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Sacrificed children

This morning I was awoken by the sound of prayer.

A tune curling through my window: God is greatest, God is greatest, God is greatest.

It's Eid al-Adha. The Eid of sacrifice. Honouring when Ibrahim/Abraham was willing to kill his son, and for his devotion, his son was saved.

Of course, when Ismail (or Isaac) is replaced by a ram on the altar, I immediately start thinking of another sacrificed child. Replaced by a deer, in some versions. In others, not.

Not a test of faith who was always destined to be saved. A punishment, a dare, or a wretched bargain: lose the girl or lose the whole army.

And Artemis took pity on the girl - she had no fault in all this. She had a further life. But either way, her father did the damning deed. He was not only willing, but he went through with it.

There's no winning in war.

And the clever thing The Burnt City did was to link up all the lost children of the war: not just killed, but sacrificed. Not only Iphigenia and Polyxena, parallels already drawn in the text between these two slaughtered princesses. Also Polydorus: in this version, not only killed for man's greed, but also sacrificed at the request of a god. A dark god, outside the pantheon, worshipped in secret.

Hidden away in a labyrinth.

"Boys are harder to find," I once heard Polymestor say. All the boys had been sent away already. All the boys were already off being killed. (Sacrificed to Ares.)

All except one prince, still protected by his mother.

He, too, must feed the unquenchable thirst for blood, one way or another.

The labyrinth is the city and the city is war. It repeats over and over and over again, and were it not for the war, nobody would know its name.

And all sacrificed children are the same child. When Polydorus takes me into his refuge under the stairs, he tells me a story, but the story belongs to Mycenae. The tale of the lion cub is from Aeschylus' Agamemnon. But he is not just Polydorus, he is every child that has been lost or thrown away for what was deemed a greater cause. When Iphigenia takes me into her hut, she tells not the story from her own text, but instead a story of a world that's all merciless and fake.

Every child lost to war is a loss to the whole world. Nobody comes out victorious.

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The three primary uses of masks in film are entertainment, disguise and protection. From ancient Greek plays through Japanese Noh theater, masks are deeply intertwined in the universal language of entertainment and ritual, and its power as a transformative tool is so ritualized and timeworn that it is the unofficial logo for an entire artform. Since theater was an influence on early motion pictures (consider the framing and gestural acting of silent film), it figures that masks would be smuggled into movies, and some of the most enduring images from film history are now associated with masks. —Alex Vlahov

V for Vendetta (2005), The Mask (1961), The Mummy Returns (2001), Emerald City s01e06 (2016), Black Orpheus (1959), Judex (1963), The Man in the Iron Mask (1998), Kingdom of Heaven (2005), Eyes Without A face (1960), Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Squid Game s01e07 (2021), Knights of the Zodiac (2023), Onibaba (1964), Scream (1996)

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fuck it sure

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you still owe us something in 2025-26 to celebrate your silver anniversary tho, pd

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rainbow serpent

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My mom is waxing poetic about cheese tonight

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What the immersive world needs is the platforms that can distribute news and be the hype train for emerging artists, and the platforms that will provide reviewers who are familiar with the field and can provide an honest critical eye to tell us which shows are worth our time

And, crucially, these two platforms should not be the same people

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16 shows, 23,000 words.

I know a lot of time has passed. Oh well.

The writeup typing project

I wrote up every one of my shows. It became a ritual - to help me process what I'd seen, to help me remember, to fill time in between shows.

I went a lot, but I tried not to take it for granted: I wanted each show to live in my memory and not get lost or blurred together. They inevitably will - my memories will fade and all I'll have left are the notes I've written.

I wrote them all longhand in a series of notebooks. It felt right, for a physical world like this, to put them down in real colourful ink with my own hands. To fade with time, maybe, but not to get accidentally deleted in a hard-drive crash.

But now I do want them digitally. I'm curious about how much I wrote, and I'd like them in a searchable format. And while my writeups are mostly for me (some of them are very personal), I want to revisit them and see if there are a few worth polishing and publishing.

It's a big job. By my reckoning, over 500 A5 pages.

It's enough to keep me busy for a while after it's all over.

Typed so far: 11 shows, 12,000 words.

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Me shooting down my expectations when I start dreaming too hard

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People give us so many clues about who, how, and where they are. When audience members enter the scene, they arrive with potential trailheads: keys for affixing their present emotional states to future ones. Often I forget to harness this skill in the world beyond theater: meet people where they are before embarking on a shared journey. Rather than imposing my roadmap onto an interaction, can I see what’s right in front of me in the face of a fellow being? Can I ask them: where are you now and which colors would you like to paint with today? Through Sleep No More, I found that improvisation is clarity, not chaos. In their work, Punchdrunk frequently draws upon literary sources that interrogate notions of linear time (the cyclical prophecies of Macbeth, the fragmented ordering of Woyzeck) in ways that underscore their shows’ looping structure (most Punchdrunk shows are one hour of theatrical material repeated three times, to give roving audiences more chances to experience scenes). In my shared scenes with audience members, I’d call upon this Punchdrunk philosophy that flouts the conventions of linear time. Inside that hut with a spectator, I felt we could shuffle an emotional deck of cards together and trust that we’d be dealt the right hand eventually, in whatever order we needed.

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Ilana Gilovich-Wave. PhD Dissertation: Bodysnatching in Contemporary Anglophone Drama, 1996-2022

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Harry Styles has a Tom Scott number of 3.

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The indomitable Tori Sparks takes us briefly through the McKittrick compound. Video from 2017 and the Tennis Channel (of course).

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Sleep No More’s program-building video I missed earlier - Arkadia & Co. give a glimpse into their inspiration and process for…

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I (masculine) am parched with thirst and am dying; but grant me to drink from the ever-flowing spring. On the right is a white cypress. ‘Who are you? Where are you from?’ I am a son of Earth and starry sky. But my race is heavenly.

Translation of a Greek inscription from the second half of the 4th century B.C.

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Wild at Heart (1990) dir. David Lynch