic Shylock ever onstage."

   And he created a personal history for the character, inspired by what he called Fagin's "warped but empathetic stance with Oliver," the parentless waif whom he both protects and uses.    In creating this back story, Kingsley also made a connection to Polanski, whose parents were deported from Krakow's Jewish ghetto to Nazi concentration camps when he was a boy. "Fagin was brought up by his grandparents, who did not speak a word of English, who brought him to London as a child, and he had to fend for himself," he posited.  "Fagin had many near-death experiences, as Roman did in the ghettos when they were occupied. Roman nearly died many times as a child. There is that familiarity."    

Harwood also drew a parallel to Polanski's life, albeit one different from Kingsley's.    "My own theory is that Roman thinks of himself as Oliver Twist," Harwood said. "Oliver comes into this world, is abandoned. That's Roman, abandoned not by the agency of his parents, but by the historical world he came into - the tidal wave that was moving against him - and he's swept along. And he escapes the ghetto and goes to these people and they look after him, and gets into a film school.  "These various adventures. His life is picaresque."  

 Polanski explained his interest in "Oliver Twist" more simply.  His wife, the actress Emmanuelle Seigner, "knowing that I was looking for something that my kids could somehow identify with, said, 'Why don't you do that 'Oliver,' since you like it so much?"'  

 Softening the edges around Fagin wasn't the only change worked into the current version by Polanski and Harwood, previous collaborators on "The Pianist." They deliberately stripped the story of its Dickensian element of coincidence, Polanski said, "to make it acceptable to today's audience."    After shooting the film last year, Polanski and Harwood watched Lean's version of "Oliver Twist" together. Harwood found Guinness's Jewish stereotypes "obnoxious and grotesque."    Polanski called the film "a very poor adaptation." He added: "Showing Fagin the way David Lean did doesn't make any sense, as a total caricature of the villain."  Kingsley said that he has never seen "Oliver!" and has not seen Lean's version since childhood. He said that his portrayal of Fagin was in no way a response to the Guinness interpretation, and he said he was unaware of the controversy that surrounded his predecessor's portrayal of Fagin.    However, he said: "I think we have to destroy the stereotypes and replace them with archetypes. As an actor, my struggle is to put archetypes on the screen in the mythological sense. My struggle with Fagin was to present the Collapsed Father."    Asked to describe what he meant by Collapsed Father, Kingsley protested, "I can't."    He elaborated: "I'm not going to tell you what I'm doing, what I'm trying to do, what I want you to feel, how I judge him. Here is a portrait. Here is a portrait of a Jew. Make of it what you will."

Berlin : A palatial mountain of protest art
By Geeta Dayal,New York Times Aug.27


www.halfcupofian.com/ photogalleryberlin.html

Days before the end of a mammoth protest exhibition, government officials on Wednesday unveiled the results of a feasibility study to raze the crumbling old East German Parliament building and make way for a replica of a Prussian castle that would house a five-star hotel and big museum collection.  The German culture minister, Christina Weiss, said the government hoped to start construction by 2007 on the new building, which the study says could cost $650 million to $950 million.

 In recent months, proponents have sought to cast the proposed castle, an imitation of one that once stood on the site on the famed Unter den Linden, as an architectural and cultural counterpart to the Louvre in Paris.  "Here is one of the world's most famous historic ensembles in the center of Berlin, with the university and the opera house and the cathedral," Wilhelm von Boddien, head of the group lobbying to rebuild the old castle, said in an interview.  "The Palace of the Republic is disturbing the ensemble," he said of the old building, a boxy, orange-hued 1972 structure that stands out amid the gray and grandiose neo-Classical architecture lining the boulevard. But a very vocal group begs to differ.

Arguing that the building should be preserved as a reminder of postwar history, about 160 artists and architects from around the world banded together this month to create a mountain inside the Palace of the Republic.  A fantastical construction of fiberglass and steel, rising 44 meters, or 144 feet, above the floor, the mountain ("Der Berg") overflows with paintings, theater pieces, video installations, comedy routines, architectural models and sculptures.  The mountain idea was chosen as a conceptual statement - a way of anchoring the building to make it a seemingly immovable object - by Benjamin Foerster-Baldenius, 37, an organizer who describes himself as a "performing architect."  "It will never be a castle," he said. "There will be no king, no queen." The purpose of the mountain, he said, is to feed off the building and to "suck up the symbolism."  The artists and architects say they see value in the beleaguered Palace of the Republic, a shell of its former self after being gutted for asbestos removal in the 1990s. For them, its golden-mirrored facade - tarnished, pockmarked with cracks and adorned with graffiti - survives as a literally distorted reflection of the dreams and hollow promises of the postwar Communist regime.  Many argue that knocking it down to build a costly castle replica would be an unseemly way of dismissing the recent past.

 Demolition is planned for the end of the year. "Der Berg" was erected in a mere eight weeks, at an estimated total cost of $550,000.  Of this, said the dramatist Amelie Deuflhard, another organizer, the project received $305,000 in arts funds from the German government, a bit of a paradox, considering that the project is, after all, a statement against government actions.  But the artists got started without official permission.  "We got the permission three days before the opening," Deuflhard said.  Visitors to Der Berg are invited to choose one of three paths to scale the mountain - the way of the philosopher, the pilgrim or the mountaineer. "They're three groups of people who have a good reason to go up the mountain," Foerster-Baldenius explained.  Underneath the mountain are large letters, written in delicate script but cast in concrete. They read "Ceci n'est pas une montagne" (This is not a mountain) - a twist on Magritte's Surrealist work "Ceci n'est pas une pipe." Faint traces of an audio collage permeate the air: the original Palace architect, Manfred Prasser, explaining how the space was built, tunes from the opening of the Palace in 1972, East German dance music and audio quotations from the time the building was closed for asbestos.

 The mountain is to be dismantled over the weekend. Hundreds of visitors are filing in each day - older Germans who remember being in the building in the 1970s, teenagers, tourists.  "Whenever people come in, they bring ideas, memories - ideology sometimes," Deuflhard said.  Some of the biggest fans are young people who never experienced the Parliament before it became a ruin.  "They don't have memories of this place filled with lamps and sofas," Foerster-Baldenius said. "It's just a cool ghetto space. You can imagine skateboarding in here, having all kinds of music events. It tells you, 'Spray my walls, paint something on my floor."'  

Lars Ramberg, whose recent art project "Palast des Zweifels" (Palace of Doubt) placed the word "ZWEIFEL" in gigantic neon letters on the top of the Palace of the Republic, also praised the building's interior. "I'm an artist and also a building engineer, and I was stunned by how well it was built from the inside," Ramberg said.  For everyone involved, it is clear that this is a war of symbols, a journey to the heart of the modern German identity. What makes it tricky is that the Palace of the Republic isn't just a symbol of Communism. "The fact is that the building has been abandoned longer than it has been in function," Ramberg said. "So the history of the building is not only the G.D.R.," he added, referring to the old regime's initials. "The history of the building is more of a ruin, and the identity of a ruin." He and others argue that Berlin would be better off if it could just be Berlin, with its past mistakes there for everyone to see.  "Why would Berlin want to be a fake Paris?" Ramberg said, referring to the remarks by the castle project's coordinator. "Paris would never want to be a fake Berlin."  He added: "People go to Berlin to see traces of Western history. All of it."   Below is a photo of the Berlin Wall:www.halfcupofian.com/ photogalleryberlin.html

The Mountain in Bethlehem:


and the wall: