The Times Quotidian

New Original Works Festival, REDCAT, 22, 23, 24 September 2011
By Alan Berman

An enthusiastic sold-out crowd saw a triple bill last week of two new dance works and an elaborate puppet/human operetta in the annual NOWFest at REDCAT, a three-week series that showcases new works by Los Angeles-based dance, theater, music, and multimedia performance artists.

Michel Kouakou began the evening with his pseudo-solo Sack, in which he was the primary moving object. A large sack suspended from the ceiling functioned as the only prop — unless one also counts the several stationary dancers who also occupied the stage, all of whom had their shirts pulled over their faces for the duration of the 20-minute performance. Kouakou’s movement cerainly contrasted with the rigidity of his collaborators: throughout the work his dancing was fluid, varied, and rapid. Near that start, he spun his hands in front of himself as if reeling in an impossibly long cable. At another point he was in a yoga-like pigeon pose, sitting near the rear of the stage on one leg; then he ambulated in hopping pigeon poses to the middle, alternately snapping his legs out from under himself, pulling himself forward with the freed limb like a darting crab. Even though Kouakou has danced with other companies, notably the Reggie Wilson Performance Group, and has worked with many international choreographers, his approach to dance is so singular that it is fortunate that he has created his own work that reveals his very deep understanding of the power of movement. The piece itself is personal and raised many questions, especially about the significance of the sack, the unmoving cast, and whatever narrative Kouakou had in mind. Perhaps this reaction speaks more to the nature of such a festival: performers premiere work that is still in process and subject to revision, revision informed by the performance itself, which cannot be simulated in rehearsal. As it was, Sack served as a vehicle for Kouakou to display his considerable virtuosity as a dancer.

Kouakou returned in a featured role for the next work, Victoria Marks’s Medium Big Inefficient Considerably Imbalanced Dance, a work in which five other dancers moved to varying amounts of silence and harshly manipulated music excerpts from Bonobo and Kamikaze Ground Crew. As with the first work of the evening, there were some intriguing moments in Marks’s work, the highlight being a dirge by  two dancers approaching each other from opposite edges of the stage; they reached out with great yearning as they drew ever closer, their bodies growing more tense as we anticipated their meeting. And just when they came together, they missed their chance to finally embrace, sadly continuing their grim procession past each other, eventually reaching each other’s starting points, having never touched. Marks, a Guggenheim, Alpert, and Fulbright recipient, doesn’t pander to the audience or her dancers; while she requires great skill from them, she doesn’t incorporate many recognizable techniques. She draws on  disparate sources in her choreography: perhaps her movement work with elderly men informed some of the original solo and ensemble phrases, such as when the dancers, particularly Wilifried Souly, were called upon to move awkwardly, with tightness in the shoulders and back, as though dealing with an internal struggle through the external mechanism of the body. For contrast, there were humorous juxtapositions of music and movement throughout the work, which according to Marks is rooted in improvisation although this dance didn’t include it overtly.

The evening concluded with the elaborate production Zoophilic Follies by puppet duo Tandem and perverse cabaret/chamber group Timur and The Dime Museum. The narrative was loosely and comically based on the Daedalus myth, and although billed as a puppet opera, Zoophilic Follies was far more opera  than puppet, with extravagant, exotic music composed by Tandem’s Daniel Corral (who served as conductor and accordionist for the band) and otherworldly singing from poly-tessitura vocalist Timur Bekbosunov. The crazy catch-all staging included rear-projected images, handheld puppets and masks sized from a few inches to several feet, actors in the aisles, and complex costumes (by Sandra Burns).  There were committed performances from Dorian Wood (Minos/Minotaur), Abby Travis (Pasiphae), and Maesa Rae (Ariadne). This thrilling, precious project was as entertaining as it was unique, driven by ever-engaging songs, instrumental solos, and tight ensemble playing.  The well-paced direction and video contributions of Caitlin Lainoff and DanRae Wilson were especially notable given the intrinsic difficulties of staging such a complicated work.

NOWFest encourages creative performers to take chances and all three of these works were challenging and risky. The evening was a fitting end to a series that featured the Lucky Dragons, Rosanna Gamson/World Wide, and Cindy Derby, among others. It is fortunate that Los Angeles has a state-of-the-art venue in REDCAT whose management sees the value of mashing up the significant creative energy of such local artist/performers.

Sandra Bernhard, REDCAT, Los Angeles, August 12, 2011
Performances run through August 21. www.redcat.org
By Alan Berman

Sandra Bernhard is back in L.A. for a two-week run at REDCAT to promote her recent album, I Love Being Me, Don’t You? Or perhaps the album promotes the tour–it’s hard to say since she included hardly any of the recorded material in her 100-minute performance Friday night. If you know Bernhard only through YouTube videos or guest appearances on talk shows, or even from her albums, you don’t know her vast range until you’ve seen her live. The show was a balanced blend of standup, stories, and music.

Bernhard’s an assured, emotional singer, and the audience responded to the risk inherent in the intermixing of music and narrative. After all, if the story isn’t strong enough, the music could smother it; likewise, if the story conveys too much, the music could seem gimmicky. In more than one sequence, the exquisite tension she created between sentiment and raucous hilarity left us wondering if we should laugh or send condolences. Sure, she took a few of her trademark cheap shots at the celebrities who are the typical easy targets. She has insisted in interviews that she’s not being cruel with these remarks, just honest, and we would expect no less from her. But the highlights of her show weren’t the insults–what she did best was that inspired threading of songs and stories.

Throughout the show it was obvious that she had power to burn, that she could probably have performed another hour without letting up. She emphasized during the show that she’s a working mother, not so that we would feel sorry for her, I suppose, but so that we would understand that this stage work takes preparation, that it’s no accident that she’s in condition to give us what we came for, and we should be grateful that she held up her end of the bargain. And because she has material to spare, the show won’t be stale after several nights.

Sometimes she riffed so quickly during her improv moments that she faltered–she was willing to sacrifice perfect delivery for the sake of spontaneity; after all, the show isn’t an act, it’s Sandra Bernhard being herself and she didn’t want to act like herself. But the songs were tightly rehearsed, and even if some of the tunes were chosen for ironic reasons, she never made fun of the music itself or left any doubt about its value to her. She picked tunes from her lifetime: ’60s anthems, Motown, current girl bands, the Beatles. Fortunately, her splendid band—musical director/pianist Carla Pattulo, drummer Alex Stickles, guitarist Mike Manning, and background vocalist Jason Joseph—are serious pros and stayed out of the way when their star was solo. But when she took a five-minute break, they took on Paul Desmond’s “Take Five” with genuine enthusiasm and terrific solos from Manning and Stickles. When she returned, she and Jason Joseph did some fine harmony work.

It’s not as though everything in Bernhard’s life is funny–she just keeps us interested, even with the occasional lack of a punch line. We trust her, despite her making things difficult for us. I won’t share any of her astounding lines, but offer this instead: Bernhard is a fearless artist who turns her life and opinions into humor that invites us to be disturbed and sometimes outraged. She allows herself to feel more deeply and express more completely than most of us have the courage to do.

Pat Graney Company: Faith, REDCAT, April 28th – May 1st, 2011
by Alan Berman

Choreographer Pat Graney’s work is an unmistakably original artwork—fresh, timeless, and challenging. Graney is the recipient of dozens of awards for her choreography, including 11 NEA fellowships and the Alpert Award in the Arts. Her work presented at REDCAT recently is a re-creation of a 1991 piece that, in time, became the first segment of the Faith Tryptych, which, thanks to numerous grants, is being entirely resurrected this year. The one-hour Faith section stands on its own as a unique conception of movement and social commentary.

From the start we are drawn into an unusual experience: we witness animated tableaux vivants representing Caravaggio paintings of religious scenes, including The Crucifixion of St. Peter and The Death of the Virgin Mary. But these tableaux are enhanced: the audience is privy to the methodical preparation of the scene followed by a sliver of stillness, then a gentle descent of the victim to the floor while the other company members reassemble. The industrious and graceful scurrying in assembly and disassembly of the scene is not unlike that of Pilobolus during their shadow work, although it predates their trademark fluid silhouettes by almost two decades. The first section ends with a single dancer proceeding towards the audience as darkness envelopes her. Throughout the tableaux we hear the elevated Latin mass music of Arvo Pärt, a sonic backdrop as essential as the exceptional lighting design by Ben Geffen and Amiya Brown, drawing on the original design by Meg Fox.

Tim Buckley’s heart-breaking “Song to the Siren,” as sung by the Cocteau Twins’ Liz Fraser, becomes the chilling background for the playful summer sequence, using small (nine-inch) red fitness inflatables rather than vinyl beach balls. The dancers variously throw, roll, glide on, and encumber the inflated balls as they dance what could be simulations of seals or mermaids. Their bodies are sometimes board-flat as they sling themselves forward in formation, each dancer’s ball supporting them in their slide front to back, after which they might catch the ball between their legs or do a precision throw to another dancer. The ensemble phrasing here is tricky and delighting: sometimes they act in sequence, other times they start and end precisely together. One can’t help but think of Hart Crane’s “Voyages” while hearing the Buckley song during this uninhibited play. How sad this joy is! The dancers wear white, so the many paths taken by the red balls in both directions across the stage become their own visual pattern that lulls us as the sirens lull those out to sea. “Swim to me,” the song says, “let me enfold you.” The movers think they’re playing with the ball—but it’s the ball that’s playing with them. This simplistic idea could have ruined the work if it were handled badly—but, as with Buckley’s song, their committed innocence is unassailable.

The next segment begins with the introduction of the theme that is visited later, which might best be described as the torture faced by many women in our society as they feel compelled to conform to outward expectations, and in fact regard it as their duty to participate in this institutionalized discomfort. A single dancer is seen taping her feet so that they will fit into the taper of her red high-heeled shoes; once she wedges herself into them, she stumbles as she leaves the stage. All the dancers soon have red heels and perform the segment in spite of, or in adaptation of, this counter-functional footwear. And they have changed outfits: no longer in white, they wear black micro-dresses as they move around the stage with the distorted lengths of their bare legs–it is tremendously un-sexy despite all the skin exposure and physicality. The dancer who began the section eventually reappears, fussing with her face and body in a mime of failure to achieve the cultural standards; no matter what she does, she does not meet the bar she feels is set for her. Of course, this is all my interpretation, but it’s not a subtle set of gestures and the dancer is a convincing and talented communicator.

The remarkable last section is almost too tender to attempt a description. We are witness to more tableaux, but these turn out to be with entirely naked bodies under subdued lighting. Somehow in the conception and performance of the dancers, who proceed at a calm pace throughout, there is not the slightest hint of sensationalism or exploitation. On Graney’s canvas we see a collusion of female forms freed to be individual and complete. After the various scenes are done, all the dancers step slowly towards the audience as darkness again falls, a moving testimony to the power of women to transform experience.

There is richness here that we should not take for granted. Graney has figured out how to create an hour-long work that, despite being sectionalized, is a unified piece which builds on itself and offers endless visual interest. It is compelling that several of the dancers in the performance were with Graney’s company 20 years ago–and all the dancing was expert, selfless, and, like the choreography itself, wholly genuine and direct.

Eiko & Koma: Retrospective Project I: Regeneration, REDCAT, March 3 and 5, 2011
by Alan Berman

Raven, performed at Danspace in 2010

The singular duo Eiko & Koma returned to Los Angeles for the first segment of their three-year retrospective based on 40 years of performing together, which have included many honors, grants, collaborations, and documentations. This Project I features one work each from 1976, 1984, and 2010. I attended two of their five performances at REDCAT.

The newest of the three works, Raven, established the unwavering grim tone and largo tempo for the evening. Eiko & Koma build and modulate tension through magnified examinations of movement. While they do eventually arrive at new locations or orientations, it is the protracted journey that conveys their unique perspective as dancers. Eiko begins Raven alone, emerging over many minutes from an imaginary egg. Her calibrated control over her body extends even to her toes, which opened almost identically in both performances after her foot “cracked” the shell. As she experiences her initially clumsy, outer-shell new life, learning about her feather bed and about locomotion, Koma enters amid the sounds of tribal drumming and chanting. Koma moves with focus, but it’s not clear what he’s representing: another, older bird? A human who trains them? A creator being? Twice she drapes herself over his back; they then roll over and are separated. As the lights dim to complete darkness, we see her twitching.

REGENERATION II:NIGHT TIDE (1984) performed at ADF 2010 from Eiko and Koma

Night Tide was their first work that featured complete nudity, which is a fact that shouldn’t matter, but it does give one the chance to present their rationale for being unclothed: Eiko has said that fish and stones are naked–“why not us?” And one can also discuss their sublime 60-year-old bodies. Eiko’s form is compact, girl-like, a dynamic fluid human sculpture. Her attention to her movements demands our attention–how could we not want to watch her body respond to her instructions? Koma is sturdy and muscular, broad-chested and tree-like. Their contrasts are compelling and sometimes arresting, such as when Eiko curls up in a cobra pose toward Koma, who has knelt forward, offering his neck for her arms to wrap around. The simple beauty of this elongated moment is almost healing.

After seeing the performance a second time, I noted the precision with which certain movements were replicated while other phrases were not rigidly copied. The duo convey a sense of inventing each movement: not improvising, but discovering each one, then executing it.

When they started performing in the 1970s, they called every performance White Dance. The version featured here is a distillation of an evening-length version from 2009. The sometimes-intrusive music is the anonymous medieval “Agincourt Carol” and a movement from J. S. Bach’s Keyboard Concerto Number 5. But there are also extended silences, just as there are extended periods during which we can appreciate the range that exists in the barely perceptible motion spectrum: there’s slow, and there’s really slow, and there’s just plain impossibly slow. We become aware that there is no such state as complete motionlessness, only minute slivers of degrees of movement.

White Dance (Revival)

The comprehensive E&K web site includes full-length videos of all the tour works. What must be conveyed here is the sense of their apparently limitless devotion to their self-described “delicious movement.” One of the videos on their web site is actually presented at double speed and its unfolding still brings to mind melting ice. And while they never studied formal Japanese dance, their mask-like expressions and sustained stillnesses certainly echo exposure to the Butoh style. Watching the videos does not fairly represent either of these qualities as well as being present at a live performance.

My favorite moment both nights came when they saw us, not through their sometimes tortured existential expressions, but at the end of the last work, after they had left the stage and returned to our applause. They stepped patiently among the several dozen potatoes that Koma had dropped from two sacks earlier in the work. After they reached the center of the stage and faced us, their eyes were full of respect for us, mirroring ours for them. Koma placed his hands on his thighs and the performers took deep, patient, humble bows, as though finding out about bows for the first time. This communication suggests that Eiko and Koma know of Whitman’s assertion that great poets need great audiences. We felt ennobled by their acknowledgement of our witnessing their mature commitment to a unique vision of dance.

Iannis Xenakis: Now and Tomorrow
Curtis Roads: New Work, with Brian O’Reilly, Video, REDCAT, January 30, 2011
by Nancy Cantwell

The CalArts Center for Experiment in Art, Information and Technology (CEAIT) Festival returned this year to REDCAT with an extraordinary three nights of concerts and two symposia featuring the work of the highly experimental architect and composer Iannis Xenakis. Presented in conjunction with the MOCA exhibition Iannis Xenakis: Composer, Architect, Visionary, Angelinos got a rare opportunity to dote on the work of this complex hybrid master.

The culminating CEAIT program included Xenakis works, Dikhthas (1979), Epicycles (1989), Akanthos (1977) and Polytope de Cluny (1972), and that night’s opening performance featured the work of Curtis Roads and Brian O’Rielly whose dynamic audiovisual collaborations were the perfect evenings’ aperitif. Roads and O’Rielly have conjured a most finely tuned experience between sight and sound. Working side by side they presented Flicker Tone Pulse, a collection new electronic and cinematic pieces composed since 2009 as well as a few from the previous set Point Line Cloud (2005). The sophistication of pairing new music with visuals reaches for even higher ground in these works due to the intense synchronistic event that is achieved. The drama is not imposed on by theme or narrative such as seen in the collaborative work of Bill Viola in the Tristan Project, but emanates from within the electronic/visual landscape. Curtis cultivates his purely computer generated tonalities from the “…realm of microsound, of sound grains. First predicted in the acoustical theories of the physicist Dennis Gabor and the polymath Iannis Xenakais, the microsonic realm remained invisible for centuries.” Part of the extraordinary experience manifests as the duo of composer and filmmaker operate in tandem, live, so that even as the materials of electronics and video are perhaps a step removed from the temporal unique performance of say a classical orchestra, the every nuance of the production feels of the moment, a distinct performance.

Point Line Cloud (selections) from Brian O’Reilly

The excitement generated by this kind of staging is now being played out on a grander scale in Miami Beach at the New World Center, home of the New World Symphony. This latest of Frank Gehry design performance venues takes public broadcasting to the next level. Simulcasts of New World Symphony performances are relayed to the general outdoor park public via a hundred and sixty-seven speaker system as well as accompanying video projections that are displayed on an exterior wall, seven thousand feet square. What happens inside hall is reshaping the world of concert music and looking at the success of such partnerships as Curtis and O’Rielly it is a wonder to think of the dramatic possibilities. The New World Center is equipped with ten robotic cameras that project onto five curvilinear acoustic sails floating above and around the stage. And just as Curtis and O’Reilly work in tandem so do the filmmakers, composers, conductors and engineers (who can monitor and respond in real time to the subtlety of tempo), all now have the opportunity to explore simultaneous, supple performance possibilities.

Directly following Flicker Tone Pulse was, Dikhthas (1979), the first Xenakis composition of the evening and a duet of a different nature. This highly dynamic exchange between violin and piano is built of a series of individual, contrasting dialogues. Fiercely performed by violinist Mark Menzies (and the evening’s considerable conductor) and pianist Dzovig Markarian, Dikhthas bears little resemblance to the classic chamber combination of strings and piano and favors the differentiating factors between the two instruments in both range and density. The rapid and fast shifting exchange between instruments, connected yet wildly divergent, create an unmistakable anxiety akin to rapidly falling in and out of love. Extraordinarily compelling and heroically demanding of body, Menzies and Markarian delivered a virtuosic performance.

The idiom, “Back to the Future” has never felt more germane than when considering the finale of Xenakis: Now and Tomorrow—particularly when reflecting on the new hardscaping of multimedia performance, the Polytope de Cluny (1972) is clearly a harbinger of productions to come. Commissioned for the Festival d’Autonne and originally performed in the medieval ruins of the Baths of Cluny in the heart of Paris, Polytope de Cluny was a success unknown for its time. Running for sixteen months, four times daily and with attendance statistics over 200,000 it was a sound and light projection piece of a scale and sonority not yet experienced. Due to the historic nature of the performance site, the entire installation was erected within the walls utilizing a series of scaffolding and cables. All operations, the coordination of six hundred flashbulbs and three lasers were directed along paths determined by four hundred adjustable mirrors. The timing of light and sequences were programmed on a computer (circa 1972!) and subsequently converted into electromagnetic tape signals. Thus the twelve loudspeakers placed around Cluny were precisely coordinated with the light spectacle. One could not fault Xenakis for lack of tenacity.

While REDCAT was not in a position to reproduce the visual counterpart to Cluny the sound was ever faithful and Curtis, at the keyboard, kept to Xenakis’s propensity for volume. The layer upon layer of sound, distributed across eight channels included sonic material ranging from gongs, ceramic wind chimes, timpani rolls, and metallic, brassy entities. Cluny is also the first instance in France, much to the pride of Xenakis, to incorporate computer generated digitally synthesized sound into a composition. However, for all its ground breaking electronic prowess, the powerful crescendo of Cluny resides in the hands of a sustained, singularly plucked African thumb piano, and while this eventually gives way to a more complex conclusion, one is struck by the contrast and paradox of this deeply satisfying experience.

George Herms: THE ARTIST’S LIFE, REDCAT February 3, 2011 - February 5, 2011
by Rita Valencia

“Loving everyone. Knowing nothing.” —George Herms, on himself

In this joyously messy, shambling show, jazz fan and beat generation icon George Herms put together a happening/opera, framing his assemblage art with an all-star ensemble of L.A.’s jazz legends, the Bobby Bradford Mo’tet and  the Theo Saunders Group. Herms tuned in to the audience with bat-like radar, waiting for the last program to cease its rattling and the last guy to stop chattering to his girlfriend, then announced that we had just experienced The Afterparty (listed as the first piece in the program) in the lobby beforehand. Indeed, I reflected, my lobby experience had been really fun and party-like, running into old friends and being de-recognized by some people who had slipped my mind entirely. Then George lined up the (nearly all-male) ensemble of instrumentalists for intros that are usually saved for after a couple of sets and named this, his second piece,  “Curtain Call”. During “Darkness”, we were requested to turn on our cell phones in order to make some noise (as luck would have it mine was programmed for silence.)

“Opera” was used loosely–there was a soprano, Diana Briscoe, who didn’t really find a groove that night–but the jazz was tight. It was easy to be carried away by  solos from the likes of Vinny Golia, Azar Lawrence, Chuck Manning or Don Preston. Coltrane and  Monk, of course, had something to do with this. The show also channelled some of the spirit of L.A. jazz genius and musical bodhisattva Horace Tapscott (Herms listed him in the dedication) whose brilliant free jazz narrative experiments were as breathtakingly intense as they were heartbreakingly secret (largely unrecorded). Herms being the quintissential fanatic, the energy feedback loop only amplified the prodigious muscianship onstage.

Surrounding himself with this kind of heat, Herms stayed cool and in control. A huge video projection played across the back of the stage, its camera focussed on Herms’ handicrafts. He stamped letterforms on paper plates and tossed them out into the audience, made different shapes with cut up photographs, and used as interstitials slides of old work. During “Trane Cycle” stagehands rolled out a large rust bitten spiral staircase which was set dangling in clockwise motion upstage and used as a percussion instrument as Herms whacked it with short lengths of 2 by 4s. Later in the show he tethered it with an ungainly wired up mass of glittery trash and chicken wire. A giant beaten up metal buoy hung like a beautiful dead thing stage left. In the final act, Herms traipsed across stage encased in a giant triangular-shaped assemblage, putting the intrepid Briscoe at risk of sudden impalement. As a crescendo, the wiry Herms ran around the theater with two fists full of  demented pompoms devised from Venetian blind slats which made a delightful clamor as he shook them. Then Herms wriggled into a harness and had himself hoisted far above the stage, where he dangled for a while in the spotlight. It was a sort of grownup art kindergarten, to the tune of ultra-sophisticated sounds, and Herms revelled in his angst-less-ness most of the time. He did set aside a part of the show (“Facing Death”) for reflecting wistfully on friends and loved ones who had died; without any great sentiment or attempt at ‘wisdom’. Herms left us us only the faintest and most delicate brushstrokes of an abiding loneliness and anxious confusion.

This was not a show steeped in art theory. The Beats, as Herms has been known to say, were truly  “conservative” in hewing to romantic values of Beauty, Truth, Art, and anti-materialism. They were about undercutting Eisenhower America: a squaresville that nurtured burdgeoning consumerism, eschewed sincerity and embraced status, and tossed out any idea that threatened its zeal for comfort, conformity and conventionalism.  Appropriately, Herms went to junkyards and picked up trash to make art that recognizes a certain equality of form related to Zen philosphical ideas, but also has a gently political, anti-bourgeois slant.

The Beat generation was dissipating even as Herms came of age. It had had a good long run, starting in the late forties and extending into the early sixties, linked to a fast-evolving flow of jazz music. Even though the Beats emerged from the shadow of the Bomb, radical political analysis was never their bag. The Beats were into spiritual liberation, the liberation of the word (Ginsberg, Burroughs, Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Philip Lamantia and on), the alteration of consciousness, shifting frames of reference, exploring eastern thought–particularly Zen–getting high, and freeing the “self” from the strictures of straight life. The way history went down, with the Vietnam War, the draft, Civil Rights, and the Black Power movement, assassinations, conspiracies, riots, bloodied heads and students killed; the Beats were bound to become obsolete. The more trenchant and radical groups like Weathermen, Yippies, and  the Situationists (who were around even before the Beats and who attacked the Beats on the grounds of their slack political analysis) saw their relevance and visibility rise. It became more urgently necessary, given the challenges of civil rights, the draft, and the brutal realities of war and protest, for art to expose the underlayment of social repression in the very institutions of art and the academy, as well as commerce and the “apolitical” realm of entertainment.

There is an interesting interview with Herms on netropolitan.org where he speaks ruefully about his associate Ed Keinholtz, an artist who framed his work in the context of social protest and who cultivated a bad boy image to his advantage. His implication is clear, that Keinholtz was better at marketing, and so was able to take the kind of work that Herms was doing and build an art-star career out of it. “I owe it all to you”, Herms quotes Keinholz as telling him when they were alone together and nobody was listening.

Herms’ intentional playfulness and studied lack of rigor are all about staying open and free–terms that seem utterly anachronistic to an uptight urban art culture–but are singularly appropriate to reconsider in this ironic world we inhabit. Of course, the greatest irony is that this very enjoyable evening of music and happening by a cool, maverick artist is presented by Roy and Ed Disney Redcat theater, as part of “Pacific Standard Time”, a series presented by the Getty about the birth of the L.A. Art scene, and it’s sponsored by Bank of America.

The Wooster Group, REDCAT, December 1, 2010 – December 12, 2010
By Guy Zimmerman

Art, like life itself, is an activity rich in paradox. The style of an artist, their aesthetic signature, limits as well as shapes their expressive energies. Great artists embrace and also rebel against their own style with equal ardor, and it’s this tension that creates the evolution, the trajectory of their work. Some artists tuck all that struggle behind the drapes; some let it become the direct subject matter of the work itself. Either way, this tension is exactly where we, in our self-created lives, connect to the artistic project in an urgent way. The struggles of the artist with form and style, hidden or shamelessly displayed, show us how to derive pleasure from our own life struggles in a mode of solidarity and generosity.

In theater you want to know that the text itself is rich in this illuminating tension. It’s best when a writer (rather than a director or an ensemble) has created this text, and when that writer is a poet as well as a dramatist. Then it’s best if the performing artists who bring the text to life experience it as both a shaping force and a limiting restraint; they must embrace and rebel against the text with equal commitment. That’s when you get these wonderful multiplying, double helix effects – the performers doing on their level what the playwright has done on his (or her) level – and the whole thing becomes worth the slog through traffic to get to the theater. The Wooster Group’s production of Tennessee Williams’ Vieux Carré at REDCAT last week was a high culture cage match of this kind, and it was a pleasure to behold.

The play itself is a tortured miscreant. Williams took forty years to cough up Vieux Carré, and the play seems untidy, oddly unresolved in itself, a wounded limping thing…that the Woosters seize in their jaws like rabid wolverines. The Woosters have a Soho-bred distrust of sincerity, but for our sake they are stuffing themselves with it here. Scott Shepherd and Ari Fliakos are terrific in the production. Director Elizabeth LeCompte knows how well these two complement each other on stage, and both performers are building on physical vocabularies they have developed over the course of a decade. The night I saw the play Shepherd, performing two roles, was at moments so expressive physically I felt truly honored to be there. The huge mechanism of theater exists to create exactly those moments of presence, and it would be a mistake to underestimate their transformative value. In a quieter vein Fliakos was just as good as the writer, finding ways to be tentative and absent within the demands of the Wooster style. But Kate Valk, as always, was the one who fascinated. How to describe the minutely tuned irony of her delivery? With every breath she managed to lampoon but also honor the intimate angst of method acting. It felt like watching A-Rod cover first and third base at the same time – it shouldn’t be possible.

The challenges of depicting intimacy in theater have to do with the basic configurations of the stage space. In theater, the off-stage is where the unconscious resides, the dark matter that feeds and supports the luminous spectacle under the lights. Invite too much of that dark matter onto the stage and you drain the luminance. Or, if you want to adopt Nietzschean rather than Freudian imagery, it’s Dionysus who rules the off-stage and if you invite him onto the stage you had better reify him into a character…in which case you’re staging a version of The Bacchae and not a psychological melodrama rich in private regrets. You could make a case that Williams did write versions of The Bacchae – Streetcar, for example – but with Vieux Carré he’s really trying to tell the truth about himself in a non-paradoxical way and things get soupy. And that’s why the ironic force of the Wooster Group is just the right combination. The irony pushes all that unformed Dionysian energy back off stage where it belongs and the spectacle turns like a dancer and begins to lift.

You have to understand that the Woosters are not really people at all – they are complex aesthetic entities that self-catalyzed out of the cloud of irony that settled over the area between Houston and Canal in the 1970s and then condensed there for the next few decades. The fact that we must now look to the Woosters for ways to reconnect to our humanity might be to some a sign of how far gone we really are. But, ever the optimist, I actually view it as another indication that American culture is beginning to raise its gaze a bit after the ferocious horizontality of the post-modern, Warhol era. Change, one senses, is in the air.

Other theater reviews by Guy Zimmerman The Koons Moment, In the Playground of the Post War Period, LeCompte and Co.-North Atlantic, Language and Its Opposite

Ralph Lemon/Cross Performance: How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere?
by Alan Berman

Ralph Lemon takes the long view in the latest work from his Cross Performance company, How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere? presented at the REDCAT, Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater space November 10-14, 2010. His previous company followed a traditional annual touring schedule, presenting a mixture of old and new works. With Cross Performance, he creates large-scale multi-disciplinary projects over many years. This single-project approach creates an atmosphere in which Lemon, a Guggenheim and US Artists Fellowship recipient, among many other awards and honors, feels comfortable attempting to integrate his responses to an admittedly impossible set of big questions on his way to being recognized as an artist.  How Can You Stay . . . is a true representation of profound human struggles with mortality, relationships, racism, invention, grief, communication, memory, perception, knowledge, structure, time, and truth.

Lemon is well aware that the audience will be challenged by the variety and intensity offered up by How Can You. . . He begins by seating himself in a white plastic lawn chair on stage, then reads from his “Sunshine Room” script while a 30-minute film with original footage and clips from other films are projected. His reading, sure and without drama, invites us to take a chance. He shares his need to start over again and again with each new project, re-returning to his beginning to find a dance that is not founded in dance, a “no-dance.” During the narration we learn that his partner Asako has recently passed away. An hour later, during the live dance segment, the stage is vacant and we hear off-stage sobbing for many painful, disturbing minutes. Eventually Okwui Okpokwasili enters the stage, continuing her sobbing, standing and facing away from the audience. It is the sobbing of grief, unself-conscious, canceling all other sounds.

But in between Lemon’s story of grief and Okpokwasili’s embodiment of it, we see in the film “Sunshine Room” a hundred-plus-year-old man (Lemon’s friend Walter Carter) dressed as a 1960s astronaut, rolling around on the floor of a metal contraption that resembles a miniature carousel. To force a structural connection between these three elements does a disservice to the experience, which is perhaps meant to mirror a life in which wildly disparate, inexplicable occurrences invade our attention on a daily basis.

At the end of the evening, in the “No Room” section of the work, Lemon returns to the stage, moving in straight lines, then collapsing. Each first step in a new direction after returning to upright appears to be the first step he has ever taken. He keeps his promise of starting over, even as his eyes are locked open taking in the enormity of his manifold subjects while admitting certain defeat. One can’t help but recall Ezra Pound’s Cantos, the epic everything-and-the-kitchen-sink-attempt to assay the poet’s knowledge. Despite Pound’s understanding that his attempt would be not be fully successful he proceeded with the publication regardless.  As the Cantos jump around from language to language, in and out of time and styles, so does Lemon’s work display an acknowledgment of multiple ways of expression.

My first impulse was to scold for Lemon’s attempting too much, to address so many ideas using several media in a single two-hour piece not being fair to the material: no idea will receive the attention it deserves. But the themes frequently inform one another–and as we confront simultaneous significant events in our own lives, so may an artist choose to present them in encapsulated form.

Even though Lemon offers effusive credit to his dancers for their collaborative contributions, he still made the choices that identify the work. One remarkably risky decision was Lemon’s choice to have no music during the dancing–this sonic austerity was reinforced by the spare stage, simple outfits, and full lighting. The message was clear: “Here we are, and here it is.” The sounds of the dancers’ bodies and their breathing became an engrossing soundtrack. I couldn’t help but wish for more dance works to allow us to hear the actual sounds of dancers dancing.

My greatest struggle with the work is rooted in the dancing itself. The dancers, who are consistently and thoroughly magnificent movers and have evolved a “natural” style of movement that seems in keeping with Lemon’s “authentic” goal, are Djédjé Djédjé Gervais, Darrell Jones, Gesel Mason, Okwui Okpokwasili, David Thomson, and Omagbitse Omagbemi. They present ecstatic, committed, declamatory actions: whirling windmills, leaps, sudden collisions. But witnessing someone else’s catharsis isn’t necessarily cathartic; in fact, it can create a chasm of detachment. During the ensemble dancing, I recalled the quote from Tarkovsky’s Solaris that had appeared during “Sunshine Room” on screen: “As he approaches truth he is condemned to knowledge.” Thus were we set up for the struggle of these formally trained dancer/athletes whom Lemon demanded let go of technique, rules, and structure. Their knowledge prevents them from truly inventing, so we are privy to the result of that inner conflict. During the “Sunshine Room” narration, Lemon had shared his earlier method to free his dancers from formal oppression: to have them practice drunk and stoned for hours, until they had achieved truly free movement, a foundation on which to build, sober, his new affect-free dance. But what’s left is largely repetitive, not necessarily compelling. Left to its own devices, each body defaults to a few discrete authentic actions, perhaps four or five. We soon learn what each body does and we crave more variety, more . . . thought. And due to the nature of the movement, opportunities for deep partnership tend to occur relatively infrequently; otherwise, the dancers could injure one another with their rapid, forceful movements. When they do enter, after some solos, a series of synchronized leaps and precisely timed simultaneous falls, we feel the success of that sequence and are relieved, not by their having done harm to themselves, but by the reminder that they have the choice to cooperate, to not navigate this world mindless and alone, rather to fly and land together.

One can’t help but consider the nature of improvisation itself. Ideally, an improviser acts from a universe of possibilities. But as the Solaris lines suggest, the more we know, the harder it is to be spontaneous. Most jazz musicians, after all, work from a vocabulary of modes and chords; few have consistently achieved results greater than the original melodies they are using as a framework for their “improvising.” Lemon has, remarkably, succeeded in taming the training out of his troupe, but what’s left is perhaps most valuable to the dancers themselves, not to the audience–I felt left out. I could not experience the transformation I assumed the individual dancers were undergoing. The more they danced, the further from them I felt, despite my very determined impulse to find a connection with their extraordinary surrender. Perhaps this unanswered longing is something Lemon anticipated–it was certainly personal–but I understood why some performances of this work in the past year had included a fourth section, “Meditation,” in which the audience could visit the space after the presentation was concluded.

As if to emphasize the temporality of existence, before Lemon returned to do his pacing, a scrim fell, the lights went out, and an illuminated dog meandered onto the stage, stopped dead center, and sat, panting and looking around disinterestedly. Then one of the dancers appeared in a hare outfit and approached the dog. They were soon joined by a bird, deer, cow, ostrich, bear, and giraffe. It took most of us off guard: at first the dog seemed real, as did the dancer. But all were pre-recorded projections sent to the dark stage in neon outline. These projections will outlive their actors, just as will the film of Lemon’s aged friend Walter Carter dressed in a space suit, reenacting scenes from Solaris. We spend a lifetime acquiring knowledge, the “condemnation” in our ascent to truth, which could be interpreted as aging itself. Sometimes we are young enough to remember what we know, as Lemon’s partner Asako did. Lemon tells us that Carter couldn’t remember what happened five minutes earlier. Either way, what others remember about us isn’t what we have learned about ourselves: whatever enlightenment we experience is ours alone. Lemon’s message is that what will outlive Walter is not Walter’s truth–and the same goes for all of us.

Alfred Brendel: On Character in Music, REDCAT October 28, 2010
by Nancy Cantwell

The assignment of character or poetic meaning in music of the last half of the last century has been an unfashionable practice. Perhaps practiced in secret in the hearts of all composers, but not openly discussed by many. Pure musical theories of chromatic scale, tonality and form have been the favored pursuits of “new music”, a turning away from the over laden portentous Romantic zeal that dominated the late 19th and early 20th century. But as of late there has been a distinct, albeit slow, shift back towards easy listening. The toot and bleep that has been so closely identified with composers of contemporary classical music is steadily being subverted with sound thats easier on the ears.

Programming too has begun to include performances that favor a more naturalistic response to the world. At the opening of the Green Umbrella series at Disney Hall in October the composition titled “Weather One,” by  Michael Gordon was performed. Gordon spoke of being inspired by the “chaos of weather” and wanted to transcribe it musically. I find this trend for pastoral pondering an antithetic response for our deeply divergent digital age, a misplaced disconnect. But what I can understand is the need to find a meaningful context by which to reframe or bridge what has come before, to re-imagine a more complex present. One such bridge that was masterfully deliberated on at REDCAT on October 28 by the legendary pianist Alfred Brendel as part of his lecture demonstration “On Character in Music.”

The program was co-sponsored by The Brain and Creativity Institute and it’s distinguished Director, Antonio Damasio, was on hand to  make the introduction. Oh to have been a fly on the wall of the pre-lecture dinner I imagined took place. Not only do these two men possess endless insight into the nature of creativity, they also possess boundless enthusiasm for their subjects. After more than 60 years on the concert tour Alfred Brendel retired in 2008, but not before he garnered a multitude of prizes, honors and awards including the Han von Bülow medal of the Berlin Philharmonic, made Honoary Knight of the British Empire in 1989, made member of the Wiener Philharmoniker in 1998, awarded the Légion d’Honneur in 2004 and the Praemium Imperiale in 2009. Now in this time of career transition Brendel has turned his indisputable authority into an integrated illustrative lecture presentation that guides his audience through the nuance of performance, interpretation and musical temperament. In his introduction, Damasio describes Brendel as synonymous with piano mastery and probing inquiry — both begin manifesting as soon as he takes the stage.

Seated on the familiar piano stool a behind a dais that faced the audience and the grand Steinway to his left Brendel launches immediately into how character infuses the sonata form. His historical command is far reaching as he paints a picture of the players who all contribute to the timeframe and philosophies that act as the cornerstones for the exploration of poetic allusion. Each piece of musical exemplification is carefully weighed for its character potency. A Schoenberg selection is used to example how the composer leaves clues for the performer as to the nature of the musics’ sensibility. These clues, through performance, are made equally transparent for the listener to reach an identical conclusion as to the character of the piece. Both the listener and performer share a consistent perspective.

The Beethoven sonatas are Brendel’s tour de force. He lives inside these compositions, thinking, feeling, breathing, bearing the weight of the composers intent. Freed from the formality of the concert platform Brendel bodily merges with the music absorbed by the psychological and emotional humors. As he is sometimes wont to throw his head back in ecstatic sing along, so Brendel reminds me of the great Glen Gould, bent over his celebrated Steinway CD 318 piano, muttering along completely assimilated by a Goldberg Variation. In examining Beethoven Brendel extracts movements that demonstrate psychological motivation through the use of prolonged tension and concentration of theme, explicates on the emotional color of anima and animus by the use of contrasting dramatic ensemble and discovers lyrical conversations that exemplify the nature of a landscape’s Arcadian temperament.

While Alfred Brendel does have the mystique of a European era past, his own predisposition is towards a modern ear. In the midst of reveling in the lyric sensitivities of Beethoven’s epoch, he adamantly declares his preference for his own far more minimalist extrapolations. Brendel asserts that musical structures and expressive atmospheres of Beethoven be sympathetic, inservice to the music at all times. And while he issues a quite contemporary warning against the tendency to “bell jar” the emotional and cautions equally the temptation to parody the poetic, we are whole heartedly encouraged to pursue all the passion that character affords us.

Please take some time to explore the Beethoven Sonata No. 30 in E, Op.109 as performed by Alfred Brendel in 1996
This is the 3rd movement, Gesangvoll, mit innigster Empfindung.

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The Ring Festival Los Angeles April 15 -June 30, 2010
by Nancy Cantwell

For ten weeks this spring more than 115 cultural partners and Institutions have gathered round the Los Angeles Opera’a first complete Ring Cycle and mounted in support an amazing array of events, symposia, art exhibitions, lectures, theatrical performances and film presentation. This is a great time to experience the depth, breath and enthusiasm of this city’s artistic community. Not only are all committed to the cooperative ideal of festival, but they are wholeheartedly embracing the labyrinth of material that The Ring poses for critical study: Political Allegory, Epic mythological archetypes, philosophical inquiry ranging from classical Greek to contemporary French, in depth Psychological debate and most of all the musical explorations into influences preceding Wagner and those on whose Wagner’s musical genius left its indelible mark.

Two such exemplary venues I was privileged to attend were the Prussian Blues program staged at Jacaranda and the Myth, Wagner and the Human Brain, lecture featuring Antonio Damasio, Peter Sellars and Bill Viola, hosted at REDCAT. While Prussian Blues tackled, through the music of Hindemith, Schubert, Wagner and Mahler, histories including Hitler’s Entartete Kunst (degenerate art), the origins Wagner’s anti-semetic predisposition and the emergence, after the 18th century era of Enlightenment, of “Romanticism” embedded with “hero seeking authenticity”*, Myth, Wagner and the Human Brain concentrated on the story behind the Ring, examining the nature of Myth, memory and sentience.

The concept behind Jacaranda’s Prussian Blues was to explore the musical and historical context of the Wagnerian experience. The first selection, Paul Hindemith’s (1895-1963) Septet for Wind (1948) was a backwards look at the composer’s struggles to find an artist home in the Third Reich and the aftermath of “the grim consequences of a re-imagined Twilight of the Gods, a final conflagration conceived by the biggest German ego to follow Richard Wagner.”* Second on the bill was a selection of Franz Schubert (1797-1828) songs, a Wagnerian prelude that explored the Romantic Zeitgeist and it’s contribution “to creating the language of German music drama.”* After intermission Richard Wagner’s (1813-1883) own Siegfried Idle (1870) was performed and gave cause to examine the personal and tumultuous life Wagner shared with the then Cosima von Bulow. Well known for her Anti-Semetic leanings Cosima’s views on “racial purity” was said to influence Adolph Hitler who conscripted Wagner’s music in service of the ideals National Socialist Germany. Coming full circle, the final performance of the evening was Gustav Mahler’s (1860-1911) Adagio from Symphony No. 10 (arr. Hans Stadlmair 1911/1970). Mahler had adopted Wagner’s love of Carl Maria von Weber as his own, completing Weber’s unfinished opera The Three Pintos whose premiere established Mahler as both a critical and financial success. And not unlike Wager he shared a profound, but far more tortured relationship with the femme fatale Alma Schindler who was twenty-three, pregnant, and two decades younger than Mahler when they married in 1902.

There is quite a difference between hearing certain pieces in concert settings and experiencing them in environments devoted to other worldly concerns. Jacaranda resides at the First Presbyterian Church of Santa Monica where the acoustics allow the music to ascend. Certainly there were no religious intentions behind in the programming of Prussian Blues, but listening to the Schubert performed by an all male choir with accompaniment, and sitting in the balcony, where the voices scaled perfectly, I was taken back to the St. Augustin Church in Vienna, hearing Anton Bruckner’s Grosse Messe in F-Moll, to the Eglise Saint Germain des Pres hearing Charles Gound’s Messe Solennelle en l’honneur de Sainte-Cecile and to the Eglise de La Madeline hearing Puccini’s Messa de Gloria. Divine.

Across town at REDCAT where the atmosphere couldn’t be more secular Wagner was getting the thrice over. Antonio Damasio from USC’s Brain and Creativity Institute acted as an emcee of sorts and started the discussions by setting the ground work with his understanding of what myths are and how they behave in the culture. His ability to distill and relate the basic precepts was professorial and put me in a mood to learn. He began by quoting Paul Ricouer, whose anthropological inquiries and philosophies, lead Ricouer to conclude “there is no self-understanding that is not mediated by signs, symbols, and texts; in the final analysis self-understanding coincides with the interpretation given to these mediating terms.” Wagnerian indeed. To which Mr. Damasio added a few more simple tenets such as “[myths] are about Beings, Events and have no verification, substantiation nor proof” or “[myths] are Brain ingredients” and “[myths] are autobiographical, personal histories.” These prompted our gray matter to commence synapsing and acted as guides for the “Pictorial” and “Theatrical” contributors to follow.

Bill Viola, representing the Pictorial, was next at the microphone and seemed a bit uncomfortable at the table. Adding to the basics concepts of Mr. Damasio, Viola spoke of  “root systems”, “events outside of time” and taking up the technical baton (clearly a comfort zone), “[myths] function like a computer’s operating system – below the horizon, as infrastructure.” Another metaphor Viola explored was that of myth functioning as an intake form; a tablet where life’s primary informations are stored. He advanced his thought process further by stating that within the context of form vs content – the last century’s art being preoccupied with form, his hope for the 21st century was to lead us to a new content driven humanism. A welcome postulate.

By now the audience was pretty pumped for some substantive Wagnerian insight, and although Peter Sellars’ delivery was hyper-emotional and divaesque, he did eventually wipe his tears and bear down on the subject at hand. Bottomline, the story line of Der Ring Des Nibelungen is a cure for Optimism, where, in worlds of conflagration, transcendence equivocates to inaction. Characters, charged with great questions to answer and dauntless tasks preform, dramatically fail, unable to bridge the gap between their beliefs and actions. Gods and man alike require superior talents, impeccable moral fortitude, pure ambitions and heroic determination to police, not just world order, but inner rectitude. And while, the dialog and plot lines of the Ring are infused with character flaws, greed, avarice and delusions that ultimately undermine Nietzsche’s “Will to Power” the music that Wagner creates is seminal, valorous, and the consummate force that infuses the Ring with its preternatural power.

Still with Mr. Sellars, but now returning to myth and memory. If myths are a repository for explanations of origination, good and evil, power, governance catastrophe, love, war and death, and as each new generation experiences new encounters with these old informations, they in turn re-inhabit the collective memory pool to create a their own future. Wagner’s generous use of leitmotif throughout the Ring is a powerful memory tenant, a musical manifestation of each occupant. Each leitmotif is replayed, woven in and out of every opera, expanded upon over and over. Every leitmotif becomes its own language that builds and sustains the collective mythologies of the Ring.

When the discussion opened to the floor, Mr. Damasio seized the chance to comment on the science of how the brain actually functions with memory’s recall. He states that memories are repeated constructions, images are rebuilt and used to re-connect within the current syntax. Memories can degrade and/or the brain can introduce novelty into the process thus the memory can be re-modeled. The brain can make real, that which has not occurred; a persistent impediment for establishing the veracity of forensic testimony.

For a discourse on Wagner, the evening was oddly bereft of music. However the finale, Bill Viola’s Three Women, supplied visuals worthy of the Wagner mantle. An exquisite film, Three Women is a meditation on the states of being, unborn (inert), living, the dead or infinite. Viola has been collecting video cameras since 1970 and one of his prized possessions is an early B&W surveillance camera that creates a barely recognizable image somewhat akin to listening to a scratched up 78. Three Women juxtaposes this technology, with which Viola identifies preconsciousness, with the hyper-real quality of HD. Soundless and moving three women, representing the three stages of life slowly come into view. As they materialize they cross over emerging through a curtain of water, become colorized, highly defined and “born” only to return from where they came. For this attendee, the Three Women was an fitting conclusion to this mosaic of an evening. It’s investigation of origin, archetypes, the prolonged, deliberate tempo and grand scale touched on many a Wagnerian moment.

*Patrick Scott, Artistic Director, Jacaranda – Program notes for Prussian Blues

Swapan Chaudhuri, Aashish Khan and the CalArts Tabla Ensemble, REDCAT April 3, 2010
By Marla Apt

My first exposure to classical Indian music was an unforgettable Ravi Shankar concert. The meditative focus of the musicians to which the presence of the audience contributed required throughout the mostly improvisational intricacies of raga struck me as spiritually uplifting and physically revitalizing. I found myself soon thereafter in India hunting for a set of tablas.

It is said that each note on the Indian scale corresponds to the human subtle anatomy (chakras and nadis that govern the flow of prana or energy in the body). With roots in ancient vedic religion, Indian classical raga music is viewed by many as a spiritual discipline that can lead the individual to the direct perception of the true nature of reality. However, after a couple of years of less than intensive study of the tabla, I discovered that the joy of pure artistic transmission only comes from a lifelong single-pointed dedication to the subject, As Ravi Shankar says “It is only after many long and extensive years of ‘sadhana’ (dedicated practice and discipline) under the guidance of one’s guru and his blessings, that the artist is empowered to put ‘prana’ (the breath of life) into a raga. This is accomplished by employing the secrets imparted by one’s teacher…. The result is that each note pulsates with life and the raga becomes vibrant and incandescent.”

Content with not being able to experience bliss in front of my own tablas, I’m happy for an opportunity to listen to the practiced masters of Indian music, most of whom became initiated into the art before the age of ten. Last week, one of India’s most recognized tabla players, Swapan Chauduri accompanied Aashish Khan at REDCAT. The evening began with the Cal Arts Tabla Ensemble, seven tabla players (all men) playing a composition written by Swapan Chauduri. Hearing what is normally an accompanying instrument in a largely improvisational form performed in a rehearsed mini orchestra subtracted much of the potential beauty and subtlety from the tabla. While all of the musicians were technically proficient, (certainly more fluent than my two years of tabla studies ever delivered), their playing, most of the time in unison with only a brief solo allotted to each individual, lacked the artistry and expression that I think a half hour tabla spotlight demanded.

However the depth of sound elicited from Swapan Chauduri’s hand, even during the tuning reminded us of the richness possible when a lifetime of disciplined mastery meets with a hand drum.

My last classical Indian music listening experience was a 3-day music festival in India. The audience of thousands wandered under the music tent, sprawled in the sun or picnicked on the ground from morning to late night listening to extended sets by vocal artists and masters of various instruments from all over India. The stark contrast to the short set performed by Khan and Chauduri in the clean black box of REDCAT was apparently a difficult transition for Khan’s instrument. Adapting to having just returned from the humid climes of India, the sarod refused to remain in tune and required continual and extended adjustments.

The introspective and weighty sound of the sarod extracts a soulful depth evocative of the blues guitar. A lute-like instrument, the sarod can have anywhere from 17-25 strings. Only 4 or 5 main strings are used to play the melody while the other strings are used for drone and resonance.

Aashish Kan, practically a member of classical Indian music royalty was trained by his father, the great Sarod master, Ali Akbar Khan and was initiated into the study of music by his Grandfather, the famous Sarod guru and innovator, Allaudin Khan, one of the twentieth centuries most influential classical Indian music artists, His Aunt, Annapurna Devi, also a teacher to a long list of India’s most recognized classical musicians was married to Sitar maestro Ravi Shankar.

The concert followed the traditional Indian recital that begins with an emotional and introspective unaccompanied exploration and coaxing of the chosen raga that leads into a rhythmic section followed by drum accompaniment in the melodic raga composition that becomes the point of departure and return for innumerable improvisations. When he did finally harness the cooperation of his instrument, Khan delivered a lovely, slow tempo raga composed specifically for the time of day. Chauduri whose instrument required very little tuning honored the mood of the raga while expertly following (with technical, artistic and mathematical skill) Khan’s extemporization.

Being a largely improvisational melodic form based on a prescribed number of beats that holds the musicians together, a raga takes time to build and unfold. After the opening act, intermission and extended tunings, the short two ragas beginning late in the evening whet my appetite and left me tired but wanting for more.

Michiko Hirayama, Giacinto Scelsi, Canti Del Capricorno (1962-1972), REDCAT April 2, 2010
by Nancy Cantwell

“They are songs that explode classical convention: their vocal expressionism is ignited by the phonemes, not by any semantic content. Language seems to be atomized for all time. then an electrifying flow of sound is heard again, almost an archaic rite of evocation” – Jügen Kangold

As Michiko Hirayama took to the stage at REDCAT on April 2nd I could tell that we were in for penny, in for a pound. This was no garden variety solo recital, for as she entered the darkened hall Hirayama beat the gong that hung around her neck as if a call to prayer. Theatricality aside, it was time to listen up.

Canti Del Capricorno is Hirayama’s signature work. It was written specifically for her voice and spirit by outsider composer Giacinto Scelsi. Largely self taught, the Roman aristocrat Scelsi, forged his own idiosyncratic music one note at a time, even beyond the avant-gardism of the day. Forgoing a brief dally with serialism Scelsi focused on his own naïveté and peculiar passion for microtonality, believing that he was indeed more of a medium than master composer creator.

70 minutes of straight vocal performance for any singer is an undertaking, but for 87 year old Hirayama, I realized that we were witness to something beyond prowess, this was a chance to experience a direct embodiment necessitated by the composer. “…Scelsi liberated me in my head so that I could produce any sound with my voice. He pushed me to explore my vocal possibilities to work in ways that any classical vocal school had forbidden.” Written over a ten year period, Hirayama collaborated with Scelsi, at first laboriously improvising one or two of the compositions and finally, with the composer’s authorization, Hirayama penned Canti to completion of the 20 piece song cycle.

Song may be misleading to the uninitiated listener. These pieces are ritualistic, fierce and at time agonizing forms of human expression. Wordless, they take on a language of their own. I felt the sense of becoming a participant in the decoding of autistic yearnings for understanding. There is a child like intensity and curiosity for the exploration of new meaning to the creation of sound.  Michiko Hirayama pours all her strength into her performance, channeling each note of this life’s work. Each song conjures afresh an archaic rite of passage, a world of intimate interpretation and mysterious communication.

The staging of Canti Del Capricorno at REDCAT included four stations each carefully arranged to facilitate the petite Hirayama and accommodate the prodigious score. Hirayana administered over the fragile document, greatly considering each turn of the page and coddling with loving kindness as she motored from setup to setup to sing.

Canti Del Capricorno achieves a particular resonance and reaches some satisfying resolution when Hirayama is accompanied by an instrument. Aniela Perry’s soulful turn at contrabass underscored the feeling of lament. Ulrich Krieger on saxophone provided a sizzling embellishment, while California Ear Unit veteran percussionist Amy Knoles was joined by newcomer Lydia Martin to provide a strong heartfelt pulse to the piece, much to the visible delight of Hirayama whose fisted hands pumped and gestured with glee.

Canti Del Capricorno, Canto No. 5

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Canti Del Capricorno, Canto No. 14

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Canti Del Capricorno, Canto No. 19

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North Atlantic, Wooster Group at REDCAT, February 10–21, 2010
by Guy Zimmerman

Many things went through my mind walking away from REDCAT after seeing the Wooster Group’s North Atlantic, but one of them was surely hats off to the company’s artistic director, Elizabeth LeCompte. First created by LeCompte and company in 1982, North Atlantic holds up remarkably well. The writer, James Strahs, pulled from texts by Thornton Wilder, Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill and Gertrude Stein, and the company, anchored by Francis McDormand, Kate Valk, Ari Fliakos and Scott Shepherd, hit their marks with style and precision. Set on an aircraft carrier moored off the coast of Holland, the piece juxtaposes tough-talking military exchanges with kinky sexual banter, presenting life during the Cold War as a fever dream full of violence and desire. Devoid of the multi-layered video projections that play a major role in later Wooster Group productions, North Atlantic features the fast noir rhythms and the Grotowski-esque physicality that define the company’s approach to performance. Evidently LeCompte remains as sharp as a tack.

North Atlantic was created shortly after LeCompte took the reins from founder Richard Schechner and changed the company’s name from the Performance Group to the Wooster Group. Schechner had been one of America’s earliest and most energetic proponents of the visionary Polish director Jerzy Grotowski’s laboratory aesthetic. This past summer I saw Schechner at the Grotowski Festival in Wroclaw, Poland, where the elite of the global avant-garde gathered to pay tribute to the legendary Pole. Schechner spoke to our group about Grotowski’s impact on American theater, the rigor and seriousness he demanded from performers in every aspect of their craft. The Wooster Group’s highly physicalized performance style and their intensive working methods are among the most visible examples in America of Grotowski’s belief in theater as transformative ritual grounded in fully embodied presence in action. Beyond any rigid doctrine, the stamp of Grotowski is the absolute conviction that theater is linked in crucial ways to our collective sanity and, as such, merits the highest level of commitment.

At the same time I got the sense that Schectner’s earthiness and urbanity helped to limit the transcendent aspirations of Grotowski, pushing things in the direction of a kind of neo-Brechtian irony and spectacle. Or perhaps LeCompte is the source of those qualities in the Wooster Group’s basic affect. Either way, part of the reason the Group has found favor with the American art world is that they don’t mess all that much with depth. If American theater is a vast inland sea, wide and shallow, the Wooster Group is one of the bigger crocs, sunning themselves on their mossy log just North of Canal. Their productions are best thought of as comedies that don’t really have time for a sense of humor. It’s interesting to compare with the Polish company Theater Zar, which is Grotowski-inspired work at its most achingly transcendent. Unlike Zar, the Wooster Group does not traffic in reverence; leave the tragic dimension to the Eastern Europeans and pass the smutty jokes.

Rigor without transcendence manifests as kinetic energy, which is LeCompte’s forte as a director. Energy is where the agenda of art links up most easily with the American mindset, and this helps to explain why a counter-cultural enterprise like the Wooster Group has managed to slip past the informal censors that guard American sensibilities from challenge. One searches in vain, in a Wooster Group production, for the subversive silence in which self-recognition can bubble up. And yet one reason North Atlantic holds up so well is that America has matched the shallowness the piece is intent on satirizing. North Atlantic feels much darker now than it would have in the early 1980s. The addition of a Moslem call to prayer way in the background and some references to water boarding are all LeCompte needs to remind us of Abu Graib and Blackwater – of how far we have fallen. North Atlantic does not lack edge, it just aims its edge at tissue where the nerve endings long ago died.

For me the most successful Wooster Group piece was Hamlet, which came to REDCAT in 2007. The piece showed LeCompte’s command of a full high-tech barrage working to support her performers, and the brilliance of her meta-theatrical staging. And yet despite all the distancing and irony, the grandeur of Shakespeare’s mythic text came through loud and clear. To me, and as a playwright I am fully biased here, theater remains at root a literary activity. It’s when rigor in performance meets an original text with true depth that the full transformative display of the art form arises. This is why the highest points in the history of world theater tend to center around a significant playwright rather than a director. Think of fifth century Athens, Elizabethan England, the European era of Ibsen, or to a lesser degree the post War Europe defined by Brecht and Beckett; the playwright-centered convergence seems to occur when a culture begins to run a kind of maximum energy, an energy that translates into a willingness to collectively engage with the radical freedom of the present moment. We do not seem to be currently living in such a time, but perhaps the best way to move in the right direction is to pretend that we are.

That said, it’s impossible to overstate the challenge of maintaining an American new work theater company over the last thirty years the way LeCompte has done, much less a company that has consistently produced such excellent and original work. Theater is pre-eminently an emergent art form, each performance resting on a huge web of complex social and artistic interactions. From the banality of board meetings to the Shakespearean treachery of inter-company politics to the ecstatic energy of performance, an artistic director like LeCompte has to engage with the full spectrum of human experience and remain operative. We are lucky to have artists as strong as LeCompte and her Woosters, and we should treasure every performance.

Agreed.
Wooster Group’s Sci-Fi mashup of Cavalli opera La Didone offered little sense of transcendental satisfaction for the die hard opera lover (of which I am one!). And really the whole conflation felt gratuitous. But as sheer entertainment…I had a great time!

First off RedCat feels the perfect spot for this kind of hyperactive performance. Wooster really makes the most of all the technology available. The sound is amped and so are the cast, ready at any moment to take one for team Wooster. Probably my favorite performance was Scott Shepard as sir Piggy. He ran around snorting and grunting executing one prat fall after another, all the while clinging to his ukulele. When at last he is shot down, he belly flops onto a table hard-on side up. Very Conanesque. Lots of redheads in this troop!

Speaking of which, I found redhead King Jarbas’s counter tenor not believable. When he does finally rest in his proper register you get an idea of his true tone, but straddling the heights just sounded scratchy to me. Dido and Aeneas carry the heft of the singing well, seemingly not distracted by their space counterparts. The music direction was superb with an every-once-in-a-while achievement of serendipity between space banter and opera phrasing.

I found myself pondering why those tables didn’t just roll off the stage, a lot. Probably not what LeCompte had in mind for take away experience. It did leave me hankering to re-listen to my first Dido experience, Jessye Norman. But that was in Paris at the Opéra Comique and for a committed opera devotee, that was Oooh La La Sublime. — Nancy Cantwell

La Didone
The Wooster Group
Redcat Theater, Los Angeles, June 6 through June 21
by  Rita Valencia

Open on a post industrial-style stage and a lush, restless soundscape of way-distorted noise levels with smooth pulsing undercurrents of Baroque chamber opera. The sensual meets cold steel, curvy bods are clad in nicely shaped silver bodysuits. The overall effect has some charms, but like most things that charm, there is a vacuous center. In the case of “La Didone”, a 1641 Baroque opera by Francesco Cavalli, you might argue that the voiding of content began in a palliated retelling of the Dido/Aeneas romance when adapted for Carnival by librettist Giovanni Francesco Busenello. In that opera, the tragic fate of Dido, the beautiful spurned suicide queen, was altered, so that Dido doesn’t kill herself after Aeneas has seduced and abandoned her. Instead she is brought back from the brink by horny King Iarbas –why let a good hot, propertied, babe go to waste when she can be eminently re-cycled? …the raunchy pragmatism of the times had its demands. Changing the end may have been an inane idea, pandering to the tastes of its audience, but not nearly half as ill concieved as marrying the whole opera to a sampling of 20th century space age kitsch: Planet of the Vampires, Terrore nello spazio, 1965 film by Mario Bava. with some additional material from Queen of Outer Space by Edward Bernds.

The Wooster Group and their brilliant impresario, Elizabeth LeCompte, by their own admission, were not eager to take on this project. “On a whim” they accepted the commission, from the Belgian KunstenFESTIVALdesArts, only after being “pestered” and because the budget was ample to hire real musicians. LeCompte’s interest in the nascent musicality of theater voicing was given some wind –“I always direct opera”. And so the group began by playing the movie and singing the opera side by side, then continuing to work and to stage and refine, until the piece took form. Check out this edifying set of interviews with LeCompte, Chinn and others from the group .

Hear an excerpt from this interview with LeCompte, Shepard and Chinn conducted by Claudia La Rocco

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The methodology of the Wooster Group, a long rehearsal process where a performance organically develops through inhabiting the premise, is always a large part of what the work is about. “Possession, being possessed by genre, the opera story getting taken over by the spirit of the movie…became a useful metaphor for the combining of the forms” said veteran Wooster member Scott Shepard. Evidently the pairing of this particular film to this opera was at the suggestion of film buff Dennis Dermody, a true lover and scholar of B Movies. LeCompte had originally been attracted to the notion of pairing the opera with a spaghetti Western, because the dubbing as a form of mask bore an interesting similarity to the use of voice as mask in the form of opera. It was odd to hear her say this, as I’d commented to my husband on the way home from the performance that La Didone would have worked better had it been juxtaposed (assuming you accept juxtaposition as a strategy at all) with a Spaghetti Western. In the genre of the Spaghetti western–in addition to the dubbing which lends a curious artificiality, there is the latent tragedy of the existential lonely drifter which gives a pungence to any romance. In “Terrore…” there is none of that, only the flat stylization of that Trekkie kind of film which the Bava represents: basically a cold war drama dealing with notions of paranoid xenophobia. Opera plus movie, tangentially related by the ideas of long lonely voyages, shipwreck and the alien invasion of love or something, is a playful and anomalous juxtaposition that never really gels into poetry. Absent of a sense of darkness, which always lurks behind the successful art that engages kitsch–you end up with, well, pleasant confusion. You cannot ignore or elide the implications of the signs you throw.

Musically there’s plenty to enjoy with Hai-Ting Chinn’s powerfully expressive contralto and Bruce Odland’s inspired scoring…Chinn’s performance inhabited another world, along with the brilliant rising star turn of hunky hot Andrew Nolen. His falsetto was thrilling, even more so when he dropped it to reveal his native bass/baritone–this guy you expect to be a tenor, or a fashion model or eye candy on a daytime soap–not the charismatic presence he in fact was. Back in the day, (17th century) singing falsetto was a code for virility, sort of like sissy singing in the vernacular of soul music (think The Stylistics). Worked for me, at least with Nolen doing it, though of course it drew giggles from the audience, as the meaning has been long since supplanted (19th century) by comedy. He and Chinn paired with the truly inventive work of Music Director Odland are worth the price of admission. Kate Valk turned in a mesmerizing performance as the cool space woman Sanya, agingly beautiful and Viva-esque. Jennifer Griesbach’s choreography was disciplined and smart.

The current cutting edge theater vernacular–for those projects which have been supported by a substantial amount of institutional funding–ensures that there will be at least a modest amount of video gadgetry and image manipulation, so there is nothing in the Wooster Group production which is groundbreaking. The set design was just okay–leaning to the space age rather than the baroque. I’ve seen real transformations of the space at Redcat and this staging was weirdly claustrophobic and cluttered.

Overall, I suspect this is opera for an art audience who think that opera is hokey and square, so that to blend it with a 60’s kitsch B-film would appear to be cool, cutting edge and clever marketing, but…why?