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Joe diGenova – Brazen Plot to Frame Trump

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« on: February 03, 2018, 03:06:22 pm »


from The New York Times....

Watch the Met Opera Stage a Sea of Blood

A production of Wagner's metaphysical “Parsifal”, which returns
on February 5th, floods the stage with 1,250 gallons of blood.


Photographs by DAMON WINTER | Text by MICHAEL COOPER | Friday, February 02, 2018



WHEN it comes to blood, Quentin Tarantino has nothing on the Metropolitan Opera. Stabbings, shootings, torture and beheadings are routine at the Met. But the bloodiest show of them all may be François Girard's production of Wagner's “Parsifal, which returns on February 5th and floods the theater's vast stage with some 1,250 gallons of the stuff.

The stage blood — made from a recipe that includes tap water, glycerin, and red and blue dye, mixed to taste — is created in Brooklyn by a company called J&M Special Effects, which heats and trucks it to the Met in 250-gallon rectangular tanks before each performance.




Since opera singers do not care for frozen feet, the blood is kept warm in the tanks, which are swaddled in industrial-grade heating blankets until the last possible moment. At eight minutes before the curtain went up at a recent rehearsal, Terry Ganley, a stage manager, gave the cue.

“Fill 'er up,” she told a team of stagehands, many of whom wore rubber boots. The blood flowed.




The Met isn't trying to create a slasher opera. “Parsifal” is Wagner's metaphysical meditation on the knights of the Holy Grail, the goblet supposedly used at the Last Supper and which later caught Jesus's blood on the cross. Their leader, Amfortas, suffers from a mysterious wound that will not heal. In Mr. Girard's poetic 2013 production, blood is a central visual element.



“The overall staging didn't glue until we started playing with blood, because that is ultimately the voltage of the piece,” said Mr. Girard, who has included a river of blood; a bleeding bed; and, here, in Act II, a shallow pool of blood that covers the stage. “There was a lot of resistance: You can imagine the nightmare. But they've mastered it now.”



The Met tries to keep the blood warm for the singers and dancers who must stand in it — for a typically Wagnerian hour-long act — by placing heating pads under the red vinyl that lines the pool onstage. But the blood begins cooling as soon as it pours out. Philip J. Volpe, the Met's master electrician, monitors its temperature with an infrared thermometer.



Keeping things neat and safe with over 1,000 gallons of fake blood sloshing around is not easy. An overflow trough sits behind the pool. Rows of chairs with towels and sandals are placed for the performers coming off the bloody stage, and absorbent mats and brown paper are taped along the path to their dressing rooms. Members of the stage crew are posted beneath the stage to make sure no blood seeps into the Met's underground storage areas, where sets for operas like “L'Elisir d’Amore” and “Pagliacci” are currently stored.



A unique kind of stage-prop dialysis is used to keep the blood hygienic. Following each performance, the tanks of blood are trucked back to J&M, which filters out any newly added particles of foam and dust. The blood is then purified with ultraviolet light to kill bacteria.

“We can't use chlorine or anything like that because it would turn the water pink,” said David Feheley, the Met's technical director. “Which is, you know, less dramatic.”




The blood creates striking tableaus — drenching the dress Evelyn Herlitzius wears as she sings the role of Kundry, a wild woman in the thrall of an evil sorcerer; and helping the audience visualize the spiritual quest taken by Parsifal (the tenor Klaus Florian Vogt). And it fits squarely into Mr. Girard's conception of the opera.

“We're talking about life, Christ, Amfortas's wound, sexuality,  all of those things,” he said. “Blood became the connector.”




When the rehearsal ended, stagehands used brooms to push the blood into a small well at the back of the pool, where sump pumps sent it coursing back into the tanks.

“Where is the AB negative?” joked Stephen A. Diaz, the master carpenter.

The dancers and choristers filed offstage dripping, their feet stained slightly red. The remedy for the stains, it turns out, is much simpler than the one for Amfortas's wound, which requires the touch of a holy spear. Many of the performers have found that the red can be wiped away with Barbasol shaving cream.




The New York Metropolitan Opera

__________________________________________________________________________

• A reflection in a puddle on an airport tarmac or in a mirror-like teleprompter. Silhouetted shadows on a chain-link fence. A cascade of empty metal bleachers. Not the stuff of ordinary political coverage. But Damon Winter had never before covered a presidential campaign. So maybe he didn't know how many rules he was breaking as he followed Senator Barack Obama. But that approach worked, and he received the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for feature photography. “My editors encouraged me to go beyond the straightforward photo,” Mr. Winter said. “I had the luxury of not just getting the photographic equivalent of the 30-second sound bite, but to look beyond the obvious, in a more subtle way.” “With Obama,” he said, “much of the story was about the excitement around him wherever he went. Over the course of the campaign, I wanted to create a complete photo story, so that the reader could see what I saw.” Mr. Winter joined The New York Times in 2007 after three years as a staff photographer at the Los Angeles Times. In New York, he has captured the reconstruction of an old railroad viaduct in Working on the High Line and found a way, with “Double Exposures”, to get to a truth about urban juxtaposition that is more evocative than any single image could be. A Dilemma in the Arctic took him far from frenetic cities and campaigns, allowing his imaginative eye to record the rich human tapestry in what seems at first to be a barren wasteland. Born in New York, Mr. Winter grew up in St. Thomas in the United States Virgin Islands. He earned a bachelor's degree in environmental science from Columbia University and worked for The Dallas Morning News, Newsweek, Magnum Photos, The Ventura County Star and The Indianapolis Star. His photo essay on sexual abuse victims in western Alaska was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for feature photography. Mr. Winter lives in Brooklyn.

• Michael Cooper is a reporter who covers classical music and dance for The New York Times. Since taking the beat he has written about opera stars, some of whom happen to be sheep; regime change at the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic; a strike and boardroom drama at Carnegie Hall; the bankruptcy and reinvention of the New York City Opera; and the very real possibility that orchestras may have been playing one of the most famous pieces of American music wrong for 70 years. Previously he was a national correspondent, taking a lead role in covering the Boston marathon bombings, truth-squadding the candidates and writing about policy during the 2012 presidential election, and covering urban affairs and the effect of the downturn on state and local governments. During the 2008 presidential election he was a campaign reporter, logging many hours on buses covering the Rudolph W. Giuliani and John McCain campaigns. On the national desk he also reported on infrastructure and on President Obama's stimulus law. Mr. Cooper's reporting career has taken him from the shack, the dingy press room at One Police Plaza in New York, to Room 9, the cramped reporter's quarters at City Hall, to the grand, arched press room at the Capitol in Albany — which does have desks, telephones and computers in addition to its poker table, pool table and two pianos. He was the Albany bureau chief during the last years of the George E. Pataki era and for the first few months of the prelapsarian Eliot Spitzer administration. He has also covered the 2000 presidential campaign and its overtime rounds in Florida, and reported on plane crashes, hurricanes, an oil spill and other assorted mayhem. Mr. Cooper, a lapsed musician, joined The New York Times as a night copy boy at the end of his freshman year in college, and became a reporter on the Metropolitan staff in 1995 after spending a couple of years as a stringer in the paper's Boston bureau. His work has been recognized by the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, the Society of Silurians, the New York Press Club and the Legislative Correspondents Association. Born and raised in New York City, Mr. Cooper graduated from Stuyvesant High School and Columbia College.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/02/arts/music/met-opera-parsifal-blood-wagner.html
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