Shake the Sphere with Sid
Shake the Sphere with Sid
Podcast Description
Drawing on friends, people I’ve worked with in the theatre and at the university—writers, actors, composers, scholars, teachers—I explore the two halves (hence the word “Sphere’ in the podcast title) of their lives. One sphere is: what they do in life and how they came to do it. I get at this by asking them to tell me both a favorite line and then a work that have stayed with them, influenced them all their lives. And the other sphere is: how their work influences the way they see others, how it defines them, shapes them. The podcast series was inspired by a precious undergraduate of mine who said simply, “You are what you do.”
Podcast Insights
Content Themes
Focuses on the intersection of theater, literature, and personal identity, with episodes featuring discussions on favorite literary works and their impact, such as Shakespeare's influence on character development and the significance of contemporary theater practices.
“Shake the Sphere with Sid”
Sidney Homan is the author of thirteen books and editor of eight collections of essays on Shakespeare and the modern playwrights, and an actor and director in commercial and university theatres. He has been named the University of Florida’sTeacher/Scholar of the Year. His prize-winning Beckett’s Theatres: Interpretations for Performance emerged from his tour of Florida prisons with a production of Waiting for Godot. In A Fish in the Moonlight, he recounts stories of his youth in South Philly and his experience telling them to children on the hospital’s Pediatric Bone Marrow Unit. Bloomsbury/Methuen has published Comedy Acting for Theatre: The Art and Craft of Performing in Comedies, which he wrote with the New York director Brian Rhinehart. And for Routledge Press his most recent book is Pivotal Lines in Shakespeare and Others: Finding the Heart of the Play. He has also written the libretto for the opera The Golem of Prague, with a score by the composer Paul Richards.
About the Podcast:
Drawing on friends, people I’ve worked with in the theatre and at the university—writers, actors, composers, scholars, teachers—I explore the two halves (hence the word “Sphere” in the podcast title) of their lives. One sphere is: what they do in life and how they came to do it. I get at this by asking them to tell me both a favorite line and then a work that has stayed with them, influenced them all their lives. And the other sphere is: how their work influences the way they see others, how it defines them, shapes them. The podcast series was inspired by a precious undergraduate of mine who said simply, “You are what you do.”
Sid talks with Lawrence Quill, one of the most brilliant and inventive of thinkers, whose inquiries run from the use of nostalgia in politics to governments' recourse to secrecy. Professor of Political Science at San Jose State University, Lawrence has been a Technology and Democracy Fellow at the Center for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and the Humanities at Cambridge University. He is also the Co-Director of the (wonderfully named) Loneliness Project at his university. The discussion ranges from the idea that our so-called reality might just be a simulation, to the pleasure of having conversations not just with the living but with the dead as well. Quill's inspiration here was Machiavelli's ”Letter to Vettori” of 1513.
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