House of Alba

The House of Alba is one of the most prominent aristocratic families in Europe with ties to the Spanish monarchy. The Alba heritage is one the family has worked to preserve for over 500 years. Normally in order to see pieces from the Alba collection, one would need to visit one of the families’ palaces around the world. Therefore, it was such a privilege to observe more than 130 works of art created by a handful of master artists throughout Europe. Impeccable pieces from the Antiquity, Renaissance, Baroque and even the Twenty-First century were on display. The works presented are compelling enough to stand alone, but together, the Alba collection offers an insight into the role the family had on world history. Fernando Álvarez de Toledo,…

He completed it on June 19,1936 and left Madrid , which was becoming a dangerous place then was kidnapped and assassinated on the 18th or 19th of August 1936. This play is about a woman whose name is Bernarda Alba and her 5 unmarried daughters who live with her 2 servants the head maid La Poncia who knows Bernarda very well. In this play you will see no man on stage, Lorca subtitled the play (Drama of women in the village of Spain) because the theatre scene in spain had more female actors than…

How would an actor playing the part of Bernarda Alba in Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba use Duende, knowledge and understanding of Franco’s Spain when preparing to play this role? The House of Bernarda Alba is a play by the Spanish dramatist Federico Garcia Lorca. It has always been related to a group of other plays such as Yerma and Blood Wedding, labelling them as a ‘rural trilogy’. However Lorca did not plan to include it in his trilogy of the Spanish earth, which he did not finish when…

Hamlet’s monolog is one governed by rationality. It is a meditation on life and death, being alive and not being, over the disadvantages of existence and the act of suicide. Hamlet compares life with death. He sees life as missing the power, humans as being exposed to the blows of life and outrageous fortune. The only way to dodge the blows will be to stop existing. The death is thus a desirable state. Nevertheless, it is also seen as a journey to the unknown, to a place for which there is no…

In the plays, A Streetcar Named Desire and The House of Bernarda Alba, gender roles are discussed often. In A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche, Stella, and Stanley display the exaggeration of gender roles in order to criticize them. Blanche’s character is so over the top that her display of gender roles makes the audience question the necessity of the gender roles in place. Stella and Stanley are near perfect models of gender norms and the extreme nature of their problems displays clear reasons…

Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! tells the gripping tale of Alexandra, a farmer on the Nebraska plains and her ordeals as she faces obstacles with her farm life and personal life. The novel expands into further character plots, however, specifically that of Emil and Marie, Alexandra’s brother and his married love interest, respectively. Ending in tragedy, Cather memorializes them with this passage: “But the stained, slippery grass, the darkened mulberries, told only half the story. Above Marie and…

the big move from New York to Texas. The house we lived in was my childhood home and my husband and I shared it for fifteen years together. This was not going to be an easy task. Our first hurdle was preparing for this huge adventure. Secondly, we needed to drive both cars down. That meant that we would not have the other person to take over driving when our eyelids became as heavy as weights over our eyes. Finally, we would need to settle into this strange new world. My husband’s family…

Growing up in my childhood, I never really made a lot of friends. In my early years of education, I was very sociable, but to my dismay, people just didn’t seem the friendly type. I never really did feel safe in the school district. That being said, there was only one place that I would always go to relax and get the stress of my mind, and that would be my humble abode, my home. Because I walked to school on a regular basis, I always knew where to go, even during the renovations. I mean, I could…

This selection was written to describe the conditions of tenement houses, overcrowded slums that filled New York City during the late 1900’s. The first sentence of this selection states, “The first tenement New York knew bore the mark of Cain from its birth, though a generation passed before the writing was deciphered.” The author means that tenement houses were “cursed,” or were terrible creations from the very beginning, but this was ignored and not tended to for a long time. The owners of…

we arrived to Dayton it was dark. Unfortunately for us, the house were we going was not in the city but the outskirts. Once we showed up at the house, we were both pretty creped out. A really run down house in the woods, on top of a hill, no trespassing signs everywhere, and only one porch light on. It was the kind of light that is plugged in, but hanging by its wires swinging back and forth in the wind. The sunroom on the house was collapsed, only two walls were able to hold the ceiling up. One…