An exhibition at Tate Liverpool is celebrating Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and the influence it has had on subsequent generations of visual artists. It includes the manuscript for the original story, which was originally written as a private gift for Carroll to 12-year-old Alice Liddell in 1864. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who went by the pen name Lewis Carroll, came up with the story of Alice and her trip to a fantasy world while on a boat trip with the real Alice and her family in Oxford in 1862. The exhibition includes photos of Liddell taken by Carroll taken in 1858.

Carroll was persuaded to publish the story and approached the artist John Tenniel, known for his cartoons for the magazine Punch, to provide the illustrations. The first book was published in 1865.

The books Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass became huge successes by the end of the 19th Century, with spin-off gifts manufactured including board games and card games, dolls and figurines and slides for magic lantern shows.

Pop artist Sir Peter Blake is among those who have used the stories for inspiration in subsequent years. Sir Peter said he was captivated by the “magical realism” of the stories and aimed to capture “the sense of living one’s life through other characters”.

US photographer Anna Gaskell took pictures of a pair of twins dressed as Alice in a modern fantasy world for her series Wonder in 1996.

American Surrealist Dorothea Tanning, the wife of artist Max Ernst, painted Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (A Little Night Music) in 1943.

(Taken from BBC)

Lloyd explained that the group of actors that accompanies him brings a production that includes fragments of works of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2005, Harold Pinter (1930-2008), with the purpose of “showing our respect to him and Cuba”, he disclosed this Sunday on statements to the local television network.

The actor said that he has always been a big fan of Cuba and wanted to know it.

“The best way to do it is in a context in which he could show the work of a person like Harold Pinter who in his entire life showed true commitment with Latin America and countries like Chile, Venezuela, and Cuba”, he asserted.

The program of the British group includes Pinter’s texts like The Caretaker, The Birthday Party, The Homecoming, Mountain Language, poems like American Football, It is Here, Cancer Cells, Weather Forecast, prose like A Note on Shakespeare, and On Waiting for Godot, and excerpts of his speech for the Nobel Prize 2005 and his letter to the Tribunal of Conscientious Objector, in 1948.

The XIV International Theater Festival of Havana will take place until next November 6 with a program that gathers 32 companies from Argentina, Germany, Spain, United States, Slovenia, France, Finland, Cyprus, Norway, Chile, Turkey, and Great Britain, among other countries.

(Taken from Cubasi)

L. A. Butler

Kpi, thanks for the enlightenment…!