Dancers leap on tables, jump off statues, bounce off walls, belly dancing to hard zigzagging rhythms, achieving ecstasy via neatly dressed brass orchestras and copious supplies of beer and meat.
Vodou practitioners frequently aim to experience divine possession, as a spirit flows through their physical form, achieving ecstasy through the tools of everyday life.
Robinet identifies four components in the emergence of Taoism: #Philosophical Taoism, i.e. the Tao Te Ching and Zhuangzi #techniques for achieving ecstasy #practices for achieving longevity or immortality #exorcism.
I know a guy who recklessly deleted every e-mail in his in-box to achieve the ecstasy of "in-box zero".
Karen Armstrong approaches the history of Islam in a piously ecumenical spirit, declaring in her preface that human beings are "religious creatures because they are imaginative" and are therefore "compelled to search for hidden meaning and to achieve an ecstasy that makes them feel fully alive".
But, although the show is pleasing to watch, it never achieves the ecstasy one looks for in a musical.
There is something dionysiac about it; and, if the show achieves the ecstasy one looks for in a musical, it comes largely through the dance routines.
At first, it appears as if he covets both his brother's wife and her fortune, and India becomes suspicious as well — but she also seems flickeringly jealous, and, where the young woman in Hitchcock kept her incestuous fantasies tightly contained, India avows them with a full-throated ecstasy (achieved, as it were, with yet another Hitchcockian touch).
He's winningly avuncular and captures the breezy insouciance of the character, but "The Bare Necessities," the best-known song from the movie, doesn't really achieve liftoff into musical-theater ecstasy.
Much of this music really is a vision of another world, because of the heightened invention and compression of Scriabin's forms - the late piano sonatas are all cast in astonishingly distilled single movements; the last two symphonic works, the Poem of Ecstasy and Prometheus, achieve their otherworldly ambitions in 20 minutes or so - and the intensity of his unique harmonic language.
