One of the big hits at Woolf and the City was the performance by the West Coast band Princeton, who rocked out on stage Friday evening with all four tunes from their “Bloomsbury” album.
Another big hit was the Virginia Woolf t-shirt the band sold. It featured Virginia looking trés cool behind a pair of metallic-gold-trimmed Ray-Bans.
You, too, can be trés cool. Order a shirt from the band’s MySpace page. Scroll way down. Choose your size — men’s or women’s from small to large — and click on the “Pay Now” link to pay through PayPal.
Tip: The shirts are 100 percent cotton, and the women’s sizes run small. Bump your order up a size.
While you are on their site, you can check out their music.
Is Virginia Woolf fun? Most people don’t think of her that way, but she definitely had a fun, playful side.
That side will be center stage when the band Princeton and the Stephen Pelton Dance Theater combine to present “it was this: it was this:”, songs and dance inspired by the life and work of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group, at this year’s 19th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf.
The performance, June 5 at 8 p.m., is being billed as “Southern California frolic meets Northern California serious in a one-night-only collaboration of song and dance.”
It will be held at Pope Auditorium, 113 W 60th St. on the Fordham University campus in New York City, and tickets are still available.
Princeton will perform all of the songs from their recent album titled “Bloomsbury.” Each song presents a musical portrait of a member of the Bloomsbury group, including Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf and John Maynard Keynes.
The band, comprised of twin brothers Jesse and Matt Kivel and Ben Usen, will be joined by eight additional musicians in recreating their frolicsome, exuberant take on the cast of Bloomsbury characters.
The Stephen Pelton Dance Theater, known for known its intimate theatricality and emotional intensity, may be familiar to audiences from previous Woolf conferences.
This year the company will perform several new works, including the premiere of “it was this: it was this:”, a choreographic study of Woolf’s punctuation. Using a single paragraph from To the Lighthouse, the company dances its way from the first word to the last, pausing briefly for every comma, parentheses and semicolon in between. The company also performs a revised version of “The Death of the Moth,” first seen at the Plymouth State Conference in 1997.
The artists will combine forces for the premiere of Lytton/Carrington, a portrait-in-miniature of this original love story.
“What is most interesting to me in this collaboration with Princeton, is how remarkably different our approaches to Woolf are,” Pelton writes.” I suspect that some of this may be attributable to the fact that we are from completely different generations—I am in my mid-forties, they in their early twenties. Their sweet, light-hearted and, at times, irreverent response to the material would have been unthinkable to me twenty years ago when I started to read Woolf and make dances inspired by her.
“Though they are always respectful, their songs embrace the playful spirit in Woolf’s work and in the lives of her colleagues; whereas I have tended to focus my response on the gravity of Woolf’s concerns. This contrast should make for a very fascinating evening in the theater.”
The performance will be part of Woolf and the City, the 19th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, held June 4 to 7 at Fordham.
Interested in having Dinner with Virginia and friends? Order the chapbook-CD combination by the same name.
The new book and CD premiered at a one-night event April 18 in San Francisco. Together, they use poetry and music to posit a formal party hosted by Virginia Woolf for 16 eccentric historical figures.
Guests include the unlikely mix of Billie Holiday, Salvador Dalí, and Thelonious Monk, all of whom act out and think out loud — and silently.
Poet Jesse Nathan is the chapbook author, and Chris Jantzen is the composer and performer of the music on the CD and the designer of the collages included in the book.
Read a review of Dinner on BeyondChron: San Francisco’s alternative online daily, and find out how to order it.
Let’s all thank our lucky stars for the enlightened souls at the BBC who saved eight minutes of Virginia Woolf’s recorded voice. It is the only recording of her voice that has survived from the three broadcasts she did for the BBC in the 1930s.
Now Woolf’s voice, along with those of other great writers of the 20th century, can be heard in its entirety for the first time on a three-disc set of CDs produced by the British Library called “The Spoken Word: British Writers.”
The set features the voices of 30 British writers and includes many previously unpublished recordings. Another set, “The Spoken Word: American Writers,” features 27 authors from the U.S.
When Woolf’s recordings were made, people simply didn’t keep radio broadcasts, according to Richard Fairman of the British Library. “They went out on the air and that was it; they were lost forever,” Fairman told NPR‘s Melissa Block.
“The recording of Woolf is nothing like the interviews common on the radio today,” he said.
Hearing the voices of famous authors on CD is “not quite as good as having them walk up to you, but it’s not bad,” he told the Telegraph.
You can listen to Woolf talk about “Craftsmanship” in the series “Words Fail Me,” which was broadcast on the BBC April 29, 1937, here.
On You Tube, you can watch a video featuring a record spinning on a turntable that gives us eight minutes of Vita Sackville-West reading from her prize-winning poem “The Land.” The recording was made by Columbia in 1931 for the International Education Society.
You can also search the British Library’s online archive of more than 1,500 sound recordings that it has made here.
