Theater and the imagination

Director/designer Julie Taymor talks about her boundary-shattering theater work -- such as turning The Lion King into an astonishing live musical. The key? Always respect, and rely on, the audience\u27s imagination. Working in musicals, Shakespeare, film and opera, Julie Taymor is a wildly imaginative and provocative director and designer. She is perhaps best known for having translated the film The Lion King to Broadway, a still-running show for which she also designed costumes, masks and puppets, wrote music and lyrics -- and won two Tony Awards. (She is the first woman to win a Tony for directing a musical.) She\u27s also received MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships, as well as two Obies, an Emmy and an Oscar. Her recent stage work has focused on opera, with a production of Mozart\u27s The Magic Flute in New York in 2005, and Grendel, which she co-wrote, in Los Angeles and New York in 2006. Meanwhile, she has developed a fascinating career in the movies. Her most recent film is 2007\u27s Across the Universe, a romp through the music of the Beatles. Add this to 1999\u27s Titus, a visually remarkable adaptation of Shakespeare\u27s Titus Andronicus, and the glorious Frida, a 2002 film about Frida Kahlo. Taymor is now working on a Broadway musical in collaboration with Bono based on Marvel Studios\u27 Spider-Man

The performance of disappearance : Mike Parr's Amerika

Edward Scheer considers the aesthetics of disappearance within Australian performance artist Mike Parr's most recent series of actions, Amerika, which involve extreme physical demands even as they posit the body as subject simultaneously to its own presence and absence