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From the Ted Talk by Julie Taymor: Spider-Man, The Lion King and life on the creative edge

Unscramble the Blue Letters

(Music) ["Oedipus Rex"] ["The Lion King"] ["Titus"] ["Frida"] ["The Magic Flute"] ["Across The Universe"] (Applause) Julie Taymor: Thank you. Thank you very much. That's a few samples of the theater, orepa and fimls that I have done over the last 20 years. But what I'd like to begin with right now is to take you back to a moment that I went through in iinsnoeda, which is a seminal moment in my life and, like all myths, these storeis need to be retold and told, lest we forget them. And when I'm in the turbulent tiems, as we know, that I am right now, through the cuclbrie and the fire of transformation, which is what all of you do, actually. Anybody who creates knows there's that point where it hasn't quite become the phoenix or the burnt char. (Laughter) And I am right there on the edge, which I'll tell you about, another story. I want to go back to Indonesia where I was about 21, 22 yeras, a long time ago, on a fileohslwp. And I found myself, after two years there and performing and learning, on the island of Bali, on the edge of a crater, Gunung Batur. And I was in a village where there was an initiation comenery for the yonug men, a rite of passage. Little did I know that it was mine as well. And as I sat in this temple square under this gigantic beringin banyan tree, in the dark, there was no electricity, just the full moon, down in this empty square, and I heard the most beautiful sounds, like a crlehas Ives concert as I listened to the galmean music from all the different villagers that came for this once-every-five-years ceremony. And I thought I was alone in the dark under this tree. And all of a sudden, out of the dark, from the other end of the sqraue, I saw the glint of mirrors lit by the moon. And these 20 old men who I'd seen before all of a sudden stood up in these full wraorir costumes with the headdress and the srpaes, and no one was in the square, and I was hidden in the shadows. No one was there, and they came out, and they did this incredible dance. "Huhuhuhuhuhuhuhahahahaha." And they moved their bodeis and they came forward, and the lights bounced off these costumes. And I've been in theater since I was 11 years old, and pfmrnoierg, creating, and I went, "Who are they performing for with these elaborate costumes, these erniorraadtxy headdresses?" And I realized that they were performing for God, whatever that means. But somehow, it didn't matter about the pbulciity. There was no money involved. It wasn't going to be written down. It was no news. And there were these incredible artists that felt for me like an eternity as they performed. The next moment, as soon as they finished and deeripapsad into the shdoaws, a young man with a propane lantern came on, hung it up on a tree, set up a curtain. The village square was filled with hundreds of people. And they put on an opera all night long. Human beings needed the light. They neeedd the lhigt to see. So what I ganeid and gathered from this incredible, seminal moment in my life as a young artist was that you must be true to what you believe as an artist all the way through, but you also have to be aware that the audience is out there in our leivs at this time, and they also need the light. And it's this incredible balance that I think that we walk when we are ctenriag something that is breaking ground, that's trying to do something you've never seen before, that imnigraay wlrod where you actually don't know where you're going to end up, that's the fine line on the edge of a crater that I have walked my whole life. What I would like to do now is to tell you a little bit about how I work. Let's take "The Lion King." You saw many epaxlems of my work up there, but it's one that people know. I start with the noiton of the ideograph. An ideograph is like a brush painting, a Japanese bsurh painting. Three strokes, you get the whole bamboo forest. I go to the concept of "The Lion King" and I say, "What is the essence of it? What is the abstraction? If I were to reduce this entire story into one image, what would it be?" The circle. The circle. It's so obvious. The circle of life. The circle of Mufasa's mask. The cricle that, when we come to Act II and there's a drought, how do you express dhrgout? It's a circle of silk on the floor that disappears into the hole in the stage floor. The circle of life comes in the wheels of the gazelles that leap. And you see the mechanics. And being a theater person, what I know and love about the theater is that when the audience comes in and they snpused their disbelief, when you see men walking or wemon walking with a platter of garss on their heads, you know it's the savanna. You don't question that. I love the apparent truth of theater. I love that ppleoe are willing to fill in the blanks. The auecdnie is willing to say, "Oh, I know that's not a real sun. You took pieces of sticks. You added silk to the bototm. You suspended these pieces. You let it fall flat on the folor. And as it riess with the snirtgs, I see that it's a sun. But the beauty of it is that it's just silk and sticks. And in a way, that is what makes it spiritual. That's what mveos you. It's not the atacul leitral sunrise that's coming. It's the art of it. So in the theater, as much as the story is critical and the book and the language, the telling of the story, how it's told, the mcaiechns, the methods that you use, is equal to the story itself. And I'm one who loves high tech and low tech. So I could go from — For instance, I'll show you some "Spider-Man" later, these incredible mechanis that move people along. But the fact is, without the dancer who knows how to use his body and swing on those wries, it's nothing. So now I'm going to show you some clips from the other big prcejot of my life this year, "The Tempest." It's a movie. I did "The Tempest" on a stage three times in the theater since 1984, '86, and I love the play. I did it always with a male Prospero. And all of a sudden, I thought, "Well, who am I gonna get to play Prospero? Why not Helen Mirren? She's a great acotr. Why not?" And this material really did work for a woman equally as well. So now, let's take a look at some of the images from "The Tempest." (Music) (Video) Prospera: Hast thou, spirit, performed to the piont the tempest that I bade thee? Ariel: I boarded the king's ship. In every cabin, I flamed amazement. Prospera: At first shgit, they have changed eyes. Miranda: Do you love me? Ferdinand: Beyond all limit. HM: They are both in either's powers. Trinculo: Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows. (msuic) Looking for business, governor? Caliban: Hast thou not dropped from heaven? Stephano: Out of the moon, I do assure thee. Prospera: Caliban! Caliban: This island is mine. Prospera: For this, be sure, tonight thou shalt have cramps. Antonio: Here lies your brother no better than the earth he lies upon. Sebastian: Draw thy sword. And I, the king, shall love thee. Prospera: I will plague them all, even to roaring. Ariel: I have made you mad. Prospera: We are such stuff as dreams are made on. and our little life is rounded with a sleep. (Music) JT: Okay. (aluapspe) So I went from taheetr, doing "The Tempest" on the stage in a very low-budget production many years ago, and I love the play, and I also think it's Shakespeare's last play, and it really lends itself, as you can see, to cminea. But I'm just going to give you a little example about how one stages it in theater and then how one takes that same idea or story and moves it into cinema. The ideograph that I talked to you about before, what is it for "The Tempest"? What, if I were to boil it down, would be the one image that I could hang my hat on for this? And it was the sand castle, the idea of nurture versus nraute, that we bulid these civilizations — she speaks about it at the end, Helen Mirren's Prospera — we build them, but under nature, under the grand tempest, these cloud-capped towres, these gorgeous palaces will fade and there will — leave not a rack behind. So in the theater, I started the play, it was a black sand rake, white cyc, and there was a little girl, Miranda, on the hozrion, bindulig a drip castle, a sand castle. And as she was there on the edge of that stage, two stagehands all in blcak with watering cans ran along the top and started to pour water on the sand castle, and the sand castle started to drip and sink, but before it did, the audience saw the black-clad stagehands. The medium was apparent. It was banal. We saw it. But as they started to pour the water, the light changed from showing you the black-clad stagehands to focusing, this roguh magic that we do in theater, it fscuoed right on the water itself. And all of a sudden, the audience's pptcesivere changes. It becomes something magically lrage. It becomes the rainstorm. The maksed actors, the puppeteers, they disappear, and the audience makes that leap into this world, into this imaginary world of "The Tempest" actually happening. Now the difference when I went and did it in the cinema, I started the actual mivoe with a close-up of a sand castle, a black sand castle, and what cinema can do is, by using camera, perspective, and also long sthos and close-ups, it stetrad on a close-up of the sand catsle, and as it pulled away, you saw that it was a miniature snttiig in the palm of the girl's hadns. And so I could play with the mueidm, and why I move from one medium to another is to be able to do this. Now I'm going to take you to "Spider-Man." (Music) (Video) Peter Parker: ♪ Standing on the precipice, I can soar away from this. ♪ JT: We're trying to do everything in live theater that you can't do in two dimensions in film and television. PP: ♪ Rise above yourself and take control. ♪ George Tsypin: We're looking at New York from a Spider-Man point of view. Spider Man is not bound by gravity. Manhattan in the show is not bound by grivtay either. PP: ♪ Be yourself and rise above it all. ♪ Ensemble: ♪ Sock! Pow! ♪ ♪ Slam! Scratch! ♪ Danny Ezralow: I don't want you to even think there's a choreographer. It's real, what's happening. I perfer you to see people mnivog, and you're going, "Whoa, what was that?" (Music) JT: If I give enough movement in the sculpture, and the actor moves their head, you feel like it's alive. It's really cmioc book live. It's a comic book coming aivle. (Music) Bono: They're mythologies. They're modern myths, these comic book heeros. PP: ♪ They believe. ♪ (secrmas) (Music) (Applause) JT: Ohhhh. What was that? Circus, rock 'n' roll, drama. What the hell are we doing up there on that sgtae? Well, one last sorty, very quklicy. After I was in that village, I crossed the lake, and I saw that the volcano was erupting on the other side, Gunung Batur, and there was a dead volcano next to the live volcano. I didn't think I'd be swallowed by the volcano, and I am here. But it's very easy to climb up, is it not? You hold on to the roots, you put your foot in the little rocks and climb up there, and you get to the top, and I was with a good friend who was an actor, and we said, "Let's go up there. Let's see if we can come close to the edge of that live volcano." And we cmbeild up and we got to the very top, and we're on the edge, on this precipice, Roland disappears into the sulfur smoke at the volcano at the other end, and I'm up there alone on this incredible pprceicie. Did you hear the lyrics? I'm on the precipice looking down into a dead volcano to my left. To my right is sheer shale. It's coming off. I'm in thongs and sarongs. It was many years ago. And no hiking boots. And he's disappeared, this mad French gyspy actor, off in the smoke, and I realize, I can't go back the way that I've come. I can't. So I throw away my camera. I trhow away my thongs, and I looked at the line straight in front of me, and I got down on all fuors like a cat, and I held with my knees to either side of this line in front of me, for 30 ydars or 30 feet, I don't know. The wind was massively blowing, and the only way I could get to the other side was to look at the line straight in front of me. I know you've all been there. I'm in the crucible right now. It's my trial by fire. It's my company's trials by fire. We survive because our theme song is "Rise Above." Boy falls from the sky, rise above. It's right there in the palm of both of our hands, of all of my company's hands. I have beautiful collaborators, and we as creators only get there all together. I know you unsrtednad that. And you just stay going forward, and then you see this extraordinary thing in front of your eyes. Thank you. (Applause)

Open Cloze

(Music) ["Oedipus Rex"] ["The Lion King"] ["Titus"] ["Frida"] ["The Magic Flute"] ["Across The Universe"] (Applause) Julie Taymor: Thank you. Thank you very much. That's a few samples of the theater, _____ and _____ that I have done over the last 20 years. But what I'd like to begin with right now is to take you back to a moment that I went through in _________, which is a seminal moment in my life and, like all myths, these _______ need to be retold and told, lest we forget them. And when I'm in the turbulent _____, as we know, that I am right now, through the ________ and the fire of transformation, which is what all of you do, actually. Anybody who creates knows there's that point where it hasn't quite become the phoenix or the burnt char. (Laughter) And I am right there on the edge, which I'll tell you about, another story. I want to go back to Indonesia where I was about 21, 22 _____, a long time ago, on a __________. And I found myself, after two years there and performing and learning, on the island of Bali, on the edge of a crater, Gunung Batur. And I was in a village where there was an initiation ________ for the _____ men, a rite of passage. Little did I know that it was mine as well. And as I sat in this temple square under this gigantic beringin banyan tree, in the dark, there was no electricity, just the full moon, down in this empty square, and I heard the most beautiful sounds, like a _______ Ives concert as I listened to the _______ music from all the different villagers that came for this once-every-five-years ceremony. And I thought I was alone in the dark under this tree. And all of a sudden, out of the dark, from the other end of the ______, I saw the glint of mirrors lit by the moon. And these 20 old men who I'd seen before all of a sudden stood up in these full _______ costumes with the headdress and the ______, and no one was in the square, and I was hidden in the shadows. No one was there, and they came out, and they did this incredible dance. "Huhuhuhuhuhuhuhahahahaha." And they moved their ______ and they came forward, and the lights bounced off these costumes. And I've been in theater since I was 11 years old, and __________, creating, and I went, "Who are they performing for with these elaborate costumes, these _____________ headdresses?" And I realized that they were performing for God, whatever that means. But somehow, it didn't matter about the _________. There was no money involved. It wasn't going to be written down. It was no news. And there were these incredible artists that felt for me like an eternity as they performed. The next moment, as soon as they finished and ___________ into the _______, a young man with a propane lantern came on, hung it up on a tree, set up a curtain. The village square was filled with hundreds of people. And they put on an opera all night long. Human beings needed the light. They ______ the _____ to see. So what I ______ and gathered from this incredible, seminal moment in my life as a young artist was that you must be true to what you believe as an artist all the way through, but you also have to be aware that the audience is out there in our _____ at this time, and they also need the light. And it's this incredible balance that I think that we walk when we are ________ something that is breaking ground, that's trying to do something you've never seen before, that _________ _____ where you actually don't know where you're going to end up, that's the fine line on the edge of a crater that I have walked my whole life. What I would like to do now is to tell you a little bit about how I work. Let's take "The Lion King." You saw many ________ of my work up there, but it's one that people know. I start with the ______ of the ideograph. An ideograph is like a brush painting, a Japanese _____ painting. Three strokes, you get the whole bamboo forest. I go to the concept of "The Lion King" and I say, "What is the essence of it? What is the abstraction? If I were to reduce this entire story into one image, what would it be?" The circle. The circle. It's so obvious. The circle of life. The circle of Mufasa's mask. The ______ that, when we come to Act II and there's a drought, how do you express _______? It's a circle of silk on the floor that disappears into the hole in the stage floor. The circle of life comes in the wheels of the gazelles that leap. And you see the mechanics. And being a theater person, what I know and love about the theater is that when the audience comes in and they _______ their disbelief, when you see men walking or _____ walking with a platter of _____ on their heads, you know it's the savanna. You don't question that. I love the apparent truth of theater. I love that ______ are willing to fill in the blanks. The ________ is willing to say, "Oh, I know that's not a real sun. You took pieces of sticks. You added silk to the ______. You suspended these pieces. You let it fall flat on the _____. And as it _____ with the _______, I see that it's a sun. But the beauty of it is that it's just silk and sticks. And in a way, that is what makes it spiritual. That's what _____ you. It's not the ______ _______ sunrise that's coming. It's the art of it. So in the theater, as much as the story is critical and the book and the language, the telling of the story, how it's told, the _________, the methods that you use, is equal to the story itself. And I'm one who loves high tech and low tech. So I could go from — For instance, I'll show you some "Spider-Man" later, these incredible ________ that move people along. But the fact is, without the dancer who knows how to use his body and swing on those _____, it's nothing. So now I'm going to show you some clips from the other big _______ of my life this year, "The Tempest." It's a movie. I did "The Tempest" on a stage three times in the theater since 1984, '86, and I love the play. I did it always with a male Prospero. And all of a sudden, I thought, "Well, who am I gonna get to play Prospero? Why not Helen Mirren? She's a great _____. Why not?" And this material really did work for a woman equally as well. So now, let's take a look at some of the images from "The Tempest." (Music) (Video) Prospera: Hast thou, spirit, performed to the _____ the tempest that I bade thee? Ariel: I boarded the king's ship. In every cabin, I flamed amazement. Prospera: At first _____, they have changed eyes. Miranda: Do you love me? Ferdinand: Beyond all limit. HM: They are both in either's powers. Trinculo: Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows. (_____) Looking for business, governor? Caliban: Hast thou not dropped from heaven? Stephano: Out of the moon, I do assure thee. Prospera: Caliban! Caliban: This island is mine. Prospera: For this, be sure, tonight thou shalt have cramps. Antonio: Here lies your brother no better than the earth he lies upon. Sebastian: Draw thy sword. And I, the king, shall love thee. Prospera: I will plague them all, even to roaring. Ariel: I have made you mad. Prospera: We are such stuff as dreams are made on. and our little life is rounded with a sleep. (Music) JT: Okay. (________) So I went from _______, doing "The Tempest" on the stage in a very low-budget production many years ago, and I love the play, and I also think it's Shakespeare's last play, and it really lends itself, as you can see, to ______. But I'm just going to give you a little example about how one stages it in theater and then how one takes that same idea or story and moves it into cinema. The ideograph that I talked to you about before, what is it for "The Tempest"? What, if I were to boil it down, would be the one image that I could hang my hat on for this? And it was the sand castle, the idea of nurture versus ______, that we _____ these civilizations — she speaks about it at the end, Helen Mirren's Prospera — we build them, but under nature, under the grand tempest, these cloud-capped ______, these gorgeous palaces will fade and there will — leave not a rack behind. So in the theater, I started the play, it was a black sand rake, white cyc, and there was a little girl, Miranda, on the _______, ________ a drip castle, a sand castle. And as she was there on the edge of that stage, two stagehands all in _____ with watering cans ran along the top and started to pour water on the sand castle, and the sand castle started to drip and sink, but before it did, the audience saw the black-clad stagehands. The medium was apparent. It was banal. We saw it. But as they started to pour the water, the light changed from showing you the black-clad stagehands to focusing, this _____ magic that we do in theater, it _______ right on the water itself. And all of a sudden, the audience's ___________ changes. It becomes something magically _____. It becomes the rainstorm. The ______ actors, the puppeteers, they disappear, and the audience makes that leap into this world, into this imaginary world of "The Tempest" actually happening. Now the difference when I went and did it in the cinema, I started the actual _____ with a close-up of a sand castle, a black sand castle, and what cinema can do is, by using camera, perspective, and also long _____ and close-ups, it _______ on a close-up of the sand ______, and as it pulled away, you saw that it was a miniature _______ in the palm of the girl's _____. And so I could play with the ______, and why I move from one medium to another is to be able to do this. Now I'm going to take you to "Spider-Man." (Music) (Video) Peter Parker: ♪ Standing on the precipice, I can soar away from this. ♪ JT: We're trying to do everything in live theater that you can't do in two dimensions in film and television. PP: ♪ Rise above yourself and take control. ♪ George Tsypin: We're looking at New York from a Spider-Man point of view. Spider Man is not bound by gravity. Manhattan in the show is not bound by _______ either. PP: ♪ Be yourself and rise above it all. ♪ Ensemble: ♪ Sock! Pow! ♪ ♪ Slam! Scratch! ♪ Danny Ezralow: I don't want you to even think there's a choreographer. It's real, what's happening. I ______ you to see people ______, and you're going, "Whoa, what was that?" (Music) JT: If I give enough movement in the sculpture, and the actor moves their head, you feel like it's alive. It's really _____ book live. It's a comic book coming _____. (Music) Bono: They're mythologies. They're modern myths, these comic book ______. PP: ♪ They believe. ♪ (_______) (Music) (Applause) JT: Ohhhh. What was that? Circus, rock 'n' roll, drama. What the hell are we doing up there on that _____? Well, one last _____, very _______. After I was in that village, I crossed the lake, and I saw that the volcano was erupting on the other side, Gunung Batur, and there was a dead volcano next to the live volcano. I didn't think I'd be swallowed by the volcano, and I am here. But it's very easy to climb up, is it not? You hold on to the roots, you put your foot in the little rocks and climb up there, and you get to the top, and I was with a good friend who was an actor, and we said, "Let's go up there. Let's see if we can come close to the edge of that live volcano." And we _______ up and we got to the very top, and we're on the edge, on this precipice, Roland disappears into the sulfur smoke at the volcano at the other end, and I'm up there alone on this incredible _________. Did you hear the lyrics? I'm on the precipice looking down into a dead volcano to my left. To my right is sheer shale. It's coming off. I'm in thongs and sarongs. It was many years ago. And no hiking boots. And he's disappeared, this mad French _____ actor, off in the smoke, and I realize, I can't go back the way that I've come. I can't. So I throw away my camera. I _____ away my thongs, and I looked at the line straight in front of me, and I got down on all _____ like a cat, and I held with my knees to either side of this line in front of me, for 30 _____ or 30 feet, I don't know. The wind was massively blowing, and the only way I could get to the other side was to look at the line straight in front of me. I know you've all been there. I'm in the crucible right now. It's my trial by fire. It's my company's trials by fire. We survive because our theme song is "Rise Above." Boy falls from the sky, rise above. It's right there in the palm of both of our hands, of all of my company's hands. I have beautiful collaborators, and we as creators only get there all together. I know you __________ that. And you just stay going forward, and then you see this extraordinary thing in front of your eyes. Thank you. (Applause)

Solution

nature
times
films
horizon
ceremony
precipice
stage
theater
point
shadows
gamelan
grass
focused
perspective
lives
women
sight
square
world
understand
opera
floor
sitting
alive
disappeared
fellowship
literal
large
stories
indonesia
fours
publicity
story
notion
hands
warrior
mechanics
light
brush
towers
bottom
comic
people
quickly
prefer
bodies
yards
crucible
applause
masked
build
actor
throw
shots
black
actual
examples
music
years
spears
suspend
castle
medium
climbed
project
needed
gained
movie
moving
extraordinary
building
wires
moves
imaginary
performing
heroes
drought
started
rough
gravity
rises
strings
gypsy
circle
audience
machines
charles
creating
cinema
young
screams

Original Text

(Music) ["Oedipus Rex"] ["The Lion King"] ["Titus"] ["Frida"] ["The Magic Flute"] ["Across The Universe"] (Applause) Julie Taymor: Thank you. Thank you very much. That's a few samples of the theater, opera and films that I have done over the last 20 years. But what I'd like to begin with right now is to take you back to a moment that I went through in Indonesia, which is a seminal moment in my life and, like all myths, these stories need to be retold and told, lest we forget them. And when I'm in the turbulent times, as we know, that I am right now, through the crucible and the fire of transformation, which is what all of you do, actually. Anybody who creates knows there's that point where it hasn't quite become the phoenix or the burnt char. (Laughter) And I am right there on the edge, which I'll tell you about, another story. I want to go back to Indonesia where I was about 21, 22 years, a long time ago, on a fellowship. And I found myself, after two years there and performing and learning, on the island of Bali, on the edge of a crater, Gunung Batur. And I was in a village where there was an initiation ceremony for the young men, a rite of passage. Little did I know that it was mine as well. And as I sat in this temple square under this gigantic beringin banyan tree, in the dark, there was no electricity, just the full moon, down in this empty square, and I heard the most beautiful sounds, like a Charles Ives concert as I listened to the gamelan music from all the different villagers that came for this once-every-five-years ceremony. And I thought I was alone in the dark under this tree. And all of a sudden, out of the dark, from the other end of the square, I saw the glint of mirrors lit by the moon. And these 20 old men who I'd seen before all of a sudden stood up in these full warrior costumes with the headdress and the spears, and no one was in the square, and I was hidden in the shadows. No one was there, and they came out, and they did this incredible dance. "Huhuhuhuhuhuhuhahahahaha." And they moved their bodies and they came forward, and the lights bounced off these costumes. And I've been in theater since I was 11 years old, and performing, creating, and I went, "Who are they performing for with these elaborate costumes, these extraordinary headdresses?" And I realized that they were performing for God, whatever that means. But somehow, it didn't matter about the publicity. There was no money involved. It wasn't going to be written down. It was no news. And there were these incredible artists that felt for me like an eternity as they performed. The next moment, as soon as they finished and disappeared into the shadows, a young man with a propane lantern came on, hung it up on a tree, set up a curtain. The village square was filled with hundreds of people. And they put on an opera all night long. Human beings needed the light. They needed the light to see. So what I gained and gathered from this incredible, seminal moment in my life as a young artist was that you must be true to what you believe as an artist all the way through, but you also have to be aware that the audience is out there in our lives at this time, and they also need the light. And it's this incredible balance that I think that we walk when we are creating something that is breaking ground, that's trying to do something you've never seen before, that imaginary world where you actually don't know where you're going to end up, that's the fine line on the edge of a crater that I have walked my whole life. What I would like to do now is to tell you a little bit about how I work. Let's take "The Lion King." You saw many examples of my work up there, but it's one that people know. I start with the notion of the ideograph. An ideograph is like a brush painting, a Japanese brush painting. Three strokes, you get the whole bamboo forest. I go to the concept of "The Lion King" and I say, "What is the essence of it? What is the abstraction? If I were to reduce this entire story into one image, what would it be?" The circle. The circle. It's so obvious. The circle of life. The circle of Mufasa's mask. The circle that, when we come to Act II and there's a drought, how do you express drought? It's a circle of silk on the floor that disappears into the hole in the stage floor. The circle of life comes in the wheels of the gazelles that leap. And you see the mechanics. And being a theater person, what I know and love about the theater is that when the audience comes in and they suspend their disbelief, when you see men walking or women walking with a platter of grass on their heads, you know it's the savanna. You don't question that. I love the apparent truth of theater. I love that people are willing to fill in the blanks. The audience is willing to say, "Oh, I know that's not a real sun. You took pieces of sticks. You added silk to the bottom. You suspended these pieces. You let it fall flat on the floor. And as it rises with the strings, I see that it's a sun. But the beauty of it is that it's just silk and sticks. And in a way, that is what makes it spiritual. That's what moves you. It's not the actual literal sunrise that's coming. It's the art of it. So in the theater, as much as the story is critical and the book and the language, the telling of the story, how it's told, the mechanics, the methods that you use, is equal to the story itself. And I'm one who loves high tech and low tech. So I could go from — For instance, I'll show you some "Spider-Man" later, these incredible machines that move people along. But the fact is, without the dancer who knows how to use his body and swing on those wires, it's nothing. So now I'm going to show you some clips from the other big project of my life this year, "The Tempest." It's a movie. I did "The Tempest" on a stage three times in the theater since 1984, '86, and I love the play. I did it always with a male Prospero. And all of a sudden, I thought, "Well, who am I gonna get to play Prospero? Why not Helen Mirren? She's a great actor. Why not?" And this material really did work for a woman equally as well. So now, let's take a look at some of the images from "The Tempest." (Music) (Video) Prospera: Hast thou, spirit, performed to the point the tempest that I bade thee? Ariel: I boarded the king's ship. In every cabin, I flamed amazement. Prospera: At first sight, they have changed eyes. Miranda: Do you love me? Ferdinand: Beyond all limit. HM: They are both in either's powers. Trinculo: Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows. (Music) Looking for business, governor? Caliban: Hast thou not dropped from heaven? Stephano: Out of the moon, I do assure thee. Prospera: Caliban! Caliban: This island is mine. Prospera: For this, be sure, tonight thou shalt have cramps. Antonio: Here lies your brother no better than the earth he lies upon. Sebastian: Draw thy sword. And I, the king, shall love thee. Prospera: I will plague them all, even to roaring. Ariel: I have made you mad. Prospera: We are such stuff as dreams are made on. and our little life is rounded with a sleep. (Music) JT: Okay. (Applause) So I went from theater, doing "The Tempest" on the stage in a very low-budget production many years ago, and I love the play, and I also think it's Shakespeare's last play, and it really lends itself, as you can see, to cinema. But I'm just going to give you a little example about how one stages it in theater and then how one takes that same idea or story and moves it into cinema. The ideograph that I talked to you about before, what is it for "The Tempest"? What, if I were to boil it down, would be the one image that I could hang my hat on for this? And it was the sand castle, the idea of nurture versus nature, that we build these civilizations — she speaks about it at the end, Helen Mirren's Prospera — we build them, but under nature, under the grand tempest, these cloud-capped towers, these gorgeous palaces will fade and there will — leave not a rack behind. So in the theater, I started the play, it was a black sand rake, white cyc, and there was a little girl, Miranda, on the horizon, building a drip castle, a sand castle. And as she was there on the edge of that stage, two stagehands all in black with watering cans ran along the top and started to pour water on the sand castle, and the sand castle started to drip and sink, but before it did, the audience saw the black-clad stagehands. The medium was apparent. It was banal. We saw it. But as they started to pour the water, the light changed from showing you the black-clad stagehands to focusing, this rough magic that we do in theater, it focused right on the water itself. And all of a sudden, the audience's perspective changes. It becomes something magically large. It becomes the rainstorm. The masked actors, the puppeteers, they disappear, and the audience makes that leap into this world, into this imaginary world of "The Tempest" actually happening. Now the difference when I went and did it in the cinema, I started the actual movie with a close-up of a sand castle, a black sand castle, and what cinema can do is, by using camera, perspective, and also long shots and close-ups, it started on a close-up of the sand castle, and as it pulled away, you saw that it was a miniature sitting in the palm of the girl's hands. And so I could play with the medium, and why I move from one medium to another is to be able to do this. Now I'm going to take you to "Spider-Man." (Music) (Video) Peter Parker: ♪ Standing on the precipice, I can soar away from this. ♪ JT: We're trying to do everything in live theater that you can't do in two dimensions in film and television. PP: ♪ Rise above yourself and take control. ♪ George Tsypin: We're looking at New York from a Spider-Man point of view. Spider Man is not bound by gravity. Manhattan in the show is not bound by gravity either. PP: ♪ Be yourself and rise above it all. ♪ Ensemble: ♪ Sock! Pow! ♪ ♪ Slam! Scratch! ♪ Danny Ezralow: I don't want you to even think there's a choreographer. It's real, what's happening. I prefer you to see people moving, and you're going, "Whoa, what was that?" (Music) JT: If I give enough movement in the sculpture, and the actor moves their head, you feel like it's alive. It's really comic book live. It's a comic book coming alive. (Music) Bono: They're mythologies. They're modern myths, these comic book heroes. PP: ♪ They believe. ♪ (Screams) (Music) (Applause) JT: Ohhhh. What was that? Circus, rock 'n' roll, drama. What the hell are we doing up there on that stage? Well, one last story, very quickly. After I was in that village, I crossed the lake, and I saw that the volcano was erupting on the other side, Gunung Batur, and there was a dead volcano next to the live volcano. I didn't think I'd be swallowed by the volcano, and I am here. But it's very easy to climb up, is it not? You hold on to the roots, you put your foot in the little rocks and climb up there, and you get to the top, and I was with a good friend who was an actor, and we said, "Let's go up there. Let's see if we can come close to the edge of that live volcano." And we climbed up and we got to the very top, and we're on the edge, on this precipice, Roland disappears into the sulfur smoke at the volcano at the other end, and I'm up there alone on this incredible precipice. Did you hear the lyrics? I'm on the precipice looking down into a dead volcano to my left. To my right is sheer shale. It's coming off. I'm in thongs and sarongs. It was many years ago. And no hiking boots. And he's disappeared, this mad French gypsy actor, off in the smoke, and I realize, I can't go back the way that I've come. I can't. So I throw away my camera. I throw away my thongs, and I looked at the line straight in front of me, and I got down on all fours like a cat, and I held with my knees to either side of this line in front of me, for 30 yards or 30 feet, I don't know. The wind was massively blowing, and the only way I could get to the other side was to look at the line straight in front of me. I know you've all been there. I'm in the crucible right now. It's my trial by fire. It's my company's trials by fire. We survive because our theme song is "Rise Above." Boy falls from the sky, rise above. It's right there in the palm of both of our hands, of all of my company's hands. I have beautiful collaborators, and we as creators only get there all together. I know you understand that. And you just stay going forward, and then you see this extraordinary thing in front of your eyes. Thank you. (Applause)

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations

ngrams of length 2

collocation	frequency
comic book	3
seminal moment	2
imaginary world	2
black sand	2
sand castle	2
dead volcano	2
line straight	2

Important Words

abstraction
acquaints
act
actor
actors
actual
added
alive
amazement
apparent
applause
art
artist
artists
assure
audience
aware
bade
balance
bali
bamboo
banal
banyan
batur
beautiful
beauty
bedfellows
beings
beringin
big
bit
black
blanks
blowing
boarded
bodies
body
boil
book
boots
bottom
bounced
bound
boy
breaking
brother
brush
build
building
burnt
business
cabin
camera
cans
castle
cat
ceremony
changed
char
charles
choreographer
cinema
circle
circus
civilizations
climb
climbed
clips
close
collaborators
comic
coming
concept
concert
control
costumes
cramps
crater
creates
creating
creators
critical
crossed
crucible
curtain
cyc
dance
dancer
danny
dark
dead
difference
dimensions
disappear
disappeared
disappears
disbelief
drama
draw
dreams
drip
dropped
drought
earth
easy
edge
elaborate
electricity
empty
entire
equal
equally
erupting
essence
eternity
examples
express
extraordinary
eyes
fact
fade
fall
falls
feel
feet
fellowship
felt
fill
filled
film
films
fine
finished
fire
flamed
flat
floor
focused
focusing
foot
forest
forget
fours
french
friend
front
full
gained
gamelan
gathered
gazelles
george
gigantic
girl
give
glint
god
gonna
good
gorgeous
governor
grand
grass
gravity
great
ground
gunung
gypsy
hands
hang
happening
hast
hat
head
headdress
headdresses
heads
hear
heard
heaven
held
helen
hell
heroes
hidden
high
hiking
hold
hole
horizon
human
hundreds
hung
idea
ideograph
ii
image
images
imaginary
incredible
indonesia
initiation
instance
involved
island
ives
japanese
julie
king
knees
lake
language
lantern
large
laughter
leap
learning
leave
left
lends
lies
life
light
lights
limit
line
lion
listened
lit
literal
live
lives
long
looked
love
loves
lyrics
machines
mad
magic
magically
male
man
manhattan
mask
masked
massively
material
matter
means
mechanics
medium
men
methods
miniature
miranda
mirren
mirrors
misery
modern
moment
money
moon
move
moved
movement
moves
movie
moving
music
mythologies
myths
nature
needed
news
night
notion
nurture
obvious
ohhhh
opera
painting
palaces
palm
passage
people
performed
performing
person
perspective
peter
phoenix
pieces
plague
platter
play
point
pour
powers
precipice
prefer
production
project
propane
prospera
prospero
publicity
pulled
puppeteers
put
question
quickly
rack
rainstorm
rake
ran
real
realize
realized
reduce
retold
rise
rises
rite
roaring
rock
rocks
roland
roll
roots
rough
rounded
samples
sand
sarongs
sat
savanna
screams
sculpture
seminal
set
shadows
shale
shalt
sheer
ship
shots
show
showing
side
sight
silk
sink
sitting
sky
sleep
smoke
soar
song
sounds
speaks
spears
spider
spirit
spiritual
square
stage
stagehands
stages
standing
start
started
stay
sticks
stood
stories
story
straight
strange
strings
strokes
stuff
sudden
sulfur
sun
sunrise
survive
suspend
suspended
swallowed
swing
sword
takes
talked
tech
television
telling
tempest
temple
theater
thee
theme
thongs
thou
thought
throw
thy
time
times
told
tonight
top
towers
transformation
tree
trial
trials
true
truth
turbulent
understand
video
view
village
villagers
volcano
walk
walked
walking
warrior
water
watering
wheels
white
wind
wires
woman
women
work
world
written
yards
year
years
york
young