TED Talk - Julie Taymor: Theater and the Imagination

A great TED Talk on the artist and the need to respect the imagination of the audience. The Lion King is one of the most successful Broadway plays of all time.

She talks, in the beginning of the lecture, about an initiation ceremony she witnessed in Indonesia, which seem to me a living example of the origins of theater in ritual.

Here is a brief piece on the origins of Western Theater:

The earliest days of western theatre remain obscure, but the oldest surviving plays come from ancient Greece. Most philologists agree that Greek theatre evolved from staged religious choral performances, during celebrations to Dionysus the Greek God of wine and ecstasy (Dithyrambos). There are, however, findings suggesting the possible existence of theatre-like performances much earlier, such as the famous "Blind Steps" of the Minoan Palace at Knossos: a broad stone stairway descending to a flat stone courtyard that leads nowhere - an arrangement strongly suggesting that the courtyard was used for a staged spectacle and the stairway was in fact used as seating.

And here is some biography on Julie Taymor:

Director/designer Julie Taymor talks about her boundary-shattering theater work -- such as turning The Lion King into an astonishing live musical. The key? Always respect, and rely on, the audience's imagination.

Working in musicals, Shakespeare, film and opera, Julie Taymor is a wildly imaginative and provocative director and designer. She is perhaps best known for having translated the film The Lion King to Broadway, a still-running show for which she also designed costumes, masks and puppets, wrote music and lyrics -- and won two Tony Awards. (She is the first woman to win a Tony for directing a musical.) She's also received MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships, as well as two Obies, an Emmy and an Oscar.

Her recent stage work has focused on opera, with a production of Mozart's The Magic Flute in New York in 2005, and Grendel, which she co-wrote, in Los Angeles and New York in 2006. Meanwhile, she has developed a fascinating career in the movies. Her most recent film is 2007's Across the Universe, a romp through the music of the Beatles. Add this to 1999's Titus, a visually remarkable adaptation of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, and the glorious Frida, a 2002 film about Frida Kahlo. Taymor is now working on a Broadway musical in collaboration with Bono based on Marvel Studios' Spider-Man.

Tags: TED Talk, Julie Taymor, Theater and the Imagination, The Lion King, art, ritual, musicals, ceremony