200 Women by Ruth Hobday

200 Women by Ruth Hobday

Author:Ruth Hobday [Geoff Blackwell and Ruth Hobday]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chronicle Books LLC
Published: 2017-03-17T04:00:00+00:00


‘Resilience’

Julie Taymor

Julie Taymor was born in Boston in Massachusetts, USA. Upon graduation from Oberlin College, she spent four years in Indonesia on a Watson Foundation fellowship and, in 1991, received a MacArthur ‘Genius’ Fellowship. Her theatre credits include the all-time highest-grossing Broadway musical, The Lion King, for which she won two Tony Awards; Grounded, starring Anne Hathaway at the Public Theatre; and M. Butterfly, with Clive Owen. Her operas include Oedipus Rex, with Jessye Norman; and The Magic Flute at the Metropolitan Opera. Her films include Titus, starring Anthony Hopkins; the Academy Award–winning Frida, starring Salma Hayek; Across the Universe; The Tempest, starring Helen Mirren; and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Q. What really matters to you?

I do feel like I was given a gift to create, so what matters to me is being able to inspire people and move them. This journey began when I was eight or nine: every day after school I did theatre with kids from all over Boston and from various socioeconomic backgrounds. It was the start of understanding what it means to be in another’s shoes.

That understanding is why travelling is so important. When you go to another country, you can’t fall back on the things you are used to or are comfortable with; it’s important to lose your bearings, so that you can start to see what it’s like to live in another body, in another context. That’s the start of compassion and empathy, because it’s very hard to have an enemy when you can empathise with them, when you’re able to recognise a common thread.

Later, when I was twenty-one, I remember wondering why the New York Times had an ‘Arts and Leisure’ section. Why were those two things put together? Why is art considered to be an ‘extra’ in our society? When you think about the potential of art and what it can do for people, it’s extraordinary. So if people can be touched, be intellectually and emotionally inspired, then I feel like I’ve done my job.

Storytelling can be illuminating, dark, transformative or healing. So, as an artist, being able to not just give people a good time, but to affect their lives is very important to me. I feel that this is my responsibility, and I’m lucky that The Lion King, a stage musical I created twenty years ago, has given me economic freedom. When you have economic freedom, you have the freedom to choose your work. The projects I choose to do have something to say and, hopefully, can inspire. I believe that’s my role as a contemporary shaman – it’s as entertainer and healer; it’s connecting people and, potentially, effecting a transformation in them. The origin of theatre is shamanistic performance. It was about taking people through misery, death and illness, through a healing process. A shaman would take or enact a spirit journey to confront the causes or issues plaguing the community and would return to address these. Whether or not the shaman’s power is ‘real’ isn’t important – if you believe it’s real, then it is.



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