The Turbine Hall is both set and cinema, a real place and a place of illusions in Dean's Unilever commission.
"I thought, 'Well, what if the Underworld was a good place, a place of escape, what we think of in the "normal world" as a place of illusions.' " In her retelling of the Greek myth, Ms. Zollar said in program notes, Orpheus is bound by societal expectations while Eurydice choses to delight in the discovery of herself and to take flight into a new life.
The stage is a place of delicious illusion, a world of adults who never have to leave childhood pleasures behind.
In place of the illusion of freedom you can have within the neoliberal market, where you face numerous invisible but in fact (and for that reason) insurmountable obstacles, you create the obstacles yourself, at the right moment, limit your freedom on your own and thereby form an independent economy of relations as well as, in a way, creating your own norms for what freedom means.
In the place of these illusions, the young revolutionaries made the struggle against their own dictatorships their political priority, just as their Iraqi counterparts had done in vain 20 years earlier after the first gulf war.
The set seems alive: a magic maze of hidden windows, false fronts, peep holes, hiding spaces, balconies and revolving doors that accommodate all those who populate the play's tumultuous city, a place of amazing illusions that feels totally natural.
I ended my travels watching the broadcast of "La Traviata" in Las Vegas, a place defined by the embrace of illusion and verisimilitude, a place that shares all the benefits of the HD broadcasts: cheaper, easier, less intimidating.
Populated by birds, fish and animals, cyclists, smokers and donkey-riders, it is a place of abstractions and illusions, the everyday and the impossible.
In a more whimsical if still conceptual vein, there is GARDENS OF ILLUSION: Places of Wit and Enchantment (Cassell/Sterling, $29.95), by Sara Maitland and Peter Matthews.
