Not the communist party manifesto set to music: A Dollhouse diptych

[hazelk]

I think a Marxist reading of Dollhouse works best and no one plays musical Marx better than Kurt Weill. With or without that Brecht guy. Youkali Tango is intended as a doll’s eye view of the show - an interpretive dance of false consciousness. Mandalay speaks for the clients (and not so much with the dancing).

Title: Youkali Tango
Song writers: Kurt Weill & Roger Fernay
Artists: Jeff Cohen, John Mauceri, RIAS Sinfonietta Berlin & Ute Lemper
Fandom: Dollhouse
Spoilers: S1.1-12
Warning: Scenes from the show
Format: DivX
Size: 42.7 MB

Summary: The sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. The opium of the people.

Download here (Right/control click and save target as)
Stream at BAM here. Embedded below.
Lyrics with translation

Title: The Mandalay Song
Song writers: Kurt Weill & Bertold Brecht
Artists: The American Conservatory Theatre Cast
Fandom: Dollhouse
Spoilers: S1.0-13
Warnings: Sexual assault, institutional rape, violence, exploitation, abuse and bloody revolution
Format: DivX
Size: 34.8 MB

Summary: The universal prostitution of the worker

Download here (Right/control click and save target as)
Stream at BAM here. Embedded below.
Lyrics

Comments

[quinara]

I'm not very good with vids as a medium (in the sense that the language feels very foreign compared to fic), but I wanted to give these a try because Dollhouse pings for me much more as a show for meta than for fic - and I liked them! There is clearly so much more to get out of them than I've managed in two viewings, but in the first I really like the sense of all the personalities forced upon the actives and the influence that spreads into their doll state: the doll state is the finish of a dance rather than a random position. My main reaction to the second is yeah, revolution! They were very cool, anyway.

[hazelk]

Welcome to the dark side! I think vids are more like meta, although some are meta on particular characters and then there's meta on vids. But I've always made up pictures to music the way other people write stories so vidding seemed very natural once I realised it existed.

I think you're right the doll state is ground zero, I hadn't thought of it that way explicitly but the vid went there anyway, which is cool.

[quinara]

Hee! And yes, I'm inclined to think all fic is meta as well, so I don't really know what I was going for there. Vids seem to state their statements a bit more loudly I suppose. (I've only ever had one vid-like idea - well, more like there's an Arctic Monkeys song that is AtS S5 - but I wouldn't have the first clue where to start, so I'm mostly happy with it sitting there.)