Research on Julie Taymor (Homework)

    It was very interesting learning about Julie Taymor and her work in the performing arts. Despite having never heard her name before starting this class, I have heard of some of her projects. The main one is of course the Broadway adaptation of “The Lion King”, but I also remember learning about her film adaption of “Tempest” near the end of our reading of “Othello” for World Literature class last year, and I’ve actually heard of the Spider-Man musical through the Internet as well. It almost makes me feel bad that I have never heard of Taymor before... though in researching her I also found out that she was apparently fired from the Spider-Man musical for making too many last minute changes, then sued the show’s producers only to eventually settle out of court.
    When watching Taymor’s Ted Talk, there were two parts that caught my attention. The first was around the seven minute mark when she said, “I love the apparent truth of theater.” In context, she’s talking about how theater audiences are willing to extend their suspension of disbelief and imagine something grander and more real out of what is presented to them. This idea definitely seems to fit with more of the Stanislavskian approach to theater, which aims to immerse the audience and get them to relate to the characters, rather than the Brechtian approach, which aims to make people focus more on the social message of the play than the actual story and the world it’s set in. Since Stanislavski’s ideology is far more commonly popular in contemporary theater, this is not that surprising.
    The other part that peaked my interest was the anecdote Taymor told around the fifteen minute mark about when she climbed up an active volcano and then had to find her own way down. Aside from being an unusual story in itself, the reason it caught my attention was because I had read the New York Times article from 1992 about Taymor just Becker watching the video, and in it, I had made note of the following passage:
    “Each of her last three works has, in fact, ended in scenes of immolation: a funeral pyre in "The Transposed Heads," a burning that turns the title character in "Juan Darien" back into a jaguar (his original semblance) and a conflagration that destroys the king and court in "Fool's Fire." "Grendel," the forthcoming opera by Goldenthal and Taymor, will begin with a cremation. In each of these instances, fire leads to transformation.”
    With this in mind, I cannot help but wonder if that experience at the volcano had something to do with what seems to be this trademark of Taymor’s work, and whether it is a conscious or subconscious influence.
    There was another small thing that stood out to me in the article: it mentioned that, as a child, Taymor had seen and been heavily inspired by the work of Peter Schumann and the Bread and Puppet Theater, a group that I discovered when doing in-class research on the use of masks in modern-day theater.

Sources:
http://www.nytimes.com/1992/03/22/magazine/the-looking-glass-world-of-julie-taylor.html?pagewanted=all
https://www.biography.com/people/julie-taymor-320722