Category Archives: Transhuman News

Compagnie Philippe Gentys Forget Me Not (Ne moublie pas) takes human beings and transforms them into puppets. And it takes puppets and makes them seem human. Occasionally, it combines puppets and humans until its hard to tell where one begins and the other ends.

Thats the easy part of describing this French companys latest piece. The hard part is describing the initially creepy, gradually mesmerizing and eventually moving effect this puppet-human-dance spectacle has on the viewer.

Artistic director Philippe Genty, 76, has been creating performances that combine puppets, dance and optical illusions for nearly 40 years. With his wife and longtime collaborator Mary Underwood, his Compagnie Philippe Genty has wowed audiences in France and around the world.

This production of Forget Me Not is a reimagining of a show that premiered in 1992 at the Theatre de la Ville in Paris. The current version is a collaboration between Gentys company and students from the Nord-Trondelag University College of Verdal in Norway. After a run at Shibuyas Parco Theater, the show embarks on an eight-city Japan tour before returning for one performance at the New National Theatre, Tokyo.

Gentys productions usually require six months of rehearsals. The director writes that he always starts with the shows decor, which is never realistic, it must be constantly evolving, thereby giving free reign to the spectators imagination. He also has an aversion to performers entering from the wings; he prefers that they suddenly appear on the stage from the subconscious, they evolve, they transform, and then they disappear.

Forget Me Not certainly looks like it took ages to perfect. It opens on a stark white stage with simple backdrops designed to resemble a snow-covered landscape. When the dancers appear, they crawl across the stage like worms. Some of them look like inanimate objects being dragged, but the stage isnt moving, and no one is dragging them. The effect is discomforting a writhing mass of human flesh that seems to blur the line between doll and human, compounded by the fact that several of the dancers are wearing lifelike (but lifeless) masks covering their entire faces.

You would think this humans-moving-like-dolls device would get old, but Forget Me Not is endlessly inventive. All the movement-based stories and visual tableaux are executed with a playful spirit that occasionally turns melancholic or mildly sexual. Dancers cavort inside fluffy, marshmallow-like balls, swirl in the middle of giant bolts of silk, and constantly lift and throw each other with such effortless ease that they must be in unimaginably good physical shape.

Thinking back on the performance, Im still uncertain about how many puppets were onstage and how many humans. Sometimes bodies seemed so weightless when they were thrown (and then landed so hard on the ground, sometimes on their heads) that I was certain they were dolls. But then they got up and continued dancing. Was there some sleight-of-hand going on? Im sure thats exactly what the creators wanted me to think.

The director writes that his work cannot be pigeonholed into any of the usual categories: dance, theater, puppetry or circus. Moreover, it is practically impossible to describe its theme. A handicap that we are more than happy to assume.

Certainly Forget Me Not manages to be both a spectacle and to feel quite intimate. The music is lively and accompanied by beautiful singing, and while there may be no clear narrative, the show never makes the audience feel theyve missed something.

Continue reading here:
Forget Me Not leaves an abiding impression

Mexico City As Mexicos national human rights ombudsman, Raul Plascencia Villanueva oversees a sizable corps of investigators who look into the atrocities and massacres that commonly put the country in the headlines.

The job has made Mr. Plascencia a raft of enemies, but they are not the crooked cops and corrupt politicians behind some of the abuses currently roiling Mexico. His fiercest foes are human rights monitors, who say he is inept, unconcerned about crime victims, and beholden to politicians.

They are battling Plascencias attempt to obtain another five-year term to lead theNational Human Rights Commission, a semi-autonomous entity that receives its budget equivalent of $115 million entirely from the federal government.

Led by a former Roman Catholic priest, Alberto Athie, some 80 groups advocating for human rights, social justice, and more effective government presented Congress with a demand last month that Plascencia be impeached from his post. They accused him of casting a blind eye on innumerable human rights violations in Mexico.

The movement against Plascencia began with the failure of the National Human Rights Commission to shed light on the late June killing of 22 civilians southwest of Mexico City that eventually was tied to Mexican soldiers by the news media. It intensified after the disappearance late last month of 43 student teachers whod been detained by police in Guerrero state. They remain missing.

The damage to the country is enormous. Rule of law is at stake, Mr. Athie says.

Nearly a quarter of a century ago, legislators created the National Human Rights Commission to fight the kind of impunity that allowed police and soldiers to routinely use torture, and let the government in the 1960s and 1970s launch a dirty war on leftists that left hundreds disappeared.

The commission has no judicial or police powers. It receives complaints, deploys investigators to probe them, and issues recommendations. But the ombudsman potentially has a powerful bully pulpit to ensure protection for victims of official abuse, to air cases in public, and to put a spotlight on officials or institutions that prey on the citizenry.

In certain ways, the debate swirling around Plascencia is emblematic of deeper concerns about Mexicos governance. Legislators create institutions to investigate or prosecute wrongdoing that look good on paper, but then appoint ineffectual leaders who respond to political interests and allow operations to unfold with little transparency and few results, allowing corruption and abuses to go on.

Mexico suffers from a disease impunity, says Ernesto Lopez Portillo Vargas, head of the Institute for Security and Democracy, a think tank on security reform. It is a system of impunity throughout the institutional establishment.

The rest is here:
Mexico's human rights chief accused of ignoring powerful abusers

Ive been married since 1992. I barely have time for the husband I have, but if I wanted to get something going on the side, Id know just where to go. Many times a day I get spam marketing messages from websites whose purpose is to introduce married people to one another for the purpose of launching an affair. That isnt my cup of tea, but there are seven billion in the world, and different people want different things.

TIME magazine is a tiny pamphlet these days. My dad was a magazine publisher today we would say print magazine publisher but when my dad was working there was no other way to publish and he predicted the rise of ultra-targeted marketing when I was a kid in the nineteen-seventies. You cant blame advertisers for wanting to reach their specific niche of customers, he said.

Now an advertisers dream is reality. Advertisers dont flock to TIME magazine anymore, because whats the readership demographic for TIME? Its people who can read. Advertisers want more targeting than that. They want to reach just CPAs who own cats, or parents of talented-and-gifted twins.

We can reach any target market now. We can find just the people we want to talk to why should we bother anyone else, and why would we pay to reach the wrong audience?

Thats why it makes no sense when corporate and institutional folks complain that theyre awash in unwanted resumes and applications for their available positions. Have the last fifty years in marketing passed these people by?

They get deluged with responses because they arent targeting their job ads. They blast them out on every available medium and paste them on every surface. Of course theyre swamped with replies! The message in the job ad is Come one, come all!

We write job ads very badly and we market them badly. When you put a job ad up on any of the major careers sites, youre bound to get blasted with inappropriate resumes, but then again you asked for it. If you took the time to understand your target customer meaning the small set of perfect job candidates who could make a great fit for your opportunity before broadcasting your job ads far and wide, youd get far fewer responses to your ad and make your new hire more quickly.

Who wants to plow through piles of resumes? Some poor deluded managers believe that the more widely they spread the net and the more resumes they see, the more thorough their recruiting process has been. We hear that sentiment expressed every day. I really want to make sure I see a wide cross-section of the available talent market, managers say. Thats poor leadership and bad business. Youre wasting your own time and the time of many other people not just the candidates themselves but your colleagues in HR and recruiting, too to satisfy your curiosity and fill in the gaps in your knowledge of your own talent community.

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The Right Way To Post Job Openings