Van Gogh’s Ear
Opening Night: August 17, 2017
Closing: September 10, 2017
Theater: The Pershing Square Signature Center
The vibrancy of Van Gogh’s paintings is only half his story. He frantically worked on several paintings at a time, experimenting with color and form. Time became his enemy as violent fits of madness and terrifying hallucinations consumed his being. Wrestling a fractured psyche with his determination to paint the beautiful, fragile world he saw, Van Gogh revealed his struggle to his brother Theo. ERC’s Van Gogh’s Ear brings the tormented creativity of Van Gogh to life. “If my work is that of a madman … I should prefer my insanity to the sanity of others”
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August 17, 2017
The blunt title of the exquisite “Van Gogh’s Ear,” now at the Pershing Square Signature Center, does not refer to art history’s most notorious act of self-mutilation. Or not only to that.
Yes, there is a sequence in this animated tone poem from Ensemble for the Romantic Century that shows Vincent van Gogh shyly proffering what would appear to his severed ear, in a bloody bundle, to a young woman. But the titular ear of this singular show, written by Eve Wolf and directed by Donald T. Sanders, is much more a matter of what and how van Gogh heard.
That would appear to be not so different from what and how van Gogh saw. It is “the painter’s eye” that we usually speak of. But this production makes an appealing case for the interconnectedness of the senses.
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