05/15: On Stage

My sister Nora celebrates her birthday today and celebrates it with a full day of rehearsals for stage productions in the DC area. She is an actress. She is very good, too. Here is a dramatic performance (improvised) from Tlemcen (northwest Algeria) in 2009 with Ami Tayeb. The amphitheater is part of the Roman ruins there (since altered), back when Tlemcen was the Roman colony Pomaria.

I am too biased a critic to comment on her acting (but she’s great; go see her!) but a lot of the theater sets that she has had to act in, on under and around have been some of the most interesting installations I’ve seen. Theaters aren’t too keen on photography so I do not have any images to back that up, but I will make a very tangential reference to a renaissance theater in Florence, the Teatro Olimpico. The theater, designed by Palladio, has a number of streets pull back from the stage in forced perspective (if you remember the old Willy Wonka movie think of the hallway that shrank down on one end). From Wikipedia: