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Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture

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Ndary Lo, The Day After (2012)

April 21, 2022 By Sephora Affa, FSU '24

star-shaped-configuration-of-people-with-arms-spread-out-black-on-white-background

“I see the world we are living in as both Hell and Purgatory. Our only hope in this life of ours, all that we have left is to try our best to be admitted to heaven someday. The Day After is an installation in which, after walking a long way through a dense and dark forest, one reaches that space where everything seems to be suspended, where one can feel this particular tension that we experience before embarking on a journey of which we don’t really know the name. The place is organized in a materialized circle and inhabited by iron characters which are ready to take off. The circle, in fact a spiral, symbolizes the energy of human beings, who find themselves in a new configuration, and they feel disoriented and experience a feeling of unreality.”

From The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell Revisited by Contemporary African Artists by Simon Njami.

Read more about Senegalese sculptor Ndary Lô, see Wikipedia.fr.

Categories: Visual Art & Architecture
Tagged with: Africa, Art, Art Books, Circles, Dark Wood, Energy, Heaven, Hell, Installation Art, Iron, Journeys, Metal, Purgatory, Sculptures, Senegal

Inferno, Romeo Castellucci (2008)

November 21, 2021 By Sephora Affa, FSU '24

white-sea-of-cloth-descends-upon-the-audience-performance-experiment

[. . .] “Romeo Castellucci attempts to ‘hurl down The Divine Comedy on the earth of a stage’. He offers the spectator, in three stages and at three venues of the Festival, a crossing, the experience of a Divine Comedy.

“Inferno is a monument of pain. The artist must pay. In a dark wood in which he is immediately plunged, he doubts, he fears, he suffers. But what sin is the artist guilty of? If he is thus lost, it is because he does not know the answer to this question. Alone on the large stage, or on the contrary, walled in by the crowd and confronted with the world’s hubbub, the man that Romeo Castellucci puts on stage fully suffers, bewildered from this experience of loss of self. Everything here aggresses him, the violence of the images, the fall of his own body into matter, the animals and spectres. The visual dynamic of this show possesses the consistency of this stupor, sometimes this dread, that seizes the man when he is reduced to his paltriness, defenceless faced with the elements that overwhelm him. But this fragility is a resource, however, because it is the condition of a paradoxical gentleness. Romeo Castellucci shows each spectator that at the bottom of his own fears there is a secret space, marked by melancholy, in which he hangs on to life, to ‘the incredible nostalgia of his own life.'” [. . .]    —Festival D’Avignon, 2008

Watch segments of the show here.

Relatedly, see our post on Romeo Castellucci’s earlier 2002 commendation here.

This theatrical piece will be discussed by scholar Sara Fontana in her contribution to the forthcoming volume Dante Alive.

Categories: Performing Arts
Tagged with: 2008, Adaptations, Animals, Architecture, Costumes, Dark Wood, Dogs, Festivals, France, Journeys, Live Performances, Paris, Performance Art, Suffering, Theatre, Translations

Hexperos, “Midway Upon the Journey of Our Life” (2020)

November 14, 2021 By Sephora Affa, FSU '24

hexperos-midway-upon-the-journey-of-our-life-album-cover

Hexperos’ 2020 release, “Midway Upon the Journey of Our Life” draws inspiration from Canto I of the Inferno.

“‘Midway upon the journey of our life, we could found ourselves within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost.’ Never there was a sentence more apt to describe the disturbance we all feel at some point of our lives, when we feel lost, empty and we don’t know if the road that we have chosen, the journey of life undertaken, is actually the right one for us.

“The songs are stories of life, of sharing as well as in the Divine Comedy. As a matter of fact, who is in pain, often makes new encounters, shares their stories, through sharing and listening to the experiences of others we grow, we find a light in the darkness.” [. . .]    — Alessandra Santovito, Hexperos

Listen to the song here.

Learn more about Hexperos on their website, here.

Album art by Nicolás Menay

Categories: Music
Tagged with: 2020, Album Art, Albums, Dark Wood, Emotions, Illustrations, Italy, Journeys, Music, Musical Instruments, Nel Mezzo del Cammin, Selva oscura, Songs, Suffering, Voice

The Sky Over Kibera (2019 film)

November 5, 2021 By Sephora Affa, FSU '24

the-sky-over-kibera-foto-di-andrea-signori-2019-film

“THE SKY OVER KIBERA is an art film: it tells us about the ‘bringing to life’ of the Divine Comedy in the immense slum of Nairobi, Kibera, where the director has worked with 150 children and adolescents, reinventing Dante’s masterpiece in English and Swahili. And he does so with his poetic and visionary style, interweaving other images with the filming of the play, sequences shot specifically in the slum to carry out the alchemical operation of transforming theatre into cinema. Three teenagers from Nairobi offer face and voice to Dante, Virgil, and Beatrice: they are the guides that lead the viewer into the labyrinth of Kibera, where the ‘dark forest’ in which the poet is lost is more than just a metaphor: in Swahili, Kibera means ‘forest.’ Around them a chorus swarming with bodies recites the tumult of being both beasts and damned, thieves and murderers, devils and corrupt politicians and poets who indicate the ways of salvation: between songs and acting, frenetic races and wild dances, the 150 protagonists give life to a fresco full of moving poetry, further confirmation of the universality of Dante’s masterpiece.” [. . .]    —Teatro Delle Albe

View the trailer here.

Image credit Andrea Signori

Contributed by Silvia Valisa (Florida State University)

Categories: Performing Arts, Places
Tagged with: 2019, Beatrice, Dark Wood, Divine Comedy, Films, Kenya, Love that Moves the Sun and Other Stars, Movies, Nairobi, Theater, Virgil

Zone Blanche Netflix Series (2017)

October 31, 2021 By Harrison Betz, FSU '25

zone-blanche-netflix-series-posterZone Blanche (“Black Spot” in English) is a French-Belgian series directed by Matthieu Missoffe. Two seasons are currently available on Netflix, with future seasons expected.

“The entire first season of Black Spot contains so many Dante references that any aficionado of Inferno can spot them: the deathlike forest impenetrable by sunlight; the suicide victims suspended from the trees, horribly disfigured by attacking birds; a teenage girl who cuts off her own fingers to escape a hellish coming-of-age ritual; a descent into a treacherous network of caverns to locate a missing person, assumed dead; encounters with beings who may be either alive or dead; a legendary monster called the Wendigo; a reservoir of waste guaranteed to kill what little life remains in the dying village. The careful viewer will spot yet more parallels to Dante, some of which are very subtle.

“With a vision as true as it is dark, Missoffe’s Black Spot not only recasts the evils of Dante’s Florence, but of our entire Western world.”    –Contributor Jane Wineland

Contributed by Jane Wineland (University of Arkansas Ph.D. ’26)

 

Categories: Digital Media, Performing Arts
Tagged with: 2017, Crime Thrillers, Dark Wood, France, French, Horror, Inferno, Mystery, Netflix, Suicide, Suspense, Television, Thrillers

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How to Cite

Coggeshall, Elizabeth, and Arielle Saiber, eds. Dante Today: Citings and Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture. Website. Access date.

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