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Henry and "the Ariels"

Arts Interchange – Such Stuff: Henry Woronicz on The Tempest

Play

If we are such stuff as dreams are made on…is anything real outside the mind? Henry Woronicz, the Director of IU Theatre’s production of The Tempest, attempts an answer. This weekend IU Theatre will open the production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest which will feature acrobatic aerial silk work and a female actor playing the “Salvage” Islander Caliban*.

For this “Arts Interchange” we speak about the “theater of the mind” that this play seems to be, and the two non-human characters that might represent the dark and light within the psyche. We might also ask, and perhaps Shakespeare is asking this too via Prospero, is this “stuff” and our “play” worth anything at all? We also venture into the territory of incest…but just barely.

The Tempest is being performed at the Ruth N. Halls Theatre an opens this Friday, 2/24, and runs through March 4th.

*For an explanation of “Salvage” see Frank Kermode’s “Introduction” to the Arden Shakespeare edition of The Tempest. “…though he is thus connected with the Indian savage, he is also associated, as were the uncivilized inhabitants of the Indies, with the wild or salvage man of Europe, formerly the most familiar image of mankind without the ordination of civility….unchastity was a conventional attribute of salvage men, which Shakespeare skillfully exploits. These creatures were said to occupy an ‘intermediate position in the moral scale, below man, just as the angels were above him…they are the link between…the settled and the wild, the moral and the unmoral.'” (xxxviii-xxxix)

GUEST
Visiting Assistant Professor and renowned actor, Henry Woronicz returned to Bloomington in January 2014 as a visiting faculty member and guest artist with the Indiana University Department of Theatre, Drama, and Contemporary Dance. As part of his visiting faculty appointment, Henry played the title role in the IU Theatre production of King Lear, directed by Henry’s partner and IU emeriti associate professor Fontaine Syer. From 2009 to 2012, Mr. Woronicz was on the faculty of the School of Theatre and Dance at Illinois State University, where he served as the Head of Graduate Acting.

RELATED
IU Theatre 2016-17: The Tempest

PHOTO DETAILS
L-R in the sky: Emily Rozman (blue), Athena Kopulos (white), Courtney Relyea-Spivak (gray)
Set by Kevin Nelson; Lighting by Matthew Wofford; Costumes by Courtney Foxworthy

CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Executive Producer: Joe Crawford

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