The director, Marianne Elliott, does what she can to enliven a dense text, shifting the action forward several centuries to an Italy visually akin to the films of Visconti and a climactic slaughter that is staged quite literally as a dance of death.
Fittingly, in this portion the narrative of the text shifts as well.
It will come as no shock to most readers that I fall into the latter camp, and there is nothing in this text to shift me over to the other side of the argument.
It is an exploration of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that Chiang reflects in the text's shifting tense structure.
She was moving up and down the block, and had been texting her shifting coordinates to me for half an hour.
The text's shifts in style are matched by dark artwork that mixes caricatured renderings of Munch's boozy, bickering bohemian clique with careful re-creations of works in progress, photos and images of mental strife.
That same year, she collaborated with Cendrars on the publication of a poem describing a trip from Moscow to Paris on the Trans-Siberian railway, in which Cendrars's text is shifted this way and that by Delaunay's colour.
"We were using five different ways of communicating with each other, including e-mail, text, phone, shift-management software and a manager logbook," said Mike Leatherwood, who founded and owns the chain.
Mr. Caird's script is efficient and fast paced, though toward the end, when Schumann's correspondence dries up as his mental afflictions take over, the text necessarily shifts toward narrative, and the musical sections grow longer.
Kac began investigating the use of holograms as a medium for poetic expression, and in 1983 he published his first "holopoem," "Holo/Olho" ("Holo/Eye"), which rendered the words of the title in holographic text that shifted as the viewer changed position.
