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noreply@blogger.com (Chloe Veltman) — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 17:16:00 +0000

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Why Hurling Rotten Fruit Is Good for TheaterNEW YORK TIMES

noreply@blogger.com (Chloe Veltman) — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 23:44:00 +0000

When audiences threw rotten vegetables at actors in the old days, it generally meant they weren’t having a good time. But the San Francisco-based theater company PianoFight has been resurrecting that Shakespearean tradition in the hopes of inducing the opposite effect.

At PianoFight’s inaugural “Throw Rotten Veggies at the Actors” night last October, which the company will repeat in the coming weeks, the audience, at the end of the production, gleefully hurled produce at the cast. Meanwhile, the actors, slipping about in a sea of squashed tomatoes, did their best to shield themselves from the blows.

Arts organizations are always searching for new ways to engage audiences as overall attendance continues to decline. According to a recent survey by the National Endowment for the Arts, nearly 35 percent of American adults attended an art museum or an arts performance in 2008, compared with about 40 percent in 2002.

These companies are using social media like Facebook and Twitter, alongside more traditional techniques like talks, tours and audience surveys, to keep the public informed of their activities and deepen their customer relationships.

While such methods can help arts organizations interact with the public, they seem dull compared with ideas like inviting the audience to sing with the professionals in musicals, view their own drawings on museum walls, or stand in for Keanu Reeves (as they do in the interactive stage show “Point Break Live”).

In a world overrun with entertainment options, these activities have the potential to foster people’s attachment to the arts. But even the more creative tactics come with challenges — there’s a fine line between making a visitor feel invested in a work of art and sacrificing artistic standards in the pursuit of interactivity.

Local groups are certainly using their imaginations to find ways to captivate the public. Besides its “Throw Rotten Veggies” night, PianoFight is asking ticket buyers, rather than theater experts, to judge the work of the 56 competing playwrights in the contest “ShortLived,” which continues through June 26 at the Off-Market Theater. The winner will get the chance to write a full-length play to be produced by PianoFight for a one-month run in San Francisco and Los Angeles. (The same competition is taking place in Los Angeles at the Asylum Lab.)

The act of judging plays encourages strangers to interact with one another. “We bring up the house lights in between plays, and people ask each other about scoring,” said Rob Ready, the artistic director of PianoFight.

Branching out from its usual classical music repertory, the Mill Valley Philharmonic is hosting a sing-along event on April 10 in which the crowd can perform songs like “Hey Jude” and “Sweet Home Alabama” backed by orchestral musicians.

The Philharmonic hopes the interactivity will build audiences. “Once people get to know us, they become incredibly loyal concertgoers,” said Laurie Cohen, its music director. “Audiences love to feel they are part of our community.”

When the Oakland Museum of California reopens on May 1, it will include a special exhibition in which visitors can create a computerized self-portrait and see their artwork projected on the wall alongside paintings by professional artists. Meanwhile, the monthly Non-Stop Bhangra event at the Rickshaw Stop in San Francisco combines performances by the Dholrythms dance company with opportunities for audience members to try out Bhangra steps.

The novelty value of these events can bring in audiences. A recent “Sing-Along Mikado” played to capacity crowds, according to Barbara Heroux, the artistic director of the Lamplighters Music Theater, a company that specializes in producing Gilbert & Sullivan operettas.

Some of these heightened interactions are more inspiring than others. The San Francisco Symphony offered a free workshop last summer based on the popular iPhone application Ocarina, which turns the phone into a digital flute. The class took place after a performance of music from the “Final Fantasy” video game series, which provided the perfect way to hook in a young audience. About 60 people played in the “Ocarina orchestra” that night, and 140 people downloaded sheet music from the symphony’s social networking Web site, according to symphony officials.

Less germane, however, was an attempt by the a cappella vocal ensemble Chanticleer to engage audiences at a youth choral festival concert two weeks ago. In the middle of the show, the audience was instructed to take photographs of the student choir using their cellphones and e-mail the snapshots to friends and relatives. Though a sweet idea, it interrupted the flow of the concert and felt gimmicky.

Balancing audience involvement with artistic concerns is undeniably challenging. Chanticleer’s cellphone tactic may have been superficial, but it didn’t undermine the perfection of the singing. And that is what keeps audiences coming back.

Conversely, PianoFight’s all-out approach, though fun, threatens to sacrifice quality at the expense of interactivity. And the barriers to entry for “ShortLived” are exceedingly low: Anyone can submit a play. Because the audience is responsible for judging, authors frequently bring their fans. The winning play may therefore be as much the result of a popularity contest as it is a reflection of artistic merit.

Arts organizations should be careful not to let these interactive elements debase the quality of their work. Or it won’t be long before audiences start hurling rotten veggies on a regular basis.

Audio Aesthetics a Bit Removed From the Standard Do-Re-MiNEW YORK TIMES

noreply@blogger.com (Chloe Veltman) — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 21:35:00 +0000

On a craggy outcrop in the Marina, the sounds of the sea become art. “The Wave Organ,” a sprawling waterfront sound-art installation created with materials from a demolished cemetery, has been quietly performing an oceanic symphony since 1986. Pausing to cup an ear to one of many protruding pipes amid the installation’s sun-blanched granite and marble terraces, you hear a strange liquid music. It alternately whispers like wind passing through conch shells, gurgles like an old man laughing and assaults the senses with cataclysmic thunderclaps.

Meanwhile, “Audium,” a sonic experience held in a specially built theater in the Lower Pacific Heights, engages differently with the melody of water. Waves, a stream and a dripping faucet are among the sounds heard by audience members as they listen to the hourlong performance. It takes place almost entirely in the dark, as 176 speakers embedded in the walls, ceilings and floors emit various acoustic and electronic noises controlled live by the composer and co-founder of “Audium,” Stanley Shaff.

With today’s culture placing a far stronger emphasis on sight than hearing (the oversize eyes and shrunken ears of the Na’vis in James Cameron’s “Avatar” emphasize the trend), we ought to pay closer attention to experiences that ask us to engage our auditory powers in unusual ways.

The Bay Area has been a hub for sound-art experiments since the 1960s. Composers like Steve Reich, Pauline Oliveros and Terry Riley carried out many sonic investigations under the auspices of the San Francisco Tape Music Center, an electronic studio that gained prominence in the ’60s.

Since then, sound art has flourished here, thanks partly to a lively experimental music scene, the presence of renowned audio companies like Meyer Sound and institutional support from universities and museums. Yet the medium frequently goes unnoticed. While these projects have to compete for audiences with myriad other less esoteric cultural happenings, the relative marginality of sound art may be inherent in the art form itself.

In these cases the issue partly stems from the way “Audium” and “The Wave Organ” are implemented and operated. Created in 1960 by Mr. Shaff and Doug McEachern, an equipment designer, “Audium” has been in its present location since 1975. Mr. Shaff and Mr. McEachern don’t advertise their work, having always relied on word of mouth. The theater’s understated storefront presence further keeps the project hidden from view. According to Mr. Shaff, the show, which plays each week on Friday and Saturday nights, typically attracts around 25 people.

The out-of-the-way setting of “The Wave Organ,” at the end of the breakwater forming the Marina Yacht Harbor, similarly contributes to its under-the-radar status. The Exploratorium, the science museum that commissioned the work in the early 1980s from the artists Peter Richards and George Gonzales, loosely estimates that about 300 people visit the installation each week. The day I attended, my friend and I were the only people around.

Certain aesthetic challenges can prevent many sound-art works from reaching bigger audiences. “Audium” and “The Wave Organ” point to two issues facing the medium.

Like “The Wave Organ,” many sound-art installations interact with existing environments. The Bay Area sound artist Bill Fontana is known for creating such works. His “Spiraling Echoes” sound sculpture, set in the rotunda of San Francisco City Hall last year, used ultrasonic beams to project sounds, like twittering birds and clanging bells, off the architectural elements. This November Mr. Fontana is creating an installation for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art that will use sensors and speakers to explore corners of the building.

“Sculpture Garden Carillon,” a continuing sound-art installation by Joseph del Pesco and Helena Keeffe at the Oakland Museum of California, emits gonglike noises. The artists recorded their material by striking 12 of the museum’s outdoor sculptures, using a fleece-covered mallet. Passers-by on the street can hear the sounds on the hour while the galleries are closed for renovation. (The museum reopens on May 1.)

As inventive as some of these works are, they have to compete with many other distractions. It’s possible to walk right through a sound-art installation without even realizing it.

Projects created for tailor-made spaces, like “Audium,” come with different challenges. With a soundscape that harks back to the musique concrète tradition of the mid-20th century and its retro-looking domed auditorium, “Audium” feels like a throwback. The attempt to isolate hearing from the other senses creates an entirely personal experience that can be both transporting and meditative. But the insularity of this approach can make listening to sounds in the dark seem more like a 1960s-style psychedelic experiment than a cutting-edge art happening.

Despite the challenges of the form, the Bay Area’s role in nurturing sound-art projects shows its spirit of experimentation. “Audium” occupies one of the world’s very few purpose-built spaces for sound art, and “The Wave Organ” makes use of the Bay Area’s resplendent natural topography in an unparalleled way.

These works teach us to listen more closely to sounds that we often take for granted. “I think of liquid as an audio archetype of life,” Mr. Shaff said. “It is the most fundamental of all of life’s sounds.”

Taking a Children’s Tale to Dark New DepthsNEW YORK TIMES

noreply@blogger.com (Chloe Veltman) — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 13:12:00 +0000

In John Neumeier’s ballet adaptation of “The Little Mermaid,” the title character undergoes an extreme physical ordeal so that she might live on land. As the orchestra plays a stomping series of cataclysmic chords, a malevolent sea witch wrenches off the mermaid’s fluid blue costume and leaves her almost naked and shivering onstage. With one of her newly acquired human limbs grotesquely contorted over her shoulder, the former mermaid looks like an insect that’s been flayed alive.

For audiences weaned on the peppy 1989 Walt Disney animated film version of “The Little Mermaid,” Mr. Neumeier’s relentlessly bleak take on Hans Christian Andersen’s 1837 fairy tale — which opened Saturday night at the War Memorial Opera House in its United States premiere by the San Francisco Ballet — may come across as a bit of a shock. Mr. Neumeier, the director of the Hamburg Ballet in Germany, first had that company dance the piece, and cavorting crabs and singing sea urchins were nowhere to be found, as a viewing of the DVD of a November 2009 Hamburg performance shows.

Infused with stark blue and white light, angular movements, expressionistic visual imagery and an unsettling and often dissonant musical score by the Russian composer Lera Auerbach, Mr. Neumeier’s mature take on Andersen’s cautionary tale about a young woman who risks everything for love has about as much in common with the Disney version as Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland” has with Lewis Carroll’s original text.

Perhaps to retaliate against the prettification of many classic children’s stories, prominent artists are drawn to recasting such works in more somber hues. Projects like those of Mr. Neumeier and Mr. Burton help to reconnect audiences with the darkness that lies at the heart of the originals.

But sometimes the adapters go too far in focusing on mature themes, and risk estranging not only children but adults too. This can undermine the well-intentioned efforts to bring a fresh perspective to parts of our collective folklore that have been bowdlerized in the pursuit of audience-pleasing palatability.

Since becoming the Hamburg’s director and chief choreographer in 1973, Mr. Neumeier, who was born in Milwaukee and studied literature and theater arts before training as a dancer, has created psychologically intense works that straddle the worlds of drama and dance. His ballets, including “Nijinsky” (2000) and “Death in Venice” (2003), contrast the lead characters’ stormy mental states with an austere visual aesthetic. Demanding wide emotional range and kaleidoscopic movement that veers between flowing liquidity and spiky brittleness, Mr. Neumeier’s approach to “The Little Mermaid” plummets to the pitiless depths of Andersen’s watery fairy tale.

Unlike Disney’s dainty Ariel — and, for that matter, the central character in the miniballet that Roland Petit created for the 1952 film “Hans Christian Andersen” — the heroine in Andersen’s original is in constant pain when she walks on human feet. Mr. Neumeier captures Andersen’s descriptions of physical torture by creating dance steps that make the principal ballerina in the role of the Mermaid (portrayed alternately in San Francisco by Yuan Yuan Tan and Sarah Van Patten) look, as Anderson wrote, as if she were “treading upon sharp knives.” Knock-kneed, slump-shouldered and in a wheelchair for several scenes, the disoriented ex-mermaid is literally a fish out of water.

The second half of the ballet begins with a nightmarish vision of the heroine, stuck in a small white room and wearing a girlish gray dress. In the orchestration, Ms. Auerbach’s use of a flute and a cello playing in very high register gives the scene an otherworldly quality. The mermaid desperately bashes what used to be her tailfin (represented by the ballerina bending one leg at the knee and flicking a point shoe behind her) against the wall. She appears almost suicidal.

The Neumeier ballet isn’t entirely gloomy. He injects wry physical humor on occasion. In one scene three nuns wearing huge wimples cross themselves frantically. And the ending, though not uplifting, carries a sense of release.

Yet darkness threatens even these lighter moments. During the scene with the nuns, descending figures in the woodwinds undercut the humor. And the eerie tranquility of the final tableau suggests death more than new life.

“The darker side of the fairy tale is an essential aspect of the fairy tale,” Mr. Neumeier said in an e-mail message. “Without darkness there is no light.” But so little luminosity penetrates this adaptation of “The Little Mermaid” that the Disney version’s bubbly warmth is sorely missed at times.

I experienced a similar feeling while watching Mr. Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland.” The Red Queen’s unmitigated cruelty, the many eye gougings and the horror-movie-like sight of graying human heads bobbing in a moat prevented me from being fully immersed in the film’s gorgeous wizardry.

Some reworkings of the children’s canon — the musical “Wicked” (loosely based on “The Wizard of Oz”) and the 2005 film of C. S. Lewis’s novel “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” — have managed to straddle the worlds of youthful wonder and more adult preoccupations. Lately, though, the most engaging narratives aimed primarily at the young have frequently been original stories, like Pixar’s “Wall-E” and Daniel Handler’s Lemony Snicket books.

Often burdened by the baggage of the versions that have preceded them, those artists adapting long-established children’s works for stage and screen tend to swing too far in the opposite direction. Maintaining a better balance between dark and light is key to creating successful adaptations.

British TV Ads Flaunt Their Arty SideNEW YORK TIMES

noreply@blogger.com (Chloe Veltman) — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 17:28:00 +0000

In a recent British television commercial for the Barclaycard credit card, an office worker strips down to his briefs, saunters past his co-workers and enters a storage closet, where he jumps down a chute and sets off on a wild water-slide ride across an urban landscape, sailing down the sides of buildings, whizzing past shoppers and sloshing through a public library to the sound of the 1976 Bellamy Brothers hit “Let Your Love Flow.” When his joyously soggy ride comes to an end, he says, “Can you get me a towel?”

In contrast, in this country Bank of America — showing considerably less inspiration than Barclays — is advertising its bill-payment service with a tinny jingle and statically shot images of people spilling coffee on their paper bills.

British commercials have long been known for their creativity and innovation. But from an artistic standpoint, most American advertising, perhaps except for those made for the Super Bowl or the Web, pale in comparison with their British counterparts. And unsurprisingly, British ads have long attracted a huge following in America.

Next weekend the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts will bring the latest batch of award-winning British commercials to the Bay Area for the first time. The program — featuring the 2009 winners of the British Television Advertising Awards — visits 10 United States cities annually. Recently, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis sold more than 20,000 tickets to its British ad viewings, which it has been presenting for more than two decades. The Museum of Modern Art in New York has shown these bite-size films for more than 30 years.

That the program has taken so long to reach the Bay Area is surprising considering the region’s strong advertising and independent film communities. Joel Shepard, film curator at the Yerba Buena Center, decided to import the program to fill the gap.

“It’s a bit of a mystery as to why these ads haven’t made it to San Francisco yet,” Mr. Shepard wrote in an e-mail message. “Part of the reason these screenings are so popular elsewhere is that they have been shown annually for a long time, and audiences know to expect a mix of artfulness, humor and commercial appeal.”

Many of the commercials in this year’s program are minute masterpieces. A sleek ad for the Audi RS6 features a corps of gymnasts undertaking amazing physical feats with machinelike precision. Shot in a muted palette and gorgeously lighted so that the athletes’ bodies shimmer as if they’re made of mercury, the commercial is as much a work of kinetic art as it is a sales tool.

In another ingenious ad, set in a city cafe, a young woman listens in disbelief as her friend gossips in hushed tones about a man named Don who commits a rape and a murder before trying to force himself on another unsuspecting woman on her wedding day. It’s not until the end of the commercial that we realize that the woman is recounting the plot of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.” The close-range cinematography, sensitive execution and unexpected denouement make this advertisement for a Royal Opera House production memorable.

“In general, TV advertising has always been a high form of public art in the U.K.,” said Richard Silverstein, co-chairman and creative director of the San Francisco-based advertising firm Goodby, Silverstein & Partners. “People over there watch commercials as if they are entertainment.”

On occasion, the American advertising industry is equally capable of producing inspiring commercials. Google’s recent “Parisian Love” ad simply communicates the company’s services. The 52-second spot tells the story of a young man who travels to France, meets the woman of his dreams and settles down solely through displaying search terms on screen like “impress a French girl” and “how to assemble a crib.” The spot doesn’t feature any actors or dialogue, yet it manages to imbue something as sterile as a Web search with emotional force.

A spot for Frito-Lay Dips, conceived by Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, imagines a Mexican culinary cornucopia through the use of lush, colorful animation, including an erupting tomato-shaped volcano spewing chunks of salsa.

Yet such creative efforts are not part of this country’s standard TV advertising lexicon. Television ads in the United States tend to be more sales-driven and less focused on aesthetics. Artistry exists, but it’s more likely to be found on the Web. In fact, the Google ad played on YouTube for three months before being broadcast at the Super Bowl, and the Frito-Lay spot was initially created for the video-centric social networking Web site Vimeo.

“Companies want everything buttoned-up in a 30-second ad,” Mr. Silverstein said. “This often leaves nothing to the imagination, so you get pretty pedantic advertising.”

There may be several factors behind the British advertising industry’s more innovative approach. With that country’s film industry a fraction of the size of Hollywood, many talented British film directors spend part of their career in advertising. (Ridley Scott, Hugh Hudson and Alan Parker have all made commercials.)

Also, it could be that black humor, oblique sales messages and deliberate provocation — common in many British ads — don’t go down as well in the United States. And in such a big country, commercials with direct and friendly sales messages are more likely to appeal to broader audiences than artful creations that risk causing offense or confusion.

A commercial is principally a sales tool. But it can also be art. Perhaps if the American advertising industry were allowed to create more imaginative, aesthetically engaging and thought-provoking commercials, viewers would be less inclined to fast-forward their way through commercial breaks.

Colleges and Schools Try to Do More With LessNEW YORK TIMES

noreply@blogger.com (Chloe Veltman) — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 20:16:00 +0000

When San Francisco State University’s theater arts department commissioned Mark Jackson to adapt and direct a production of “Romeo and Juliet,” he came up with the unusual idea of creating a version of the tragedy for 14 actors, all cast in the role of Juliet. But because of budget cuts at the university, less money is available for items that affect the look of a production, like sets, lights and costumes. So to save on wardrobe, Mr. Jackson has had to readjust his core creative concept: now he has just eight actors for his new show, “Juliet.”

San Francisco State University is among several Bay Area academic institutions whose resources have been vastly reduced amid California’s fiscal crisis and the recession. A recent rehearsal there was one stop on a survey of artistic endeavors at local schools and universities. Taken as a whole, these works reveal that budget cuts have hardly dampened creative output. Even though the disastrous belt-tightening measures have put tremendous strain on teachers and students, these institutions are continuing to produce remarkable work.

San Francisco State University’s College of Creative Arts is typical of a performing arts institution grappling with reduced finances. Its operating budget has been cut by 15 percent over the last 18 months, and its staff has been thinned because of widespread furloughs, a hiring freeze and the dismissal of most of its temporary teaching staff, said Kurt Daw, dean of the College of Creative Arts.

Even Mr. Jackson, who graduated from San Francisco State in 1993, lost his salaried adjunct professor position in 2008 after a year and half in the job, and is now freelancing as a guest artist — at lower pay.

But you wouldn’t know it based on the quality of his work. Mr. Jackson’s 2008 productions of “Don Juan” (which he adapted from Molière and Pushkin) and Sophie Treadwell’s “Machinal” remain among the highlights of my theatergoing career. They have eclipsed many professional productions I’ve seen, including those directed by Mr. Jackson at spaces like the Aurora Theater and the Ashby Stage.

The way the young cast handled the physically demanding and grotesquely witty sex scenes in “Don Juan” was particularly engaging: one hilarious moment involved the title character dueling with an enemy while enjoying a romantic tryst. And the student actors brought a canny 21st-century sensibility to Ms. Treadwell’s 1920s agitprop drama. The actors sent up the overblown mannerisms of expressionist theater through their physically extreme approach to mundane tasks like washing the dishes. The dehumanizing effect of their actions was at once chilling and comical.

Word has clearly been getting out about the high quality of performances at San Francisco State, where tickets range from free to about $15. So far, in the 2009-10 academic year, the College of Creative Arts has had a 46 percent increase in attendance at its performances over the previous year. Recent productions of “Twelfth Night,” directed by William Peters, and “High Fidelity the Musical,” directed by Stephen Brookins, had capacity audiences.

The Bay Area’s public schools show similar artistic excellence. The San Francisco School of the Arts produced a memorable Christmas concert last December in the face of falling budgets and run-down premises, where classrooms often lack basic supplies.

Parents are helping to keep the high school afloat by donating an average of $300 per year per student, said the principal, Carmelo Sgarlato, who added that some of that money helps to pay for guest artists.

Like many school concerts, the Christmas program was rather long. But the school’s music ensembles gave a polished and spirited performance of a diverse range of work. I was especially moved by the chamber choral ensemble’s spectral approach to plainsong during the opening candlelit processional, and the vocal jazz ensemble’s take on the Sting song “Fragile,” complete with a silken-toned 14-year-old male soloist. The full house responded enthusiastically.

Dynamic performances and creatively inspiring rehearsals are equally evident in Bay Area institutions that don’t specialize in the arts. A recent dance show at Berkeley High School featured a variety of genres, including hip-hop and contemporary ballet. The dancers executed the steps with passion and an engaging sense of ensemble.

The state now provides less money per student, and the school is facing potential cuts in the next academic year that may adversely affect two art courses. But many students have met the arts education shortfall by taking private classes.

The challenging financial climate is certainly forcing educators in the Bay Area to be more resourceful about creating art in schools. What our educational institutions are able to achieve in a time of financial disarray makes me look forward to the dizzy heights of artistic excellence that will be possible in a more prosperous climate.

But I can’t help wishing that the money were around right now to enable artists like Mr. Jackson to channel their entire creative energy into making art. He — and discerning audiences — deserve to see his original vision of 14 Juliets, rather than making do with 8.

Music Festivals Are Siblings, Invisibly BondedNEW YORK TIMES

noreply@blogger.com (Chloe Veltman) — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 20:33:00 +0000

The British-born electronic composers Kieran Hebden, who performs as Four Tet, and Natasha Barrett are both in San Francisco for concerts. Although Mr. Hebden is closely identified with the indie-pop scene, and Ms. Barrett with the contemporary classical world, they could easily be on the same bill. These musicians, creators of spiraling musique concrète-infused compositions that veer between sound art and trance, allow us to pick out tiny textural details in their work while basking in the music’s overall ambience.

But instead of appearing on the same program, the composers’ music is reaching audiences in entirely different settings. Mr. Hebden’s scheduled appearance on Friday at the Independent was part of the Noise Pop Festival, an annual weeklong indie-rock music celebration, ending on Monday, that attracts around 20,000 people to more than 50 events.

Meanwhile, two of Ms. Barrett’s works will be performed this coming Friday at the Other Minds Festival of New Music, a yearly forum for contemporary classical composers. Its public performance series, held this year from Thursday through Saturday at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, features three concerts of nine composers’ works. Attendance is expected to total around 1,300.

Despite the obvious differences of size, scope and demographics (Noise Pop’s audience skews about 20 years younger on average than that of Other Minds), the festivals have much in common. The crossover potential of artists like Mr. Hebden and Ms. Barrett is just one similarity. Since being founded in the same year, 1993, the festivals have helped to shape the Bay Area music scene.

Each grew organically out of one person’s vision. Noise Pop began life as a one-night stand produced by a local promoter, Kevin Arnold. He was a booker for a small Emeryville agency when a San Francisco club (now the Independent) asked him to find bands to fill an empty January date.

“The original Noise Pop Festival was just a ‘five bands for five dollars’ show,” Mr. Arnold said in an e-mail interview. “But I called it a festival and silk-screened a poster to make it seem more exciting. It was way more successful than anyone expected.” The Other Minds Festival emerged from the composer Charles Amirkhanian’s experience producing a similar event in Telluride, Colo., from 1988 to 1991. When financing for that festival ceased, Mr. Amirkhanian recreated it with new backing in the Bay Area. Combining a private composers’ symposium (held under the auspices of the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, of which Mr. Amirkhanian was executive director) alongside three days of public concerts and discussions, the inaugural Other Minds Festival featured Meredith Monk, Conlon Nancarrow and Philip Glass.

From the beginning the two festivals have shared a desire to bring together local, national and international artists at different stages of their careers. This year’s Other Minds Festival features work by young composers like Gyan Riley and Carla Kihlstedt of the Bay Area and Lisa Bielawa from New York, with more established names, like the American composer Tom Johnson, who is based in Paris, and Jürg Frey of Switzerland.

“By having different generations involved, we have a much livelier discussion and interchange of ideas,” Mr. Amirkhanian said in an e-mail message. “We also relish the opportunity to expose Bay Area composers to guests from outside California and vice versa.”

The current Noise Pop Festival lineup has featured international bands, like We Were Promised Jetpacks from Scotland; household names, including Yoko Ono’s Plastic Ono Band; and Bay Area up-and-comers like Deerhoof, Thao Nguyen and Glaciers. It also included the innovative partnership of the Bay Area indie-pop band the Dodos and the Magik*Magik Orchestra, a San Francisco instrumental ensemble.

Both festivals pride themselves on spotting emerging talent. Julia Wolfe, a co-founder of the Bang on a Can ensemble, got a boost from meeting Mr. Glass at the first Other Minds Festival. The next year he invited her to put out her first solo CD on his Point Music label.

The Chinese composer Tan Dun, the Oscar-winning composer of the “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” score, appeared at the festival in 1995. And the Noise Pop Festival gave early exposure to well-known bands like the Flaming Lips, the White Stripes and Death Cab for Cutie.

Even the most balanced musical lineup isn’t enough to keep a festival bubbling for nearly two decades. Though serving different markets, the two festivals have devised remarkably similar strategies to enhance the standard concert fare. Each presents films and a visual arts component; broadcasts recorded music (Noise Pop offers podcasts, and Other Minds presents a weekly public radio show, “Music From Other Minds”); and runs live music events later in the year.

The Other Minds Festival presents fall concerts focusing on the music of past luminaries like Henry Cowell. Introduced in 2007, Noise Pop’s fall two-day Treasure Island Music Festival is fast becoming one of the most talked-about Bay Area music events, not least because of its rare location: an island in the middle of the bay.

Mr. Arnold and Mr. Amirkhanian have never met, but they really should; they could learn a great deal from each other. The Other Minds Festival could draw on the Noise Pop model to open up the insular world of contemporary classical music, while Noise Pop could look to Other Minds to build stronger bonds and unusual collaboration among artists. It may not be too long before the two festivals start seeing some audience and artistic overlap.

Two Cities, One Lasting Cultural ExchangeNEW YORK TIMES

noreply@blogger.com (Chloe Veltman) — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 19:51:00 +0000

To many people who have never been to China, myself among them, San Francisco’s Chinatown — the oldest and one of the largest districts of its kind in North America — still largely represents Chinese culture, despite the popularity of films like Zhang Yimou’s “Hero”; international tours by the country’s top ballet, opera and circus companies; and the fame of Chinese composers like Tan Dun. Most Bay Area residents see beyond the usual representations of Chinese New Year parades, dragon dances and Ming Dynasty vases gathering dust behind glass in museums. But even so, when lipstick-colored pagodas, soggy dim sum and mass-produced, paw-waving porcelain cats come to represent an entire civilization, it’s time to take a step back and look beyond the Disneyland view.

For years organizations like the Chinese Culture Center and Chinese Historical Society of America have been working hard to change this image by demonstrating a sophisticated view of Chinese culture that challenges clichés and pushes us to think differently about the relationship between our two nations. And the conventional notions of Chinese culture will continue to be challenged as San Francisco begins Shanghai Celebration, a yearlong arts festival honoring the longstanding cultural connection between the two cities through concerts, films, exhibitions, discussions and other special events.

Inspired by the 30th anniversary of San Francisco’s sister-city relationship with Shanghai, as well as by the 2010 World Expo there, an event of this scope is a significant step forward.

Leading the effort is the exhibition “Shanghai: Art of the City,” opening on Friday at the Asian Art Museum. In contrast to that institution’s last major exhibition of Shanghai art in 1983, which focused strongly on traditional representations of Chinese heritage, the new show surveys the tension between the forces of outside influences and the push to stay loyal to Shanghai’s own visual culture. The work on display extends from 1850 (when Shanghai emerged as an international city as a result of clashes over trade between China and Britain) to the present day, and it reflects an artistic perspective that is at once intrinsically Chinese and more international in scope.

For instance, a bedroom suite from the 1920s demonstrates a strong European influence, with its Art Deco-inspired asymmetrical contours and use of bold geometric shapes. But the furniture reveals Chinese interests too: it is built out of a locally grown rosewood and inlaid with a typically Chinese bamboo design.

Works by the 20th-century Shanghai painter Liu Haisu suggest the tension between newer, more Western-influenced styles and time-honored Asian approaches. Mr. Liu’s ethereal “Blue-and-Green Landscape” (1978) depicts a traditional Chinese scene with craggy mountains rising out of the mist, and delicate trees in the foreground. It was created using the standard scroll and ink, but he eschewed longstanding ideas about Chinese composition by painting the trees in bright reds and greens rather than muted hues and by arranging the foliage in horizontal clusters instead of opting for the more typical zigzag pattern.

Other local arts organizations involved in Shanghai Celebration are taking similar approaches. The San Francisco Conservatory of Music will be cementing its ties with its Shanghai counterpart on Monday night with a concert featuring the acclaimed mezzo-soprano Zheng Cao, who is based in San Francisco, as well as faculty members, students and alumni from both schools.

A graduate of the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, Ms. Cao will perform new works composed by members of each institution. Instrumental pieces on the program include the United States premiere of “San,” a chamber music piece written for Western orchestral instruments that features Chinese elements like pitch-bending.

Later this month the Bay Area Chapter of the American Jewish Committee is mounting a photography exhibition, “The Jews in Modern China,” that will explore a little-known area of Shanghai’s heritage. It chronicles the lives of Jewish immigrants who came to Shanghai in the 1840s from countries as diverse as Russia and Iraq to avoid persecution.

In May the Chinese Culture Foundation is presenting a music festival in Chinatown that will combine traditional Shanghai opera with Asian-American jazz and, for an extra twist, Latin music.

Representations of Chinese culture in the Bay Area have come a long way since Chinese immigrants arrived in the middle of the 19th century to work the railroads and gold mines. The evolution in the understanding of Chinese culture in the Bay Area can be seen in, among other things, the changes that have taken place in the programming of art exhibitions and the developing relationships between arts organizations.

In previous decades the Chinese Culture Center imported works from China for display, like a 1979 exhibition of Chinese woodcuts; these days the organization is offering innovative exhibitions like last year’s “Present Tense” show, aimed at creating dialogue among the work of native Chinese, Chinese-American and non-Chinese artists.

“In the past, we were borrowing from museums in China for our exhibitions,” said Mabel Teng, executive director of the Chinese Culture Center. “Now the two cultures have merged, and the art reflects the old and new.”

Conservatory Theater Still Seeks Its OvationNEW YORK TIMES

noreply@blogger.com (Chloe Veltman) — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 20:41:00 +0000

Like the thrill of settling into a plush seat as the curtain rises on a highly anticipated production, there’s the excitement over the announcement every March of the American Conservatory Theater’s coming season, with its promises of innovatively staged classic plays, bold new works by powerful writers and acclaimed productions imported from beyond the Bay Area.

Yet every year my expectations are dashed. More often than not, I feel emotionally disconnected from what’s on the American Conservatory Theater’s stage. (Engrossing productions brought in from the outside, like John Doyle’s Broadway staging of “Sweeney Todd,” are an exception.) This is troubling. A bustling cultural hub like San Francisco deserves a jewel of a flagship theater company, one that, like the San Francisco Ballet, attracts the attention of the broader arts world.

The company’s current production of “Phèdre,” Racine’s tragedy about a Grecian queen’s illicit passions, underscores the problem. On paper, the play looks promising: it’s the world premiere adaptation by the British playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker featuring actors from the acclaimed Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Canada.

But Ms. Wertenbaker’s text, which retains all of the stiffness of Racine’s original but little of its lyricism, manages to excise much of the story’s poetic intensity and savage emotion. With a declamatory acting style and ponderous blocking, the work comes across as an intellectual exercise rather than a theatrical experience that engages both the heart and mind.

The same criticism could be leveled at many of the company’s recent productions, like “After the War” and “Happy End.” It took risks in staging these works, which all involved large casts and, in the case of “After the War,” significant development time. Although the productions featured impressive sets and lighting, the efforts did not pay off because of cumbersome mise-en-scènes and emotional flatness.

Founded in 1965 by the director William Ball in Pittsburgh before relocating to San Francisco a year later, the American Conservatory Theater became widely known for its expansive core acting company and dedication to training. During its first San Francisco season, the company staged 27 productions in two theaters to critical acclaim. Actors were sometimes cast in two productions at once and could occasionally be seen running from building to building between scenes.

The company’s fortunes have vacillated since. Initially, its work was well received; in 1979 the theater won a Tony Award for theatrical achievement and excellence in repertory performance. But eventually the resources dried up, the acting company faded out, and the theater’s reputation waned.

When the current artistic director, Carey Perloff, took over in 1992, she reinstated a small core acting company, expanded the educational offerings and earned praise, in particular, for her productions of Tom Stoppard plays. But other shows, like Mark Lamos’s deliberately shocking take on Christopher Marlowe’s “Edward II,” turned many people off. These days the smaller Berkeley Repertory Theater is doing more innovative work and gaining national attention.

Box office figures suggest the audience’s growing discontent with the American Conservatory Theater’s output. According to company officials, in the past five years subscriptions have fallen to 14,939, from 17,574.

But the organization is working hard to attract audiences. As part of the recent centennial celebration of the theater’s historic auditorium, it instituted a two-day $19.10 ticket sale.

One former subscriber I talked to said she canceled her subscription after seven years partly because she found many of the productions too avant-garde. No one could accuse Ms. Perloff of pandering to the masses. Despite bringing in stars like Olympia Dukakis (who is starring in “Vigil,” starting in late March), Ms. Perloff’s programming choices are often inspiringly risky — especially in the company’s grand home theater, which is ill suited to difficult, small-scale works.

This season features a formidable three world premieres: a dance-theater collaboration with the San Francisco Ballet titled “The Tosca Project”; a new translation of Bertolt Brecht’s play “The Caucasian Chalk Circle,” directed by Mr. Doyle; and “Phèdre.” The theater has eight playwrights under commission, including a local rising star, Peter Sinn Nachtrieb.

Meanwhile, the organization continues to grow its core acting company — a remarkable investment in Bay Area talent — and remains committed to importing foreign productions.

Balancing a quest for innovation with the realities of producing theater today is undeniably tough. But the American Conservatory Theater is making moves in the right direction. The company is searching for a more convivial second space to nurture new work. (Its current alternate site, Zeum, feels like a sterile lecture hall.) The theater is also sending its students out to perform in the community.

The future success of the American Conservatory Theater may also depend on the leadership’s ability to understand its patrons better. “Our audience over time has grown to hunger for challenging material,” Ms. Perloff said in an interview. “If you expose people to great storytelling told beautifully, they will respond to it even if they spend all day on Facebook.”

What Ms. Perloff perhaps fails to recognize is that as much as theatergoers like to be intellectually stimulated, first and foremost they want to be moved, whether to tears or laughter. Finding an additional space and reaching out to the community are both laudable steps. But the effort is wasted if the company fails to connect with the audience at the visceral level when the curtain rises each night.

Nonfiction Filmmakers Still Tell Rich StoriesNEW YORK TIMES

noreply@blogger.com (Chloe Veltman) — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 18:43:00 +0000

The Bay Area has long been known as a center for documentary filmmaking. Many local documentarians have won or been nominated for Academy Awards, including Sam Green (“The Weather Underground”) and Robert Epstein (“The Times of Harvey Milk”). The area is home to the Independent Television Service, a major financer of documentary films, as well as some of the most respected film schools in the country.

But the success of local documentaries can’t be attributed to education and financing alone. The region itself seems especially tight-knit and supportive.

“The Bay Area is a very good place to be a documentarian because of the cooperative nature of the community,” said Janis Plotkin, a programmer for the Mill Valley Film Festival. “For a small city, San Francisco has amazingly supportive resources for independent filmmakers.”

But fundamentally, the success has to do with storytelling. Some local filmmakers, like Christian Bruno, are pushing the limits of narrative. Mr. Bruno’s jewel-like film “Strand: A Natural History of Cinema” mines the history of the region’s once-opulent movie palaces in a lyrical manner that makes it feel like an archaeological dig. He burrows through time with the aid of diverse interviews, archival footage and contemporary scenes shot on 16-millimeter film to convey the idea of cinemas as sites of social interaction and imaginative exploration.

But as three compelling new homegrown documentaries show, local filmmakers are also using more traditional storytelling techniques, like character-driven narratives with a strong three-act structure, in powerful ways. The Talbot Players’ “Sound Tracks: Music Without Borders” series; Katherine Bruens’s “Corner Store”; and David Silberberg’s “Oh My God! It’s Harrod Blank!” tell engrossing tales by focusing on key characters.

The tried-and-true storytelling formulas clearly work. The slow-burning “Corner Store” follows the journey of Yousef Elhaj, owner of a Mission district corner deli, as he travels from San Francisco to his native Palestinian territories to be reunited with his family, which he hasn’t seen in 10 years. The film provides a moving insight into one man’s struggle to reconcile the kinship he feels for his adopted Bay Area home with his Middle Eastern roots.

“Corner Store,” which will be screened at next month’s San Francisco Independent Film Festival, trundles along languorously, with atmospheric shots of bustling Palestinian marketplaces and San Francisco streets.

Despite its meandering pace, the film is engaging because of Ms. Bruens’s deep, meditative portrait of the protagonist and the straightforward narrative arc. Moving from San Francisco to the Palestinian territories and back to San Francisco, the three-part structure makes viewers feel as if they were traveling alongside Mr. Elhaj.

The layout of “Sound Tracks” is equally pronounced. The documentary, which begins on Monday night on most PBS stations, comprises three distinct and fascinating narratives about the intersection of music, travel and politics. The segments provide fresh angles on relatively well-known subjects by offering miniature character studies.

The first story explores the genesis of the hit Russian pop song “A Man Like Putin,” a peppy piece of musical propaganda that has grown to be something of a calling card for Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin. The segment focuses on the song’s composer, Alexander Yelin, a rock music dissident turned promoter.

The next section delves into the legacy of the Nigerian music pioneer and political activist Fela Kuti. It centers on Mr. Kuti’s youngest son, Seun, who stepped forward as a teenager to lead his father’s band after Mr. Kuti’s death in 1997.

The third segment follows the Kazakhstani virtuoso violinist Marat Bisengaliev as he tries to recoup the battered reputation of his country in the wake of “Borat,” Sacha Baron Cohen’s blockbuster 2006 mockumentary that didn’t do much for Kazakhstan’s global reputation.

“Sound Tracks” makes a virtue of its three-part structure; the individual narratives come together cumulatively to make its resounding overall point: music is a powerful agent of community building and social change.

Meanwhile, Mr. Silberberg’s engrossing documentary “Oh My God! It’s Harrod Blank!” explores the life and work of Mr. Blank, a Bay Area artist and filmmaker best known for building art cars (vehicles festooned with different objects) and documenting that scene. The film, also showing at the San Francisco Independent Film Festival, not only creates a vivid, fond portrait of the eccentric Mr. Blank (a man who seems to love chickens more than people), but also provides a profound meditation on the pros and cons of rugged individualism. Although the film moves back and forth through time, it basically unfolds in three stages: Mr. Blank’s youth, his growing interest in art cars and his more recent activities.

All three films palpably demonstrate the power of traditional storytelling. But there seems to be a push on the local documentary scene for a more innovative approach, like Mr. Bruno’s, as well.

“There are many types of documentaries, and the form is not limited exclusively to stories driven by characters,” Michele Turnure-Salleo, the San Francisco Film Society’s director of filmmaker services, said in an e-mail message. “A compelling subject or inquiry can form the backbone of a nonfiction film, and funders are supporting work that extends beyond traditional character-driven storytelling.”

As long as the rich filmmaking community and resources continue in the Bay Area — and as long as the documentarians put their narratives front and center — the combination of experimental and trusted approaches should further the success.

Broad Minds Encourage Broad LaughterNEW YORK TIMES

noreply@blogger.com (Chloe Veltman) — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 10:36:00 +0000

It’s often been said that stand-up comedy is the most subjective art form. What’s side-splitting to one person is seditious to the next. Yet while the evolving dynamics of the Bay Area entertainment scene have broadened traditional definitions of what constitutes comedy, some of the audience still takes a narrow view of what’s funny and what isn’t.

With its kaleidoscopic lineup, the SF Sketchfest comedy festival, which opened on Thursday, should help audiences understand that there are many paths to humor beyond the traditional setup-and-punch-line-centric patter. As in previous years, the program, which features some 200 artists of local, national and international prominence, stretches standard notions to their limits.

The festival includes the embattled talk show host Conan O’Brien (Sunday); impressionists, among them James Adomian (next Sunday); improv and sketch comedy troupes, like the San Francisco-based Kasper Hauser (Tuesday and Jan. 30); absurdist comedians like Animosity Pierre (Tuesday and Thursday); sitcom actors like Scott Adsit of “30 Rock” (Jan. 30); solo theater artists, including Sara Benincasa (Saturday); and even a comedic jazz outfit, the Be-Bop Heroin Hour (Jan. 29 and 30). The festival perhaps went a step too far by inviting the singer-songwriter Aimee Mann, a musician whose plaintive ballads aren’t generally known for their laughter-inducing qualities.

Cultivating broad-mindedness toward these many forms of comedy is important. If audiences were open to a wider range of humorous performance, the demand for live comedy might grow. This would in turn lead to the rejuvenation of the once-lauded but sadly long-dormant San Francisco comedy scene, an arena that helped forge the careers of Phyllis Diller, Whoopi Goldberg and Robin Williams.

If audiences were willing to expand their definitions of comedy, they might relax and enjoy themselves rather than fret about how what they’re seeing onstage doesn’t conform to their expectations. Their heightened pleasure would doubtless have an overall positive effect on the community. In these dark times we can use all the opportunities for laughter we can get.

Personal taste notwithstanding, the negative reaction to a recent show I attended suggests that some Bay Area audience members may not have caught up with the changes that have taken place on the local comedy scene over the past decade or so. Or perhaps they chose to ignore the words “unconventional” and “groundbreaking” on the flier advertising the “Not Your Normal New Year’s Eve” comedy night at the Herbst Theater.

“The worst comedy lineup ever, full of nonsensical stream-of-consciousness musings and pathetic revelations,” wrote one reviewer on the ticketing site Goldstar.com. Another wrote, “We only stayed because our car was not ready to pick us up.” Contrastingly, I was thoroughly entertained.

The comedy scene has transformed partly because of the shuttering of several Bay Area comedy clubs in the 1990s and early 2000s, which forced artists to develop their work in other settings, like theaters and the Internet. While many local stand-up acts once focused on observational or autobiographical material, these days the scene is much more fragmented.

But there are still plenty of observational comics around. Of those who performed on New Year’s Eve, many of whom are also on the SF Sketchfest roster, Brent Weinbach most closely reflects that tradition.

But the other acts demonstrated radically different approaches. Will Franken, named “Best Alternative to Psychedelic Drugs” by The San Francisco Bay Guardian, offers an erudite brand of stream-of-consciousness comedy that encompasses bits like a poetry slam match between George Milton reciting the opening of “Paradise Lost” and a poetically challenged modern teenager doing some rap.

Mary Van Note’s humor hinges on misplaced sexual advances; this comedian is best known for her 10-part online video series about trying to woo Mayor Gavin Newsom.

Meanwhile, the surreal theatrics of We Are Nudes balance the over-the-top physicality of a former Cirque du Soleil performer, John Gilkey, against the awkward introversion of his comedic sidekicks, Donny Divanian and Alec Jones-Trujillo. The group’s act reaches its zenith with a protracted tirade from a supposed audience member about the performers’ lack of comedic skill.

Of course, the many people in the Herbst audience who responded unfavorably to the entertainment may simply not share my sense of humor. It may be that people need to get out and see a diverse range of live comedy. But the incentive to do so lies partly elsewhere.

While the SF Sketchfest helps to expand an understanding of the art of comedy, local promoters and clubs need to play a role year-round too. Bay Area audiences are by and large enlightened. If they shy away from the stranger side of comedy, it may also be because of the local industry’s narrow approach to programming and reluctance to book any act that steps beyond conventional realms. The Bay Area’s eclectic landscape should operate along the same lines as many an effective comic act: with a good punch line set up to defy expectations.

When a Word’s Look Counted as Much as Its MeaningNEW YORK TIMES

noreply@blogger.com (Chloe Veltman) — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 21:06:00 +0000

Typography is ubiquitous. A world without letters, numerals and symbols designed by skillful font makers would consist of boring billboards, pages and street signs. Yet unlike other forms of applied design, typography remains an obscure and little-understood field. When buildings are constructed, they make news. A new font barely registers in the public consciousness.

In the 1980s and ’90s, however, the Bay Area was at the forefront of a movement to change this reality. The work of the graphic design company Emigre, based in Berkeley, is the focus of an exhibition of artwork and artifacts at Gallery 16 in San Francisco. An accompanying book, “Emigre No. 70: The Look Back Issue — Celebrating 25 Years in Graphic Design,” further stresses the efforts of a group of graphic designers (mainly locals) to elevate design in general — and typography in particular — to an art form.

But over the years, frictions between the forces of art and commerce have hindered Emigre’s cause. In today’s environment, where fonts can be created and replicated by anyone with a personal computer (United States copyright law does not extend protection to typeface design), the idea that a font can be an objet d’art in its own right seems like a utopian reverie.

“Emigre was born out of a ‘digital dream,’ ” the graphic designer Erik Adigard, based in Sausalito, wrote in an e-mail message. “But it was short-lived. Emigre is history, even if still somewhat of a cult.”

Yet the marriage between a font’s beauty of form and the context in which it is employed is what makes the written word jump off the page. In striving to demonstrate this truth, Emigre deserves our attention.

Founded in 1984 by the husband-and-wife team of Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko, Emigre was influential on the graphic design scene in the ’80s and ’90s. This was partly because of the company’s magazine, also called Emigre. First a quarterly and later a seminannual, it featured innovative typefaces and posters; eye-catching photography; offbeat profiles of writers and artists; and wide-ranging critical essays on subjects like the Bauhaus movement and the legibility of fonts. Although the magazine no longer exists, Emigre still operates as a font foundry; its library houses more than 300 typefaces.

From 1984 to 2005, Emigre magazine achieved cult status. With their unconventional and striking use of fonts, publications like Wired and McSweeney’s, both based in San Francisco, owe it a debt. In 2006 the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired the entire Emigre magazine canon for its permanent design collection, and put the magazines on display for a year.

“For me, like many others galvanized by graphic design during Emigre’s heyday, the magazine was the most consistently interesting design publication produced anywhere by anyone,” the design journalist Rick Poynor wrote in 2005.

Emigre chronicled a revolution in typography that went hand in hand with the birth of the personal computer, which brought new methods for creating type. (It’s perhaps no accident that Emigre and the Macintosh computer made their debuts in the same year.) The transformation also ran in tandem with the rise of postmodern theories then popular in art schools concerning the aesthetics of utilitarian design.

Such ideas helped to free font design from the constraints of functionality. Possibly for the first time since the elaborate but often illegible opening capital letters of medieval illuminated manuscripts, font designers didn’t have to worry about readability and reproducibility.

Going beyond the no-nonsense look of archetypal typeface families like Times and Helvetica, designers in Emigre’s orbit, like John Hersey, Joachim Müller-Lancé and Ms. Licko, saw font design as a form of creative expression. With its thick-contoured, cartoonish forms, Mr. Hersey’s Blockhead typeface won’t be used for street signs anytime soon, but the fonts are eye-catching. The same could be said of Ms. Licko’s aggressive and angular Oblong typeface.

For all the theoretical debate and creative output inspired by Emigre, the font-as-art movement seems to be over. The commercial interests in the fast-paced digital age have reduced typeface design to cookie-cutter templates and formulas. Unbridled innovation has largely been supplanted by nostalgic exhibitions and commemorative books.

Emigre magazine’s demise may be symptomatic of the fact that it was primarily a showcase for the company’s fonts. Its journalistic endeavors often supported the founders’ business goals, as is evidenced by its numerous articles denouncing designer-unfriendly typeface copyright laws. But Griff Williams, owner and director of Gallery 16, wrote in an e-mail message: “For me, the lesson learned from Emigre is that business and art can coexist. The typeface business was a guise to deliver content in profoundly interesting ways. Not the other way around.”

Mr. VanderLans was grappling with the tension between art and commerce while publishing his magazine. “The entrepreneurial element, which is crucial to the existence of any subculture, avant-garde or underground work, is largely overlooked when assessing the work, because to most people, whenever the commercial aspects become prominent, it somehow taints the work and renders it less pure or authentic,” he wrote in Emigre in 1995. “Yet it’s difficult to imagine how any movement can operate without a concentrated effort to make money.”

Voice Check: 10 Tips for Healthy SingingAMERICAN THEATRE MAGAZINE

noreply@blogger.com (Chloe Veltman) — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 20:00:00 +0000

Voice therapists, trainers and performers give expert advice on how to protect and maintain your singing voice

Theatre lore is packed with horror stories about performers cracking or missing notes on stage or—even worse—losing their voices completely. Luciano Pavarotti had, near the start of his career, a disastrous concert in the Italian city of Ferrara around the time that a nodule first developed on his vocal chords; as a result, he gave up singing for a while. In 1997, Julie Andrews's voice was seriously damaged after she underwent surgery for polyps that developed on her vocal chords while she was performing in Victor/Victoria on Broadway. And Nathan Lane frequently missed performances of the Broadway production of The Producers owing to a polyp on his left vocal chord.

Without a doubt, the care of the voice is as essential to the business of being a professional actor or singer as remembering one's lines. But hectic schedules, smoky bars, flu season and countless other challenges constantly conspire to derail attempts to sing in public with confidence, comfort and ease. Here, a wide range of singing experts—voice therapists Joan Lader, Joanna Cazden and John Haskell; voice trainers Judith Farris, Kate DeVore, Joan Melton, Janet Rodgers and Scott Kaiser; performers Susan Graham and Kristin Chenoweth, as well as choral director Ian Robertson—impart their top tips for maintaining a healthy and successful singing career.

1. Technique is King

Maintaining great technique is without question the basis for a healthy voice. Good technique prevents injury and enables performers to sing at the top of their game every time. "With proper training, the singer/actor learns to release excess tensions in the body and throat muscles," says Rodgers. "This means that the vocal mechanism is sitting in a muscular environment that will allow it to function at its best. Proper vocal technique means that the singer/actor has learned to use 'diaphragmatic breath support' in singing. This moves the effort of support to the abdominal muscles and away from the muscles that are closest to the throat. Proper vocal technique means that the singer/actor has trained the vocal folds to respond to pitch changes and that the singer/actor can maximize the gifts that nature has provided."

"Improper technique can lead to vocal injuries, which can be annoying and limiting at best and career-ending at worst," says DeVore. "Most common vocal injuries (nodules, polyps, bruising, swelling) are caused at least in part by the vocal cords slamming together too hard when we speak, sing, shout, scream, wail, keen, sob and so forth. There are ways to do all of those things healthily, which ensures that a performer will have a flexible voice to last through his or her career."

Like many experts, Farris believes that proper technique begins with the breath. "The only physical part of singing should be breathing," she says. "That should be naturally obtained and constantly maintained. It is much like a violinist practicing bowing. I know a good violinist is always attentive to balancing the bow on the strings. In singing, if one's breath is balanced, it is nearly impossible to have any kind of strain on the vocal apparatus, and the easiest and most beautiful sound is achieved. Thus obtaining a correct vocal technique is the key to the prevention of vocal problems. The vocal cords themselves are muscles. Athletes and dancers know that any muscle that is used correctly gets stronger with use, not weaker or injured."

However, good technique cannot be gained through a "one-size-fits-all" approach, says
Cazden, who explains that "many vocal techniques work but for a different reason than the teacher proclaims. The field of voice is still emerging from centuries of speculation, guesswork and secretive folklore. A singer needs to trust his or her own experience, use what works and not get distracted by flowery explanations."

Adds Melton: "Each performer is unique, so the to-do list that answers all the issues does not exist. However, to quote Mary Hammond, head of musical theatre at the Royal Academy of Music in London, 'Technique frees the imagination.' The better, more solid and more unconscious the technique, the freer the performer is to grow, explore and mature."

2. It's All about Prevention

Prescription medications might get a singer under duress through a performance, but they are not the way to solve vocal issues in the long-term. "Many singers resort to doctors who fill them with cortisone shots to get through a performance or audition," says Farris. "But if the cause of the problem is not corrected, the issues continue and these so-called 'remedies' can cause additional problems of their own. At that point, the singer should have vocal rest and then seek out a good teacher to help correct the issue. Prevention, however, is key."

Cazden concurs: "The absolute biggest problem that singers have is not visiting a doctor soon enough. Financial pressures and a mistrust of mainstream medicine lead people to 'muscle through' or 'get by' for months longer than they should. This adds layers of bad technique onto the original injury, and delays recovery. Unless you have terrific insurance, set up a medical savings account and stash whatever you can every month so that when you need a voice doctor you can afford a good one. Plan ahead, and before you need help, locate a laryngologist with videostrobe exam equipment and experience working with singers. Exams without videostrobe are only accurate about one-third of the time. You might need to travel to get to a good clinic, but in the long run, the right diagnosis will save you time, money and anguish."

Warning signs can help performers identify and take care of potential problems early: "Missing warning signs of a vocal injury can be a problem," says DeVore. "Common warning signs include hoarseness in the absence of an illness (or hoarseness that hangs around after cold symptoms have cleared up); decrease in speaking or singing range; change in voice quality (breathiness, gruffness, a veiled sound); increased physical effort to speak or sing; physical discomfort or pain when voicing; something just not feeling right with the voice."

3. Calisthenics Count

Warming up the voice is absolutely essential to a singer's ability to prevent injuries. Just like going for a run without first stretching, the voice can easily strain if pushed too hard and without first being primed. "Develop a warm-up routine that slowly 'wakes' the voice and brings it into alignment with breath control and natural support," says Robertson.

4. Happy Talk

"A common mistake performers make is forgetting to have good technique not only when singing but when speaking," says Chenoweth. "That is a tough one for me, because the speaking voice I am most comfortable in isn't the best for my voice in general."

Haskell adds: "Most singers are talkers by nature. Their biggest mistake is talking too much before and after a performance. Talking in noisy environments can be a particular problem when a singer is on the road as producers often expect artists to meet patrons to talk about their work after they've performed. This is often part of a performer's contract, so it's hard to hold back."

5. Enlist the A-Team

Singers need to find the right teachers throughout their careers. Chenoweth, for instance, still takes voice lessons with teachers in New York as well as with Florence Birdwell, the performer's mentor and professor at Oklahoma City University, where she went to school. Haskell says that vocalists should "follow their instincts about what feels right and what doesn't with regards to voice training. Some voice teachers push students too much to point of discomfort or even pain. The muscles and coordination of the vocal mechanism can be achieved in a gradual way." According to Lader, the best teachers have a good grasp of how the body works from a mechanical standpoint: "A singer needs to find a teacher who is knowledgeable in anatomy and physiology, who has good eyes and ears and can direct the student in a healthy manner to achieve whatever it is the student has set out to accomplish."

Cazden adds: "Singers often make the mistake of staying too long with a teacher who is not taking their voice in a good direction. If the process or relationship doesn't feel right, you shouldn't feel obligated to continue with that person. Take sample lessons with a few other teachers for perspective. If you think something is medically wrong with your voice, but your teacher claims to be able to fix it, get a second opinion."

Singers, however, often need more than one expert to help guide their careers. Haskell believes that performers should surround themselves with a group of trusted professionals across a range of disciplines in order to develop performance skills, prevent injury and troubleshoot problems as they arise. "In addition to the voice teacher who concentrates on helping a performer to develop great technique," Haskell says, "a singer might also benefit from the services of a vocal coach, an acting coach, a voice therapist, a physical therapist, as well as an ear, nose and throat physician. There has to be communication between the different parties so that everyone is on the same page regarding the singer's issues and progress."

6. The Power of Cross-training

Performers, who are often asked to sing in many different styles, frequently have to be as adept at singing numbers from the musical theatre repertoire as they are at performing opera arias, folk songs and jazz standards. Training to sing healthfully across multiple styles is even important to singers who specialize in just one genre.

"Cross-training across all styles is the key to being able to perform them in artistically coherent and safe way," says Lader. "If you sing opera you should also practice singing pop songs. This is important, because it prevents injury and strengthens, balances and coordinates the many parts of the laryngeal musculature. Plus, singing in a different style from what one is accustomed to can help to raise a red flag if there is something wrong with the vocal chords that needs special attention."

7. Salvation through Hydration

Drinking water is crucial to maintaining a healthy voice, because it prevents the delicate vocal chords from drying out. "Drinking about two liters of water a day is helpful for most people, but they need to compensate with extra water for things that dry them out (like caffeine, alcohol, smoke and certain medications)," says DeVore.

Proper hydration also means finding creative ways to counterbalance arid environments (caused by air-conditioning and hot climates) that can dry out the vocal chords. Steam inhalation, for example, moistens the vocal cords and thins out mucus. Graham proposes additional techniques for performers who travel regularly: "When I'm flying, I put a damp cloth on my face, because airplane air is so dry. I also keep a humidifier in my room."

Kaiser adds: "Drinking water to keep the folds of the vocal chords lubricated is important, but there are other things that performers should reduce such as the consumption of dairy products and cold and allergy medications, because they coat the vocal chords and dry out the voice."

8. Food Glorious Food

Acid reflux and other problems of the digestive system can cause serious issues for singers. "The acid that comes up through the stomach can literally eat away at the delicate tissue at the back of the larynx and affect the posterior part of the vocal chords," says Haskell. "If a singer gets a reflux diagnosis from an ear, nose and throat specialist, he or she has to start observing a reflux regimen. This may mean eliminating caffeine, carbonated drinks, citrus fruits, spicy foods and chocolate. Also, the evening meal should not be eaten too late or too close to bedtime, which can present a problem for performers who don't want to eat much before they go on stage."

9. Rest Up

The voice is a fragile instrument. Singers should be in touch with how they're feeling on any given day enough to know when to pull back or even take some time off. "If you're tired, ill or hungover, sing less," says Cazden. "If you feel great, don't be stupid and sing so much that you wreck your instrument."

Rodgers believes that rest is important even while an actor or singer is working. "During rehearsal breaks, avoid chitchat," she says. "Really rest the voice for those 10-minute breaks."

DeVore says that performing full-throttle with an illness rather than resting is one of the worst things a performer can do for his or her voice: "Succumbing to pressure (either internal or external) to 'push through' an illness is, unfortunately, a common mistake performers make. 'The show must go on' is so ingrained in a performer's psyche—and this belief is reinforced by the entire production team—that they forget that 'the show' doesn't have to include performing at every rehearsal at full tilt. Pushing through an illness is a textbook cause of vocal injuries, and many problems can be avoided if people take the time to rest and heal."

Getting good amounts of sleep is absolutely crucial to vocal health. "The most important thing for me—which I struggle with—is getting enough sleep: I need at least eight hours, but nine is best," says Chenoweth. "My friends and family understand that sometimes I can only converse via e-mail or watch a movie with them, because the voice is a muscle that must be rested!"

10. One for the Road?

The pressures of a life on the stage can lead to some unhealthy choices for performers. "The most common mistake you see in actors, particularly young ones, is that they don't know how to pace themselves," says Kaiser. "They'll rehearse till midnight, drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes and expect voices to respond. It doesn't take much to strain a voice—even talking over loud music in a dance club can cause damage."

That's why many performers avoid drinking, smoking and noisy environments. "I don't drink very much alcohol when singing, because it dries out the voice," confesses Chenoweth. "I do not smoke or use drugs. I sort of live like a nun."
Journalist and singer Chloe Veltman is the Bay Area culture correspondent for the New York Times and the host/producer of "VoiceBox", a new public radio series about the art of singing.

Biographies of the Experts:

John Haskell has maintained a private practice in speech-language pathology in New York City for more than 25 years. He has held faculty positions at Pace University, Rutgers University and William Paterson College of New Jersey and is co-founder and co-director of the New York City Voice Study Group.

Kate DeVore is a theatre voice, speech and dialect trainer, speech pathologist and personal development coach based in Chicago. She is the co-author of The Voice Book: Caring for, Protecting and Improving Your Voice with Starr Cookman.

Scott Kaiser is director of company devel-opment and head of voice and text at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where he has spent 20 years as an actor, director and voice coach.

Judith Farris is a soloist, contralto and voice trainer who maintains a studio in New York. She is presently artist-in-residence in the theatre and music departments at Southeast Missouri State University.

Janet Rodgers, the editor of The Complete Voice and Speech Workout, is a past president of the Voice and Speech Trainers Association and an associate professor of theatre at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Joan Lader is a voice teacher and therapist. Her patients and students include some of the world's leading performers, such as Patti LuPone, Madonna and Roberta Flack.

Joanna Cazden, the author of How to Take Care of Your Voice, is a speech pathologist, singer, voice coach and teacher.

Joan Melton is a voice teacher based in New York City. She is the author of Singing in Musical Theatre: The Training of Singers and Actors andfounded the voice/movement program for the Department of Theatre and Dance at California State University—Fullerton.

Susan Graham is a Grammy Award—winning mezzo-soprano who performs leading roles in some of the world's greatest opera houses, including the Metropolitan opera, the Royal Opera House and La Scala.

Kristin Chenoweth is a Tony and Emmy Award—winning singer and musical theatre, film and television actress. Some of her best-known Broadway roles include Sally Brown in You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown and Glinda in Wicked.

Ian Robertson is the chorus director of San Francisco Opera and the artistic director of the San Francisco Boys Chorus and the San Francisco Festival Chorale.

Guerrillas of Agitprop Fight to Stay RelevantNEW YORK TIMES

noreply@blogger.com (Chloe Veltman) — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 18:34:00 +0000

As part of its 50th-anniversary celebrations, the San Francisco Mime Troupe recently led its first “Anti-Capitalist, Anti-Consumption” street-theater workshop. That afternoon-long event culminated in a performance outside the flagship Old Navy store on Market Street in downtown San Francisco.

Pretending to be sales assistants and shoppers, troupe members led the workshop participants underneath a gaudy “Time to Shop” sign and then mechanically exchanged fake dollars for bits of cardboard with the word “stuff” scrawled on them. At the end of the sketch, counterfeit coins flew, as the performers engaged in a frenzied stampede for last-minute bargains.

Ed Holmes, the workshop leader and a longtime company member, said the three-minute “live political cartoon” attracted around 15 passers-by with an additional 5 to 10 stopping when the fake money started flying. “A few people got the point,” he said.

With television, blogs and social networking Web sites able to disseminate political messages far more widely than live theater, you have to question the relevance of the Mime Troupe’s polemical approach today. For the first three decades of its existence, this political theater group openly questioned United States policy and helped root out political hypocrisy.

But times have changed, and the company’s brand of broad political satire steeped in zany commedia dell’arte traditions feels outmoded. Theater can still be taken seriously as a medium for political discourse, but the Mime Troupe — with its limited reach, old-fashioned aesthetics and small budget — struggles to make a political and theatrical impact these days.

The dancer, director and mime artist R. G. Davis founded the San Francisco Mime Troupe in 1959 as a vehicle for radical political commentary and theatrical experimentation. Despite the word “mime” in its name, the group was far from silent. For a while its brand of guerilla theater, performed free in public spaces throughout its Bay Area home and as far away as Berlin, earned the company a reputation as a grass-roots political power. Troupe members were arrested on obscenity charges on more than one occasion in the early 1960s. The group was also one of the first American theater companies to perform in revolutionary Cuba and Sandinista Nicaragua.

In 1967 the troupe caused an uproar when it traveled around universities in the Midwest presenting “L’Amant Militaire,” a Vietnam War satire adapted from an 18th-century Carlo Goldoni play, at the same time recruiters from a napalm manufacturer were visiting those campuses. Closer to home, the early troupe helped derail a proposal to use public funds to tear down a building that housed grass-roots community organizations for the construction of a parking lot for Davies Symphony Hall.

In recent years, however, the Mime Troupe’s efforts have had considerably less impact. It still performs free shows in parks around the Bay Area and other parts of the state, and its longstanding appearances in Dolores Park on the Fourth of July and Labor Day weekends continue to attract hundreds. But many people seem to attend the productions these days to have their liberal political views confirmed or simply to enjoy a picnic and show in the sun.

Every now and then the company creates a production that engages the intelligence. In 2006 “Godfellas,” a show about the ills of spiritual dogma, married a wisecracking text with pithy musical numbers to examine not just religion but also blind faith in all its guises. More often than not, however, Mime Troupe productions end up subverting artistry in favor of left-wing dogma.

This year’s “Too Big to Fail,” about the implosion of the credit system, bashed audiences over the head with simplistic moral fables and told a tale of a greedy lion named Citibank. And the boringly liberal “Doing Good” (2005) was less effective as an agitprop pamphlet against American intervention in the third world. Meanwhile, a decade has passed since the troupe performed its last guerilla theater act: a version of “Ubu Roi” outside the Federal Building to protest cuts in arts financing.

It’s telling that the Mime Troupe is celebrating its golden anniversary with documentary screenings and exhibitions that focus on its early heyday; the company’s more recent history just isn’t all that enthralling.

Yet political theater is alive and well in the Bay Area, as proved by engaging productions like “This World in a Woman’s Hands,” Marcus Gardley’s drama for the Shotgun Players of Berkeley, about female workers in the Richmond, Calif., shipyards in World War II. And the Mime Troupe, with its intimacy, ability to respond quickly to current events and stealthy approach to infiltrating public spaces, can demonstrate that live performance is still, in some ways, an ideal medium for political commentary. Getting the message across, however, requires a level of subtlety and imagination that lies beyond the reach of many theater artists.

To survive, the Mime Troupe may need to find a new theatrical vocabulary for expressing its political viewpoints and work harder to question lazy liberal mores. The members may also have to take greater risks again. A three-minute sketch outside Old Navy might make an impression on just a few onlookers. But taking their antics inside the store would most likely get greater attention.

Seeking High Notes in Bay Area Concert HallsNEW YORK TIMES

noreply@blogger.com (Chloe Veltman) — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 17:59:00 +0000

What would the holiday season be without classical music concerts? Bay Area residents who normally wouldn’t set foot in a concert hall find themselves irresistibly drawn at this time of year to places like Grace Cathedral and Davies Symphony Hall to get their seasonal music fixes.

Those concertgoers’ ticket-buying decisions are often influenced by recognition of the artists involved. Handel and Bach are big sellers at Christmas around the globe, as are the American Bach Soloists and Chanticleer closer to home. For Chanticleer, the all-male chorale, revenue from Christmas concerts represents a quarter of its performance income. The group’s scheduled appearance at Cathedral of Christ the Light in Oakland on Saturday was a sellout.

Far fewer people, however, make decisions based on the concerts’ locations. This is a shame. But in contrast to major cities like Los Angeles, New York and London, San Francisco (and the Bay Area in general) lacks a plentiful supply of first-rate spaces for experiencing live classical music.

Because these sites enhance their interiors with festive decorations, and people are generally in a holiday mood, it’s perhaps easier to tolerate poor acoustics, insufficient restrooms, nonexistent temperature control and a lack of nearby restaurants and bars. But if Christmas audiences, high in number, had a more all-encompassing experience with the music, perhaps they would come back in July.

These auditoriums certainly have positive aspects. Some are visually stunning. The Paramount Theater in Oakland, where the Oakland East Bay Symphony is leading a holiday concert on Sunday, is a gorgeous Art Deco building. Sweeping, gilded staircases; bold frescoes; and plush carpets make for a fairy-tale concertgoing experience.

A number of spaces, like the Herbst Theater, the site of the signing of the Charter of the United Nations on June 26, 1945, have a fascinating history. Others still, like Davies Symphony Hall, offer amenities like comfortable seats, a well-stocked bar and ample restrooms.

The Cathedral of Christ the Light is earning raves among musicians for its acoustics.

“The acoustics are for me the best in the Bay Area for Renaissance and Baroque choral and orchestral music,” said Vance George, director emeritus of the San Francisco Symphony Chorus. “I heard ‘The Art of the Fugue’ played by a brass ensemble in the cathedral. I was amazed at the clarity of the musical lines. Each line had integrity but with added warmth and depth.”

But no single setting satisfies all of a concertgoer’s needs. The de Young Museum’s Koret Auditorium provides comfort and great acoustics, but its remote location in Golden Gate Park makes it difficult to reach. Davies Symphony Hall (whose Christmas events include Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” and an appearance by the San Francisco Girls’ Chorus) is a great space to hear large orchestral works. But that 2,743-seat auditorium overwhelms smaller ensembles.

Sound quality is perhaps the biggest challenge facing Bay Area concert halls. For Renaissance and Baroque music, the Cathedral of Christ the Light might deliver fantastic results. But when I heard gospel music there, the sound was far from crisp. The lyrics were barely distinguishable above the rhythm section’s blaring reverberations.

Meanwhile, places like the Herbst, Old First Presbyterian Church (where the ensemble Golden Bough is performing a Celtic holiday concert) and Grace Cathedral (whose offerings include concerts by its resident Choir of Men and Boys) seem to have spotty acoustics.

Sitting front and center at a recent Trinity Choir of Cambridge concert at Grace Cathedral was, sonically speaking, a heavenly experience. Yet I had trouble distinguishing individual lines during a performance last summer of Handel’s “Music for the Royal Fireworks” by the American Bach Soloists. Maybe the lack of auditory crispness had something to do with where I sat, toward the back and slightly to one side of the church. I find I obtain more clarity from the balcony than in the orchestra seats at the Herbst and Old First Presbyterian Church.

Of all the classical concert locales in the Bay Area, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music’s 450-seat Concert Hall (where the Sanford Dole Ensemble will perform “Messyah,” a contemporary take on Handel’s famous oratorio) comes close to being ideal. The vibrant acoustics suit both large and small ensembles. With its symphony-size performance platform, tall windows and elegant Beaux-Arts décor, the auditorium feels intimate yet expansive. It helps that its location in the Hayes Valley puts it close to public transportation and great restaurants and bars.

Yet it doesn’t say much for San Francisco that its most enticing classical-music setting is part of a school. A great city needs great spaces for all art forms, including classical music. Maybe when the holiday concertgoing hordes start raising their voices and stop buying tickets, producers, building managers and civic leaders will take note.

A Vanished San Francisco, Black, White and ColorfulNEW YORK TIMES

noreply@blogger.com (Chloe Veltman) — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 20:22:00 +0000

In 1952, when the budding photographer Gerald Ratto was a 19-year-old student at the California School of Fine Arts, he spent much of his time in the Fillmore district of San Francisco. Wandering around the neighborhood with his Rolleiflex camera and a bottle of brandy, he shared drinks and conversation with the residents and snapped pictures of the local kids as they played in the street.

Nearly six decades have passed since he photographed those children. Mr. Ratto, now 76, went on to lead a successful career as an architectural photographer. And the neighborhood, a bustling hub of black culture in the late 1940s and early 1950s, underwent an ill-conceived redevelopment in the 1960s and then significant growth in recent years.

When viewed against the backdrop of that tremendous transformation, Mr. Ratto’s images poignantly recall a vanished landscape. Although the pictures demonstrate an artist’s promise, his photographs do not quite satisfy as either works of art or social documents.

On display in downtown San Francisco at the Robert Tat Gallery, a space specializing in vintage photography, the compact show “Children of the Fillmore, 1952” consists of 52 silver gelatin prints, 18 of which are on display. (The other 34 pictures can be viewed upon request.)

The quality most evident in Mr. Ratto’s photographs is their innocence. Images like one depicting three small girls cuddling and smiling at the camera in what looks like their Sunday best (No. 5 in the series) and another of a boy with a cardboard box on his head and a clownish, gap-toothed grin (No. 14) convey a sense of pure-spirited delight. Meanwhile, there’s an arresting candor and warmth to the photograph of a boy sitting on a staircase with his elbows propped up behind him (No. 20). His posture and face display unfettered openness.

Most of the pictures are posed. They are also uncompromisingly shot head-on and close to their subjects. Yet they refreshingly lack affectation. Clearly, taking the time to get to know the people he photographed paid off for Mr. Ratto. Using the kind of camera that could be operated down by his waist rather than in front of his face, thus allowing him to maintain eye contact with his subjects, doubtless also helped him to earn the trust of the local youngsters.

But pictures depicting the freshness of childhood, though they look great on kitchen calendars, can veer into cutesy cliché. There’s something static and lifeless about Mr. Ratto’s portraits that undercuts their artistic strength. The images of great chroniclers of urban life, like Helen Levitt and Henri Cartier-Bresson, avoid this problem. Levitt’s famous picture of two children, one white and one black, dancing in the middle of a New York street, and Cartier-Bresson’s image of a boy rounding a corner cradling two enormous glass bottles, possess a kinetic energy and distinct personality that ultimately tell the viewer much more about the lives — and environments — of their subjects than Mr. Ratto’s photographs.

The grown-up worldliness that tinges Ms. Levitt’s pictures of children sharply undercuts their sweetness. “In each child, from very early, the germ of the death of childhood is at work,” the author James Agee says of Ms. Levitt’s photographs in his preface to her 1965 book, “A Way of Seeing.” It is this germ that makes Ms. Levitt’s photographs so powerful from a social as well as an artistic perspective. Lacking this quality, Mr. Ratto’s pictures don’t carry the same weight.

If they don’t function completely satisfactorily as works of art, the “Children of the Fillmore” images similarly lack strength as social documents of a neighborhood’s lost heritage. To the extent that the figures depicted in Mr. Ratto’s photographs appear frozen in time, the series draws attention to the vast gap between the neighborhood’s glory days and now. But with their atmosphere of utopian innocence and no hint of foreboding for the neighborhood’s future fall, the images seem naïve when viewed with contemporary eyes.

Gentrification has changed the face of the neighborhood once again. Although the area has revived, thanks to the appearance of institutions like the jazz club Yoshi’s and the spruced-up Sundance Kabuki cinemas, the black population has dwindled, owing to steep rises in the cost of goods and housing.

The district has been trying hard to reconnect with its past in recent years, with the Fillmore Heritage Center at the forefront of the campaign. The center presents historically oriented art shows, like the current exhibition of photographs of musicians shot by Dan Dion at the famed Fillmore Auditorium and a recent show of Mr. Ratto’s work.

These exhibitions might pique the curiosity of a tourist, rock music fan or local historian. But nostalgia for a bygone era ultimately isn’t very helpful to a neighborhood like the Fillmore, which, like most communities, can never hope to recapture its past in any concrete sense.

“Children of the Fillmore, 1952” continues through Jan. 30 at the Robert Tat Gallery, 49 Geary Street, No. 211; (415) 781-1122, roberttat.com

Culture Clash of the TitansANGELENO MAGAZINE

noreply@blogger.com (Chloe Veltman) — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 00:59:00 +0000

The rapid expansion of LACMA and the fall and rise of MOCA provide a drama-filled backdrop for the increasingly knotty relationship between hotshot director Michael Govan and uber-philanthropist Eli Broad.

The L.A. art world, it seems, is beginning to resemble one of Damien Hirst’s head-reeling spin paintings: The Broad Contemporary Art Museum debuts at LACMA. A financially hollow MOCA comes back from the brink. LACMA director Michael Govan ascends to stardom (with a few hiccups along the way). Art star-in-the-making Mark Bradford scoops the MacArthur genius grant. Wallis Annenberg launches Century City’s Space for Photography. Board members play musical chairs. And everyone, as always, is wondering what Eli Broad—a life trustee of both LACMA and MOCA—will do next. The guessing game du jour is predicting just where in L.A. Broad will build his own art museum (à la Armand Hammer) for spotlighting his blue-chip collection of Neshats, Warhols and Koonses.

Perhaps never before has L.A.’s art world enjoyed so much incredible growth as well as international attention. Just last month, the jet-setting Art Basel crowd descended on downtown for a star-studded gala thrown by MOCA for its 30th anniversary. The evening, which raised more than $4 million, was capped by the auction of a Damien Hirst-customized pink piano, on which Lady Gaga had just performed, for $450,000.

Yet as much as L.A.’s rise has provided a canvas for creativity, it has also unleashed a parallel amount of ambition. Power plays have been as much in the public eye as pointillism, pop art and steam punk.

At the center of it all is the complicated relationship between Broad and Govan. “There are two art titans in L.A. right now: Michael Govan and Eli Broad,” says ACE Gallery director Douglas Chrismas. “They are like our version of Nicholas Serota [the director of London’s Tate museum] and Charles Saatchi.”

Broad, 76, the co-founder of KB Home, is used to being L.A.’s unquestioned art oligarch. With an estimated net worth of around $5.2 billion, Broad—a voracious art collector whose air of Midwestern practicality is paired with a reputation for getting what he wants—has done more than any other individual to grow L.A.’s cultural scene, from serving as MOCA’s founding chairman to being instrumental in the construction of the Walt Disney Concert Hall. Together with his wife Edythe, he has donated $60 million and numerous artworks to LACMA as well as raised $40 million for the museum to date. And, with his pledge last December of $30 million to MOCA, he has brought the museum back to fiscal health and even luster.

But Broad—who Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight has described as someone who “exchanges project involvement for near total control”—may have met his match in Michael Govan, age 46, the man whom the philanthropist for all intents and purposes hired to run LACMA in 2006. “We needed someone with energy and charisma who could bring younger people to the board,” Broad tells Angeleno of his decision to recruit Govan. “Michael had all of those attributes.” A passionate go-getter who offsets a driving sense of purpose with debonair looks and an affable chuckle, Govan has more than lived up to his reputation since arriving in L.A., both in terms of undertaking large-scale projects and building LACMA’s board. The former director of New York’s Dia Art Foundation (known for its innovative focus on contemporary art), Govan is intent on making the encyclopedic LACMA a major player in the contemporary field as well; he just hired the high-powered modern art curator Franklin Sirmans away from Texas’ respected Menill Collection.

Nowhere has the muscle of Broad and Govan been more on display than in the back and forth over LACMA’s newest buildings, both designed by architect Renzo Piano: the 72,000-square-foot Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM), opened in 2008, and the forthcoming Lynda and Stewart Resnick Exhibition Pavilion, situated directly behind BCAM. Broad donated a prodigious $50 million to build BCAM and personally lobbied Piano to design it. The building is nothing if not a statement of Broad’s power—after all, it takes a particular kind of audacity to name an exhibition hall that exists within the campus of a larger art institution a “museum.”

Famously, however, in January 2008, just before the building’s debut, Broad announced that, despite expectations, he wouldn’t be giving the bulk of his collection to LACMA after all and would offer up a majority of the works as a sort of international lending library. While Govan spun the news as a positive act, enabling the works to remain in the public domain, there was almost as much ink spilled over Broad’s latest maneuver as there was over the opening of BCAM itself.

Much of the drama has played out behind the scenes, however, such as over the completion of the Resnick Pavilion, due to open in fall 2010. According to a LACMA board member who wishes to remain anonymous, Broad was making arguments to the board that constructing the pavilion would strain the museum’s finances.

The prospect of a delay couldn’t have made Govan happy. Getting the Resnick up and running quickly was crucial to the director’s plans. The exhibiton hall promises to give him a 45,000-square-foot exhibition hall, open to easy reconfiguration, that can accommodate the sort of momentous contemporary art shows that generate serious buzz.

On top of that, the LACMA board member who spoke to Angeleno believes that Broad was also motivated by a more personal concern: that constructing the new building would steal some of the spotlight from the philanthropist’s own edifice.

Broad’s chief communications officer, Karen Denne, disputes that account and insists that Broad’s concern about the Resnick building being completed was only about timing. “Mr. Broad is fiscally prudent, and he was concerned that it was not the right time to move forward with a new building, given the amount of debt LACMA had and the state of the economy,” says Denne. Either way, the board wasn’t swayed.

Denne, underlining Broad’s commitment to the museum, adds that, “Mr. Broad was the largest donor and fundraiser in the history of LACMA.” But Lynda and Stewart Resnick—the mega-moguls behind such brands as FIJI Water and POM Wonderful—might just well break that record. Before BCAM opened, the couple had pledged $25 million to open a new visitors’ center on the campus. Ultimately, Broad solicited and persuaded British Petroleum to fund the visitors’ area.

To make the exhibition hall possible, the Resnicks raised their ante. At a splashy September 2008 press conference, Govan announced that the Resnicks had stepped up with a $45 million gift to erect the Resnick behind the Broad. Before 2010 is out, Govan will have a space on par with MOCA’s Geffen facility, where the museum has mounted such swarmed shows as Ecstasy and Murakami. Says Chrismas: “Michael needed a place you could drive a tractor through.”

Who gets the credit for pulling in the Resnicks’ largesse is a matter of dispute. “In fact, Mr. Broad solicited the Resnicks for their gift,” says Denne. But Resnick spokesman Rob Six as well as a LACMA spokeswoman insist that isn’t the case.

At the Resnick, Govan won’t have any restrictions when it comes to programming shows, which hasn’t been true at BCAM. Indeed, the Govan and Broad are, to this day, at odds over whether LACMA is honoring its contractual obligations over the display of art there. “When we opened BCAM, Michael met his obligations by contract,” says Broad. “Since then, we’ve been saddened that he hasn’t lived up to these obligations. The reason we funded BCAM was to show contemporary art, and have two-thirds of the building to show our collection. LACMA could do what they wished with the remaining third. That hasn’t been the case recently.”

But LACMA spokeswoman Alliston Agsten denies this claim: “There is no language whatsoever in the contract that refers to any amount of square footage, not to mention two-thirds of the space, that is to be devoted to the presentation of the Broad collection.”

For a time, LACMA’s director and Broad seemed to be in harmony. Govan inherited a $156 million museum redesign plan (which included BCAM) from his predecessor Andrea Rich and presided over its opening, a major symbol of Broad and Govan’s achievements as partners. According to KCRW art critic Edward Goldman, who spoke to Angeleno in 2008, Govan’s aesthetic sensibility made a big impression on Broad. “I think they collaborate very well, and I also think that it is because of Michael that the entire project has become more sophisticated.”

With all these ups and downs, it’s no wonder one of the L.A. art world’s favorite obsessions of late has been trying to decipher the dynamics of the Broad-Govan relationship. “A lot of controversy centers around whether Michael is happy with Eli and Eli is happy with Michael,” says collector Stefan Simchowitz, the stepson of former MOCA board member Jennifer Simchowitz.

Few would dispute that a genuine desire to improve L.A.’s cultural offerings and a belief in the power of art are the biggest motives behind the actions of the city’s two art barons. And Los Angeles’ museums often work together as much as they vie for visitors and resources. In 2011, for example, LACMA, MOCA and 23 other area arts institutions will join in mounting a citywide arts initiative, Pacific Standard Time, funded in large part by the Getty Foundation, which will take a sweeping look at the history of art in California since WWII. “The fact that our museums have great directors and are doing important exhibitions is what’s attracting the world’s attention,” says Elsa Longhauser, director of the Santa Monica Museum. “The brouhaha is not what brings people here.”

But underneath these laudable intentions may lie a craving for control. Being a potent force in the art world is first and foremost about influencing the caliber of the art that goes before the public. L.A. is still a young city and its museum landscape is still crystallizing. So the opportunities to impact the art world’s development here are enormous.

Across town, at around the same time LACMA was moving ahead with its grand building plans, MOCA was going through its own tumult. Over the three decades of its existence, the museum has built one of the foremost troves of postwar modern art in the world. Its special exhibitions, such as Wack! and A Minimal Future, have garnered the institution resounding critical acclaim.

But its finances had become increasingly dire, a situation that exploded in the press in December 2008. Unlike LACMA, which currently receives 38 percent of its operating funds from L.A. county, MOCA depends much more heavily on private donations and ticket sales with an average of 80 to 90 percent of its income coming from those sources. And, over the course of a decade, MOCA’s expenses had so far outgrown its income that the museum was forced to dip into its endowment. In 1999, MOCA had $38 million in invested assets and an $11 million budget. By 2008, those investments had dipped to $5 million, and the operating budget had swelled to $22 million. As the financial debacle came to light, nine trustees exited the board over a period of six months. Director Jeremy Strick resigned after nine years at the helm. The money troubles had been brewing for years. Two years earlier, Susan Bay Nimoy, the wife of Leonard Nimoy, and former UPN network CEO Dean Valentine had both left MOCA—decamping to the Hammer Museum—owing to concerns about the museum’s financial recklessness.

MOCA needed a savior. Not surprisingly perhaps, two men stepped forward with visions for the museum’s future. Govan proposed a merger with LACMA. “The civic responsibility was to offer options,” says Govan. “We talked about partnerships. I said, ‘We don’t want to be perceived as taking you over. But we can argue for the potential benefits of working together and presenting innovative ideas.’ We are proud that we were able to offer exciting options in a difficult climate. ‘Museum failing in L.A.’ is not a good headline. It was all in our interests that MOCA had alternatives to succeed.”

Broad came up with an alternate plan. He told MOCA’s trustees that he would pledge $30 million to replenish the museum’s sagging endowment and support exhibitions, thus keeping MOCA independent if they could come up with $15 million in matching funds. “I said, ‘We have to save MOCA,’” says Broad. “I got Disney Hall funded and built. I knew I could get MOCA back on its feet. It had to be right-sized expense- and staff-wise. I could see that MOCA was clearly worth saving. MOCA’s board members became very contentious, a problem that started between five and eight years ago in response to financial trouble. There was no unity of vision.”

There were pros and cons to both pitches, and wariness among the MOCA board of each man’s intentions. Were Govan and Broad motivated purely by a desire to save the institution? How much did the prospect of exerting control over one of the world’s finest modern collections influence them? Govan’s plan would have enabled MOCA’s collection to survive, albeit under LACMA’s roof and as just one part of its wide-ranging collection. A number of trustees got behind his idea, arguing for the merits of having MOCA and LACMA geographically close together on Wilshire Boulevard. LACMA already owned a good portion of the property surrounding its campus, which theoretically would create a highly desirable hub for art in central L.A.

But Broad doesn’t see Govan’s intentions so magnanimously. “Michael would have liked to have taken over the MOCA collection but we took a different view. It wasn’t a merger. It was simply a way for LACMA to get a great collection without paying for it. LACMA should have been supportive of its sister institution and help it to survive independently rather than take it over.” And The Young and the Restless co-writer and MOCA co-chair Maria Arena Bell (whose husband William serves on the board of LACMA) also had reservations: “I felt it was really important for L.A. to have a contemporary art museum that was thriving and separate from LACMA,” says Bell.

Broad’s strategy, meanwhile, would allow the museum to remain self-governing but it came with hefty conditions, including aggressive cost-cutting and fundraising demands. “Eli required that the museum get financially stable, cut expenditure, raise funds, not borrow from its endowment, limit expenses from the endowment, maintain a strong and vibrant exhibition schedule and bolster its capital campaign,” says MOCA CEO Charles Young.

MOCA’s choice to go with the Broad plan is mutually beneficial to both sides. Broad may have breathed new life into MOCA, but MOCA may have done the same for Broad: Becoming deeply involved with the museum’s regeneration campaign not only provided the philanthropist with the perfect escape route from LACMA, it also enabled him to stay on top of L.A.’s museum hierarchy. And while there’s no evidence this was in Broad’s mind, the stakes were high for another reason: If MOCA were to migrate to the Miracle Mile, its exit would come with terrible consequences for the ongoing regeneration of downtown L.A., where one of Broad’s biggest investments, the stalled Grand Avenue Project, is still trying to get out of the gate.

While Eli Broad is used to holding all the purse strings, Michael Govan answers to a board and must work within that context, an environment in which he, by all measures, excels. LACMA’s leader has arguably transformed art philanthropy in L.A. from the polite pursuit of a small and doddering group of lifelong local benefactors to the cause absolut for the hip, globally minded, jet-set crowd. In a city whose millionaires and billionaires tend to favor political and environmental causes over cultural ones, Govan’s appearance could not be more welcome.

Since arriving on the West Coast in April 2006 from New York (where he successfully created the critically acclaimed, nearly 300,000-square-foot Dia:Beacon museum in the Hudson Valley), Govan has raised the prestige level of the LACMA board to the point where Forbes now ranks it as the third most powerful billionaire board in the country, after MoMA and the Robin Hood Foundation.

Unlike other art museums in town like MOCA (whose trustees include John Baldessari and Ed Ruscha) and the Hammer Museum (whose board includes Lari Pittman and Barbara Kruger), LACMA’s current board lineup doesn’t boast a single visual artist. But it does read like a who’s who of the business and entertainment world. Additions during Govan’s tenure include Barbra Streisand, producer Brian Grazer, songwriter Carole Bayer Sager, television anchor Willow Bay, L.A. Dodgers ex-CEO Jamie McCourt, former Warner Bros. head Terry Semel, and billionaire art collector/investor Nicolas Berggruen. “Boards have become different organisms over the last 30 years. In the old days, entrepreneurship wasn’t part of a museum’s operational charge. Now, people critique organizations for their lack of entrepreneurship. So we’ve started to attach the language of corporate growth to museums,” says Govan.

But Govan has suffered a few setbacks. A decision earlier this year to shutter LACMA’s beloved 40-year-old classic movie screening program for financial reasons led to a huge outcry, with Martin Scorsese denouncing Govan in a letter to the Los Angeles Times. Soon after, information about the museum director’s hefty salary and perks amounting to $1 million leaked to the same publication, further angering film lovers. The film series has been reinstated for at least another year. Meanwhile, Govan’s plans to erect a Jeff Koons installation featuring a chugging, 70-foot replica of a 1940s locomotive suspended from a 161-foot-tall crane, may have hit an impasse. In a recent Vanity Fair profile, LACMA board member Wallis Annenberg, who donated $2 million to conduct a feasibility study for the sculpture, said: “I personally think Los Angeles deserves a much finer icon than a train hanging from a crane.” Annenberg reportedly intends to leave the rest of the funding of the $25 million project to other trustees. Seeking to clarify the situation, LACMA’s vice president of development, Terry Morello, has this to say: “Wallis Annenberg agreed to pay $2 million to get the drawings done. She didn’t make a commitment to pay for the train.”

Meanwhile, MOCA has recovered much of its former sheen since accepting Broad’s pledge. The museum’s white knight, whom Bell affectionately describes as “a demanding giver who insists that his money is being well spent,” coaxed Charles Young, UCLA’s no-nonsense chancellor emeritus, to shepherd MOCA through a huge recapitalization campaign. Says Young: “Eli made it possible for the museum to survive—not only to come out of the doldrums it was in but also to move to greater heights. He made the museum’s future possible but he didn’t ensure it.”

Young has since cut the institution’s annual budget from more than $22 million to $15.5 million (LACMA, by contrast, has an operating budget of $53.5 million.) At the same time, the organization has been working hard to rebuild its board. Broad, among others, persuaded music exec Gil Friesen and Hard Rock co-founder Peter Morton, who had previously resigned, to return as trustees. Five new members have joined up, including Sex and the City creator Darren Star. And MOCA’s board has started an international search for a new director aided by the recruitment firm Russell Reynolds Associates. “We’re looking for somebody who is extraordinarily dynamic with great vision and who is very charismatic and good at bringing people together,” says David Johnson, co-chair of MOCA’s board. “We’re not looking for somebody super young, but someone on the younger side.” In other words, MOCA is looking for someone who can take on Michael Govan. Says ACE Gallery’s Chrismas: “What MOCA will have to do is find a director who can be as creative as Govan—and as ambitious.”

A visionary and ambitious Govan-like operator is unquestionably what MOCA needs. But could Broad’s recent experiences color the process? What happened at LACMA has almost Oedipal overtones. Broad hired Govan, only to have his spiritual heir turn on him. In not leaving his art collection to LACMA, Broad in turn abandoned Govan. Will Broad want to recruit another person who might undermine his authority?

Meanwhile, Govan seems to be looking to take on the Getty as well. As he recently told the Los Angeles Times, he is intent on turning LACMA into a major tourist attraction: “The first on anybody’s list,” said Govan. Chris Burden’s already-iconic Urban Light sculpture, situated directly on Wilshire Boulevard, is only Govan’s first step. The museum’s website vaunts that the proposed Koons train sculpture—which would be visible from virtually all corners of the city—will be L.A.’s answer to the Eiffel Tower. Another showy art project-in-the-making is the installation of Michael Heizer’s Levitated/Slot Mass, a boulder weighing more than 400 tons that will be suspended on two concrete rails.

Not to be outdone, Broad is busy creating his own L.A. museum, which he hopes will rise as early as three years from now. The project represents the biggest chess move yet for Broad, whose plans envision a space of up to 43,000 square feet funded with a breathtaking $200 million endowment. Both Santa Monica and Beverly Hills are briskly working up proposals to win the project. But Broad, keeping his cards close to his chest, has also said he is discussing building the museum in a third location, which he declines to name. (Broad is also constructing an art museum at his alma mata, Michigan State University; Govan serves on the institution’s advisory board.)

Of course, the bigger each man’s ambition, the better for Los Angeles. By any measure, the developments of the last few years are stunning. Between 2008 and 2010, LACMA will have added 100,000 square feet of exhibition space to its campus. In November, MOCA debuted its blockbuster anniversary exhibit, Collection: MOCA’s First Thirty Years. Sprawling across the museum’s Grand Avenue and Geffen buildings, the show, which includes 500 permanent collection works, makes an inarguable case for L.A. as one of the world’s great art capitals. And Broad asserts that, with the addition of his own museum, L.A. will have more square acreage devoted to contemporary art than any place in America.

As L.A. comes into its own as an art town, Broad and Govan will doubtlessly continue to jostle for supremacy. Yet despite some bones of contention, the two men still hold each other in high esteem. “Michael Govan is a great asset,” says Broad. “We don’t agree on everything. Our relationship is not perfect, but nor is any marriage perfect. We all live in the same community and will work everything out.” Chuckles Govan: “I don’t think I can compete with Eli Broad. He’s a restless and never-satisfied philanthropist. He loves to provoke institutions to do better, bigger, more.”

An American Export Comes Home, Still PoppingNEW YORK TIMES

noreply@blogger.com (Chloe Veltman) — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 17:48:00 +0000

Krumping, clowning, strobing, turfing, breaking, locking. Few art forms boast as many subgenres as hip-hop dance. Though the differences between its various styles may be inscrutable to most people, mavens like Popin Pete of the seminal West Coast hip-hop dance crew the Electric Boogaloos have been known to split hairs over its terminology. “There are people who wave, and there are people who tut,” he told Dance Spirit Magazine last year. “They’re not popping.”

But at this year’s San Francisco Hip Hop DanceFest, an annual festival held last weekend that showcases the work of dance crews worldwide, being able to tell “tutting” apart from “waving” hardly matters. Instead of compartmentalizing the myriad subgenres that fall under the hip-hop dance umbrella, the event, in its 11th year, illustrated just how easily all the different styles bleed into one another — even across geographic boundaries.

If this year’s event is anything to go by, what sets a Bay Area dance crew apart from, say, a South Korean one doesn’t really have much to do with the local group’s immersion in turfing — a hip-hop dance genre that started in Oakland and stresses theatricality and gliding footwork. The South Korean crew Last for One makes as much use of these elements as regional ensembles like Funkanometry and the DS Players. It is the level of artistic finesse versus attitude that seems to be the greatest differentiator between American groups and those from abroad.

Just as the music that accompanied the festival’s acts fused rap staples like Lil Wayne and the Wu-Tang Clan with Beethoven, Bjork and Britney Spears, among others, the choreography brought together steps from the different subgenres. “Invasion Involved,” a piece from New Style Motherlode of Oakland includes a heady array of hip-hop and hip-hop-derived movement. The dancers shake their bodies intensely, execute machinelike robotics, zoom around on skateboards and perform kung fu-inspired kicks and jabs.

Loose Change, a San Francisco ensemble, combines earthy, contemporary dance choreography with steps informed by funk and jazz. In his Michael Jackson tribute, Kenichi Ebina, a Japanese dancer based in New York, pushes Mr. Jackson’s signature steps like the moonwalk and the slide to their aesthetic limits.

A presentation by ILL-Abilities, a Chilean-Californian-Canadian break-dance crew whose members have a variety of physical impairments, powerfully demonstrated the innovative, inclusive and international state of hip-hop culture today. At one point, the dancer Lazylegz (who has arthrogryposis, a joint deficiency that affects his legs) leapt on his crutches over the prostrate frames of his cohorts Guns (who spins on his head with the ease of revolving vinyl though his right leg is amputated at the knee) and Kujo (whose deafness doesn’t prevent him from bouncing around the stage on his forearms with the rhythmic precision of a jackhammer).

Hip-hop dance is of course an urban art form that came of age on the streets, not in the studio. Improvisation and aggressive competition is a central component; it grew out of 1970s New York gang culture, after all. So many of the American groups in the Hip Hop DanceFest take a scrappy-streetwise approach to their art.

The Los Angeles crew One Step Ahead’s playful yet formless piece “Escalate” riffs on classical music themes. The three performers wear mismatched orchestral conductors’ coattails and dance to a distorted version of Pachelbel’s Canon, among other standards of the classical repertory. Their movements have a roomy, improvisatory feel but lack focus. Meanwhile, the raunchy “Final Call,” from Mind Over Matter of San Francisco, recalls the steamy videos of Madonna’s “Erotica” period. Dressed in assorted ’80s-style street clothes, the dancers perform simulated sex routines under sultry red lights. These efforts, though brimful of attitude, feel obvious and canned.

In contrast, the international groups have among the most technically precise and artistically imaginative performances at the festival. The six members of the Norwegian dance crew Deep Down Dopeizm move in perfect synchronicity in their playful piece “The Cube.” Their bodies morph together at various intervals during the work to create a compact human cube. This recurring motif is as visually arresting as it is physically demanding.

Last for One builds its piece, “Soul River,” on standard break-dancing and popping moves. But the physical agility, ball bearing-like bounce and showmanship of the six-strong group outpace similar pieces by others on the festival program. And in the London group Plague’s “Embodiment of MUSIC!” a reeling, kinetic tap-dance sequence performed in sneakers, sometimes on tiptoe, to Ray Charles’s “This Little Girl of Mine,” reinvigorates an old dance form. The performers in these three groups wear loose hip-hop clothes. But unlike the American ensembles, their Adidas and Pumas match perfectly.

Synchronized footwear isn’t terribly important though. What matters most is innovation. It’s telling that in this respect, the United States, though the originator of the art of hip-hop dance and its many subgenres, could learn something from the rest of the world.

In Chant, Listening and Singing Become OneNEW YORK TIMES

noreply@blogger.com (Chloe Veltman) — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 18:43:00 +0000

Chant, the practice of intoning sounds or words rhythmically and repetitively, has been a staple of spiritual systems for millenniums. Owing to the popularity of recordings like the 1993 album “Chant” by the Benedictine monks of Santo Domingo de Silos in Spain, and Enigma’s 1990 crossover hit, “Sadeness (Part I),” which juxtaposed chant with a dance beat, Westerners have become familiar with Gregorian chant, the early Christian liturgical genre.

But chant exists in many forms — including mantras, hymns, prayers, Shigin (a form of Japanese chanted poetry) and plainsong — and can be found in religions as diverse as Judaism, Eastern Orthodox Christianity and Hinduism.

Perhaps in response to the growing velocity and techno-centricity of daily life, more people have sought out chant. The sounds of “om” and “kyrie” are filling Zen meditation centers, Buddhist retreats, plainsong-infused candlelit church services, and yoga studios around the Bay Area and beyond.

Meanwhile, chant has been on the rise as an artistic pursuit. Vocal ensembles like Anonymous 4, Sequentia and Cappella Romana have garnered critical acclaim for their concerts and recordings. The field is clearly evolving. But is chant as engrossing to hear as it is to sing?

In theory, listening to a chant should be roughly the same as singing it. In practice, however, most of us aren’t relaxed, psychologically present or in tune enough with ourselves to be mindful of this effect, which is, after all, quite subtle. As a result, listening to chant, especially without the aid of a religious framework to guide your engagement, can be frustrating.

This was certainly the case last weekend during the Sabbaticus Rex performance at Old First Presbyterian Church in San Francisco. The three-member ensemble, which is based in the Bay Area, lays deep, throat-sung mantras over dense instrumental layers created by a bazantar (a five-string upright bass fitted with 33 extra sympathetic and drone strings), Japanese bamboo flutes and gongs.

The group’s anti-melodic, seemingly directionless soundscape drove my guest to the point of distraction. She called the music “primitive” and “annoying.”

I didn’t entirely share her feelings. Perhaps it’s all the yoga I’ve been doing lately, but by concentrating on my breath and listening for subtle textural and rhythmic changes, like the quiet roar of a gong or the interjection of a rippling flute motif, I was intermittently able to climb inside the ensemble’s musical meditation.

The vocalist Cornelius Boots’s occasional bouts of chesty, resonant chanting helped immensely by bringing much needed focus to the meandering instrumental lines. Still, my mind wandered often, and it was ultimately quite a relief to leave the church.

The next morning, I visited the Seventh Avenue Presbyterian Church across town, where I participated in the Medieval Sarum Chant workshop led by Susan Hellauer and Marsha Genensky of the New York all-female a cappella quartet Anonymous 4. In contrast to the previous evening’s experience, I didn’t want to leave.

This all-day class — open to anyone, even those who can’t read music, at an affordable rate — was surprising in some ways. From an aesthetic standpoint, our attempt to sing “Ave Maris Stella,” an English liturgical chant composed in honor of the Virgin Mary, left much to be desired, even though producing a pitch-perfect performance was not the aim of the day.

We weren’t particularly in tune or in step with one another. And learning the chant by rote (as the monks would have done in medieval times), rather than by reading music, added an entirely new level of complexity.

But as we were singing together, time vanished. I had no idea what “Solve vincla reis, profer lumen caecis” meant, but the act of chanting these words en masse had the same effect on my mood as eating good, dark chocolate. (By the way, it means “Dissolve these earthly chains, give light to the blind.”)

By relating these contrasting experiences, I don’t wish to imply that chant isn’t worthy of performance. Listening to Anonymous 4 sing “Ave Maris Stella” on its “Four Centuries of Chant” CD (released this year on Harmonia Mundi) or in concert demonstrates just how sublime chant can sound to the listener’s ear when the performers follow the contours of the language, flow through the lines and generally possess what Ms. Hellauer calls a “unity of intent.”

Listening to the great Lebanese vocalist Sister Marie Keyrouz intone Middle Eastern Christian chant or Tina Turner sing a Buddhist chant has a comparable effect.

As the Oakland Nada yoga (yoga of sound) expert Ann Dyer put it in a recent phone interview: “Fundamentally, chanting and listening are not that different in terms of how we respond as organisms. Even when you’re listening to chant, the whole body is responding, experiencing the vibration, and the vocal cords will vibrate in sympathy if relaxed. It’s a very kinesthetic response.”

But inasmuch as any activity in life tends to be more meaningful than experiencing it from the sidelines, chant derives much of its power from active participation.

“There is a difference between listening to someone chant and actually making those same sounds in your own body,” Ana Hernández writes in her 2005 book, “The Sacred Art of Chant.” “There’s a difference in the way the vibrations affect you, depending on whether they come from outside or within you.”

A Fulbright in Nigeria That Turned Into a ShowNEW YORK TIMES

noreply@blogger.com (Chloe Veltman) — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 15:23:00 +0000

Many things have happened since Dan Hoyle performed in the premiere of “Tings Dey Happen,” his incendiary and brilliant solo show about Nigerian oil politics, nearly three years ago at the compact theater the Marsh in San Francisco.

His career has been on the rise. “Tings Dey Happen” won the Will Glickman Award for best new play in the Bay Area and was featured, to critical acclaim, in 2007 at the Culture Project in New York. (Wilborn Hampton in The New York Times called Mr. Hoyle “a first-rate reporter and actor.”) Last month the State Department invited Mr. Hoyle to return to Nigeria to perform “Tings Dey Happen” as part of an official diplomatic tour. Now back in San Francisco, he is reprising his production at the much grander Marines Memorial Theater.

Meanwhile, Nigeria — the land where Mr. Hoyle spent 10 months in 2005-6 as a Fulbright scholar researching his project — has spiraled downward. Known as much for its corruption, kidnappings and violence as for its ample oil reserves (Nigeria is the fifth-largest oil supplier to the United States), the country has been hemorrhaging blood and money like crude from a plundered pipeline. In the most recent wave of unrest this summer, clashes between Islamic militants and the police led to dozens of deaths. Olabode George, a prominent figure in Nigeria’s ruling People’s Democratic Party, was convicted of corruption charges in October.

Bizarrely, few of these events make it into the latest iteration of “Tings Dey Happen.” Besides the slicker lighting and sound effects, minor textual cuts and the addition of supertitles to help audiences understand some of the Nigerian characters’ Pidgin, the present production is pretty much like the past. Getting the most from this latest version requires attending a post-performance discussion or reading an as-yet-unpublished essay by Mr. Hoyle. But he misses an opportunity to address the inadvertent impact of well-meaning outsiders like himself on the lives of the Nigerian insiders.

As a performance, Mr. Hoyle’s theatrical journey through the Niger Delta’s remote and lawless hinterlands continues to arrest audiences, even in this less intimate setting. Over 90 minutes he embodies a variety of African and other foreign characters with warmth and energy.

Foremost among his sharply drawn creations are a warlord who wields multiple cellphones and whose Jabba-the-Hutt-like aspect belies a sentimental side (he keeps a photo album); a loutish Scottish oil industry worker; and a physically awkward, slow-spoken 23-year-old sniper who dreams of going to a university. Mr. Hoyle captures these characters so vividly that he seems to disappear inside their stories, much as Anna Deavere Smith (“Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,” “Fires in the Mirror”) does in her stenographically precise reproductions of real-life characters.

Yet Mr. Hoyle still maintains a shadowy presence onstage despite a desire to remove himself from the narrative. When asked in a 2007 interview with The Huffington Post about the most important decision he had made while creating the work, he replied, “Taking myself out of it.” His characters address their invisible interlocutor directly and even poke fun at him: “No, Dan, please sit down. Let us dance for you,” some Nigerian characters jovially insist when this Westerner takes ham-footedly to the dance floor. Try as he might to remain an outside observer, Mr. Hoyle can’t help putting himself in the frame.

His relationship with his interview subjects is particularly complex in the case of Okosi, the young sniper. Okosi is based on Williams Ajayi, a real-life militant whom Mr. Hoyle befriended during his first visit to Nigeria. In the play Mr. Hoyle grippingly recounts Okosi’s decision to throw his guns away to pursue his undergraduate ambitions. What Mr. Hoyle doesn’t address onstage is the impact he himself has on the character’s life. Only one desperate utterance from Okosi — “Dan, please, when are you coming back?” — hints at the American’s influence on the Nigerian.

Only beyond the realm of the play do you start to get a sense of Mr. Hoyle’s true agency in the Niger Delta. In prose and conversation he tells of being reunited with Mr. Ajayi in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, during his recent visit. At the meeting Mr. Hoyle learned that the real-life Okosi narrowly escaped being killed by gang members for turning his back on a life of crime. These days, Mr. Hoyle said, the former militant lives a life of poverty, “a sometime day laborer, sometimes just wandering the streets hoping to run into old friends who will buy him a meal.”

As demoralizing as this story is, discovering Mr. Hoyle’s role in shaping Mr. Ajayi’s life is even more unnerving: “When he met me,” the performer writes in his essay of being reunited with Mr. Ajayi, “it was like a light to his life. After hundreds of performances in the U.S., I couldn’t really point to any impact my show had made on the Niger Delta. But during my research I had impacted Williams enough to change his life.”

The fortunes of individuals and nations rise and fall every day. The genius of “Tings Dey Happen” is its ability to help us understand how filling the tanks of our cars here in the United States might spark countless wars in a far-off land. If only Mr. Hoyle, full of fresh insights from his recent trip, would confront the consequences of his presence in Nigeria more openly, instead of through his characters’ oblique references to an invisible white guy named Dan.

Correction: November 16, 2009
In a previous version of this article, a quote was incorrectly attributed. The playwright, Dan Hoyle, did not say, "When he met me, it was like a light to his life." The man he was writing about, Williams Ajayi, said it. Also, a passage may have left the incorrect impression that the author interviewed Mr. Hoyle about his reunion with Mr. Ajayi. The author heard the story at a post-performance discussion, not in a personal conversation with Mr. Hoyle.

Susan Graham experiences Dido's hard life with a lounge lizardLOS ANGELES TIMES

noreply@blogger.com (Chloe Veltman) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 01:57:00 +0000

The mezzo-soprano and conductor Nicholas McGegan discuss the challenges of Henry Purcell's opera.

Susan Graham and Nicholas McGegan have never collaborated before. But when they get together, the Texas-raised mezzo-soprano and British conductor behave like an old married couple. On a recent afternoon in Berkeley, the home base of the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, a leading period performance ensemble that McGegan has directed for many years, the duo engaged in lively banter about their first artistic partnership -- a six-concert California tour of works by the 17th century English composer Henry Purcell.

Graham is known as much for her pants roles in Baroque operas as for her championing of French and contemporary American song. Celebrating Purcell's 350th birthday, the Baroque Orchestra's "Passion of Dido" program features the versatile mezzo as the ill-fated heroine in "Dido and Aeneas" (1689). Joining Graham, McGegan, the orchestra and the Philharmonia Chorale are soloists William Berger, Cyndia Sieden, Céline Ricci, Jill Grove and Brian Thorsett.

Graham often performs in L.A, including headlining Los Angeles Opera's 2006 production of Monteverdi's "L'incoronazione di Poppea." However, the singer's visit Wednesday represents her first Disney Hall appearance. We caught up with Graham and McGegan during rehearsals to discuss, among other topics, the challenges of performing Purcell, Los Angeles music audiences and the correct way to pronounce "Purcell."

You've known each other for years. What brings you together as collaborators now?

Susan Graham: I've always wanted to work with Nic. I've long been a fan of his musical aesthetic. I love this piece we're doing together now.

Nicholas McGegan: And I always want to work with the best singers.

SG: Unfortunately, you got me instead.

NM: Ha-ha. Now you get to die six times on stage over the course of two weeks.

SG: I'm excited about that, as I don't usually get to die -- or get the guy.

NM: Usually you are the guy.

SG: That's true. In "Rosenkavalier," which I did recently at the Met, I am the guy.

What's the significance of performing "Dido" on Purcell's 350th birthday?

NM: It makes me wish the composer had lived to 50 instead of dying at 34. Apparently his wife locked him out one night when he was late back from the pub. He caught a cold, and that was the end of him.

SG: Mrs. Purcell was a serious lady.

NM: Yes. Mind you, I don't think Mr. Purcell was a first-time offender. He wrote about 50 drinking songs, most of which are unprintable.

Why do people respond to "Dido" so strongly today?

NM: "Dido" moves from comedy to tragedy so fast. It achieves in just 50 minutes what it takes most other operas three of four hours to do.

SG: Purcell wrote "Dido" for students at a girls' school in London. Is it true or apocryphal that he composed the piece as an admonition to the young ladies -- as a warning to be wary of men, that they'll break your heart and leave you to die?

NM: He mainly wrote it for money. But it's true that Aeneas is an amazing lounge lizard.

How do you ensure that period performance is alive and vibrant?

NM: We don't bring our treatises on stage. We simply focus on moving people. We're entertainers. Certain academic ideas do matter. For example, if you're going to perform a minuet, it helps to know how fast people danced minuets.

NM: Right. The period instrument thing is nice. But I've also performed "Dido" on modern instruments. I've even done it with Mark Morris dancing the role of Dido in a muumuu. It was quite beautiful.

SG: Morris is multitalented.

NM: But a femme fatale he is not.

SG: As much as he'd like to be.

Please talk about the work's final famous aria -- "When I Am Laid in Earth." How do you make this aria your own, Susan?

SG: By the time this aria occurs, it sings itself. The song is so loaded with everything that has come before, yet its purity is its driving force. All I have to do is sing it true.

What are the biggest challenges in performing "Dido"?

SG: There's no place to hide. You don't have a raucous orchestra disguising your flaws. You have under an hour to tell a huge story. Capturing big emotions in a tight time frame is hard.

What do you think about the way in which Purcell sets the story to music?

SG: There's so much truth to Purcell's vocal writing. Take the part where Dido and Aeneas sing this incredible battle duet. They're playing a game of one-upmanship. He cuts her down. Then she mocks him and calls him a "deceitful crocodile."

NM: No one but Purcell would use the word "crocodile" in an opera. There really are only three composers who set the English language well -- Purcell, Britten and Sullivan.

You've both been involved in notable recordings of this work before -- Susan under the baton of Emanuelle Haïm and Nicholas with Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. How do your past experiences inform your collaboration?

NM: I've got a completely blank score for this one, and I'm going to start all over again.

SG: Me too. I can't tell you how many times I've had videos thrust at me in rehearsal and been told: "Do it like her!" Invariably, she's a foot shorter than I am and I have bigger feet, so this approach doesn't work. You always go into a new project wondering what the maestro is going to expect. We're just the hired help, after all.

NM: She said with a grin.

SG: Everyone works within the circumstances of the specific production. The dynamics are always different.

NM: In this run of "Dido," Performance One will be radically different from Performance Six.

SG: Things will get trillier.

NM: And faster.

SG: The witches will become sillier.

Please tell us about the other works in the program.

NM: We're interested in showing Purcell's range as a sacred and secular composer. The concert includes the joyful sacred anthem, "O Sing Unto the Lord a New Song," Chacony in G minor, a misfit but lovely instrumental piece, the heart-wrenching sacred lament written for eight-part choir and organ "Hear My Prayer, O Lord," and music that Purcell wrote for the 1695 revival of Aphra Behn's grisly play, "Abdelazer." Today, Purcell's incidental music is better known than Behn's drama, in which nearly everyone dies apart from the person responsible for lowering the curtain at the end. Many people know the "Rondeau" because Britten used it in his "Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra."

You've performed at Disney Hall before, Nicholas. But next Wednesday's concert marks your premiere at the venue, Susan. What are your thoughts about the space?

SG: I've performed at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion many times. As I've pulled into the parking lot, I've had an eye on Disney Hall and thought to myself, "I want to sing there." I hear the acoustic is spectacular. For a piece like "Dido." where clarity is an asset, it will sound brilliant. I'm hoping the space will help us play with lots of colors and textures.

NM: Disney is one of the world's great concert halls. It's a big space, but because of the steep rake of the seating, the audience never feels far away. I've done chamber music at Disney, and it's felt intimate. I've also conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic there, and we made a hell of a racket. The other great thing about the hall is the backstage area. It's like a five-star hotel.

What do you think of L.A. audiences?

NM: I was recently in L.A. conducing an all-Mozart program at the Hollywood Bowl. I like Bowl audiences because they don't behave like they've been recently starched.

SG: L.A. audiences aren't afraid to be surprised. For example, they loved "The Coronation of Poppea."

Please, can you settle the confusion about how to pronounce the composer's name?

NM: For some reason, people often mispronounce Purcell's name. It's "PUR-cell." It should rhyme with "rehEARsal".

SG: It's not supposed to rhyme with "DuraCELL" or "PurELL."

RivetingSF WEEKLY

noreply@blogger.com (Chloe Veltman) — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 19:18:00 +0000

The Rosies of Richmond make riveting subject matter in This World in a Woman's Hands

The image of a strapping white woman in a headscarf and overalls flexing her guns under the slogan "We Can Do It!" has become a cultural icon in this country since graphic artist J. Howard Miller created the poster bearing the figure in 1942. Strongly associated with an important piece of history, this picture of "Rosie the Riveter" represents the women who worked men's jobs during the Second World War, making ships, airplanes, and ammunition while the men were away fighting.

What many people beyond the Bay Area don't realize is the image's close association with Richmond. The careworn East Bay town betrays little of its heroic past. But during World War II, Richmond was the site of four huge shipyards. Manned — or, rather, womanned — by vast production lines of female workers, these manufacturing centers were responsible for building more vessels during the war effort than any other shipyard in the nation. Today, they are part of the Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park. That the women managed to build a staggering 750 ships in the Richmond shipyards during the war testifies to their teamwork. Though social and political challenges threatened to derail their efforts, the Rosies stuck together to support the war effort.

It is this spirit of togetherness that comes across most powerfully in Shotgun Players' riveting new play, This World in a Woman's Hands. Marcus Gardley's world premiere drama draws on the real-life stories of the women who worked in the Richmond shipyards during wartime. Set in the early 1940s, with flash-forward sequences to the present, the story centers on a poor, black Louisianan, Gloria Cutting (the mercurial Margo Hall), who abandons her child to try her luck out west. Gloria hopes to earn a living as a welder and eventually send for her young daughter.

The characters prize solidarity and teamwork above all else, even in the face of racial inequality, blackmail, unionization, financial woes, and the eventual dissolution of the work teams following the return of their male counterparts. Powerfully led by director Aaron Davidman, Shotgun's creative team also embodies this spirit of togetherness. Rumor has it that the play's two-year development wasn't exactly smooth. But the bumps, such as they were, don't show. The plot might be full of dramatic tension, but harmony rules onstage: The nine-strong, all-female cast collaborates in seamless synchronicity to make Gardley's play sing.

Literally. Music welds the characters and scenes together to give This World an irresistible flow and feeling of communion. Composed by jazz vocalist Molly Holm (a longtime member of Voicestra, Bobby McFerrin's improvisational ensemble), the show's mostly a cappella score mixes close-knit jazz and blues harmonies, playful scat singing, and blazing spirituals to create a sonic landscape that evokes the 1940s while feeling contemporary. Live accompaniment by jazz bassist Marcus Shelby counterbalances the women's high voices.

Even the script has its own internal music, which further enhances the teamwork onstage. Gardley combines percussive nonsense words like "oonka chica" and "bup kee up," which convey a feeling of a production line, with regular language that is alternately gritty and lyrical. When shipyard worker Eva offers a hungry yet standoffish Gloria an apple, the warm body language of the other women as they encourage Gloria to accept Eva's gift belies the coarse exchange:

Eva: Here. You look hungry enough to eat corns off a toe.

Gloria: Don't worry 'bout how I look. I ain't yo' husband. 'Sides, I ate 'fore I got here.

Eva: Course you did. That was called breakfast. This here's lunch —

Gloria: I know what it is. I just ain't hungry.

Eva: Course you ain't. You just shakin' 'cause you cold ... though it's hot as the devil's breath out here. It's no wonder you're skinny as a skate; you ain't eatin' enough.

Gloria: I eats plenty.

Eva: That's piss. I done seen more meat on a neck bone. You swallow your pride, woman, and eat this apple.

Gloria: You eat it. I don't know where your hands been.

Elsewhere, in a scene set in contemporary Richmond where a group of local women stage a protest in the wake of the murder of a local teen, a sudden, comical outburst of poetry-slam–style rap from one of the characters helps galvanize the group's collective feelings about street crime. "Yo, breezees, be easy," the hoodie-wearing hip-hop proselytizer says. "We holdin' this down for the 'hood, fo' sheezy. Just be cheesy; it's all good."

A sense of ensemble is an elusive but crucial component of the performance-making process. The longstanding success of some of the world's most iconic theater companies, such as Russia's Moscow Art Theatre, England's Complicité, Germany's Berliner Ensemble, and the U.S.'s Living Theatre, owes much to their collective approach. Shotgun's production epitomizes what can be achieved when a group of like-minded artists overcomes adversity to present a unified and deeply creative front.

The same rules that apply in theater often apply in life. Just as Rosie the Riveter declared "We Can Do It!," so the Obama presidential campaign intoned "Yes We Can." Individual inspiration can get a person only so far. It takes extraordinary teamwork to build ships, win elections, and put on captivating plays.

Dirty BlondeGRAMOPHONE MAGAZINE

noreply@blogger.com (Chloe Veltman) — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 19:58:00 +0000

Chloe Veltman reviews Paul Moravec and Terry Teachout's new opera noire at this year's Santa Fe Opera Festival

While developing a new opera for this year’s Santa Fe Opera Festival, librettist Terry Teachout came across a comment of George Bernard Shaw’s regarding Il Trovatore which summed up what he and composer Paul Moravec hoped to achieve with their own project: “It is swift in action, and perfectly homogenous in atmosphere and feeling. It is absolutely void of intellectual interest: the appeal is to the instincts and the senses all through.”

Running at just 90 intermission-less minutes and opening to the sound of a series of gun-shots and the sight of the protagonist clutching a smoking revolver over her dead lover’s corpse, Teachout and Moravec’s adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s 1927 play, The Letter, certainly assaults the senses. Based on a true-crime narrative about a woman who gets away with murder despite lying about her motives, The Letter enjoyed successful runs on Broadway and was adapted twice for the screen – most famously in a 1940 Bette Davis vehicle. The Santa Fe re-telling, which stars James Maddalena as a conscience-stricken lawyer and a fiery Patricia Racette and brooding Anthony Michaels-Moore as an unhappy expatriate couple -- Leslie and Robert Crosbie -- whose life in the jungle is ransacked by passion, violence and revenge, retains all of the melodrama of Maugham’s terse play while considerably heightening its emotion.

Moravec’s muscular score is as hammily reminiscent of 1940s film noir as the vampiric shadows of Duane Schuler’s lighting design with its use of swooping vocal lines, tremolo violins, shrill piccolos, honking trombone ostinati and heart-battering timpani. It nevertheless emphasises the high-stakes atmosphere, sometimes even undercutting the emotion of Maugham’s scenario. In a scene that takes place in Leslie’s prison cell, for instance, a sweet harp and flute line ironically suggests the murderess’ innocence before a flashback scene portrays what really happened on the night of the assassination. The unexpected appearances of the ghost of Leslie’s deceased lover, Geoff Hammond (an innovation not present in Maugham’s original and chillingly executed by Canadian tenor Roger Honeywell) contribute an arresting layer of Grand Guignol tension to the action.

Director Jonathan Kent’s staging of Hammond’s death in the opening beat misses a prime opportunity for melodrama as a result of being obscured by a set of flapping muslin curtains stage-left. And the production’s intermittent set changes hamper the pace. Yet this steamy-sepulchral operatic potboiler set in colonial Malaya between the world wars holds our attention throughout – and not simply by appealing to our senses. Far from being “absolutely void of intellectual interest,” The Letter inadvertently engages the brain with its seething study of the blurred lines between friendship and duty, love and madness and civilization and savagery.

THE LETTER
SANTA FE OPERA FESTIVAL
JULY 25 - AUGUST 18, 2009
MUSIC BY PAUL MORAVEC
LIBRETTO BY TERRY TEACHOUT
DIRECTION BY JONATHAN KENT
CONDUCTOR PATRICK SUMMERS
STARRING PATRICIA RACETTE, JAMES MADDALENA, ANTHONY MICHAELS-MOORE
WWW.SANTAFEOPERA.ORG

Too Much of a Good ThingSF WEEKLY

noreply@blogger.com (Chloe Veltman) — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 00:19:00 +0000

So what if August: Osage County won a Tony? It’s still boring and bloated.

The young Thomas Mann learned a lesson about overindulgence when his father took him to a patisserie and told him he could stuff his face with as many cream puffs as he liked. "He led us into a sweet smelling Paradise, and let the dream become reality," the German author wrote in his diaries, "and we were amazed how quickly we reached the limit of our desire, which we believed to be infinite."

I was reminded of this anecdote as I dragged myself back to my apartment just shy of midnight the other evening after sitting through the excess that is Tracy Letts' August: Osage County. It wasn't the length of this soap-opera–like domestic drama (three and a half hours including two intermissions) that left me feeling I'd been deep-fried, rolled in powdered sugar, and served up with whipped cream. I was simply worn out by the soul-numbing force with which the playwright, director, and cast shoved this completely hackneyed story of human indulgence down my throat. The experience made me want to go on a strict diet of minimalist puppet theater and mime.

Premiered in 2007 by Chicago's lauded Steppenwolf Theatre, August: Osage County isn't your average touring Broadway show. It isn't a musical. The sets don't revolve. And unless you count the play's trio of loud-mouthed sisters, there are no chorus girls. Yet far from being hampered by these "shortcomings," the play has done phenomenally well. It won a slew of awards, including a Pulitzer and a Tony. Audiences flocked to see the play at London's National Theatre last year. The Weinstein Company is working on a movie adaptation.

It's easy to see what draws audiences to Letts' high-stakes drama, which depicts a particularly disruptive period in a large Oklahoma family's life following the disappearance of its hard-drinking patriarch, Beverly Weston. Here's where I agree with the popular vote: Some of the performances in director Anna D. Shapiro's punctiliously executed production are deeply engrossing. The touring troupe doesn't include a single member of the original Chicago or New York cast, which starred the playwright's father, Dennis Letts, as Beverly, and Deanna Dunagan as his drug-addicted, erratic spouse, Violet. Yet the touring actors all embody their parts as if the author had written the roles specifically for them. Chief among these is the formidable old-timer Estelle Parsons, who slurs, swaggers, and slashes her way through the play as if she's a pirate on very potent painkillers. Violet has all the best lines, and Parsons delivers them like a great orchestra playing the opening notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. All growling bass and ominous tonality, she's on the attack.

The other reason people get sucked into August: Osage County is the storytelling. I don't want to spoil the climax by summarizing the play's many predictable twists and turns. Besides, the program notes helpfully include a family tree illustrating the relationships among the members of the Aeschylean Weston family and their various hangers-on. Let's just say that regarding the denouement, regrettably, the popular vote and I must part.

Letts' drama comes across like a bloated Tennessee Williams or Eugene O'Neill play, but with more shit going down and much less depth. Over the course of this long, long, long day's journey into night, the playwright piles on the thrills. He uses incest, infidelity, child molestation, addiction, violence, dispossession, and several other tired devices as an excuse for a plot. The drug-addled mother, the wounded children, and the absent father are all staples of the classic 20th-century American drama. It's tempting to think that Letts might be making some kind of comment about the genesis of this country's theatrical aesthetic and its reflection of the rotten state of society by so explicitly reverting to old tropes and presenting the many faces of human decrepitude in surfeit. But if that's the case, his meaning is obscure.

The play has the unfortunate effect of overstuffing us with its overbearing storyline, while at the same time leaving us unfulfilled. Letts misses enormous opportunities to plumb the profound. For instance, the gentle, shadowy presence of the family's live-in housekeeper, a young, hard-up Native American woman by the name of Johnna Monevata, begs for development. Johnna (played with sensitivity and grace by DeLanna Studi) is an outsider in more ways than one. But we never find out what drives her to stay with this godawful family besides financial need, and the playwright offers no commentary on her status as a hard-working native in the employment of a dissolute white family in a postcolonial world. Throwing in a few quotes from T.S. Eliot's poem "The Hollow Men" and references to Emily Dickinson don't seem to provide the metaphoric depth necessary to lift the play beyond mere gladiator sport. Add to this the intermittent shouting and screaming of the actors and Todd Rosenthal's ungainly naturalistic set depicting the inside of the Westons' house, which leaves little to the visual imagination, and you have a bad case of boredom on your hands. In short, it's all too much.

What does "all too much" really mean today? Thomas Mann knew when to curtail the cream. But these days, our desire for more frequently overrides common sense. "Nothing makes people more excessive than talking about excess," wrote psychoanalyst Adam Phillips in a recent article for the U.K.'s Guardian newspaper. "If the 20th century was, in the title of Eric Hobsbawm's book, the Age of Extremes, then the 21st century looks like being the Age of Excess." Ah. Now I understand why August: Osage County is such a stampeding success.

After Rain ManBRITISH MEDICAL JOURNAL

noreply@blogger.com (Chloe Veltman) — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 17:51:00 +0000

Chloe Veltman considers the latest in a run of Asperger’s-centric movies from Hollywood

Asperger’s syndrome has become a pop-culture fetish lately. The hazily understood autism spectrum disorder has become a common plot device in such television shows as House, Bones, and Law & Order. The protagonists of Mark Haddon’s 2003 novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time and Stieg Larsson’s thriller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2008) are affected by the syndrome. It is the subject of a slew of new non-fiction titles including 22 Things a Woman Must Know If She Loves a Man With Asperger’s by Rudy Simone, The Love-Shy Survival Guide by Talmer Shockley, and Christopher Babcock’s The Imprinted Brain. Hollywood has also picked up on the trend with a growing pile of Asperger’s-centric films including 2005’s Mozart and the Whale, which stars Josh Hartnett and Radha Mitchell as two Asperger’s syndrome sufferers, and the recent animated feature Mary and Max, centering on the relationship between a middle-aged New Yorker with the condition and a lonely Australian child.

More than two decades have elapsed since director Barry Levinson first brought autism to broad public attention with his 1988 movie Rain Man, which starred Dustin Hoffman as an autistic savant and Tom Cruise as his selfish, yuppie brother. If the newfound appeal of Asperger’s in mainstream culture points to anything, it’s the growing awareness and acceptance of high-functioning autism in society—a trend that Max Mayer’s new feature film, Adam, particularly underscores. Far from depicting its protagonist, a painfully gauche 29 year old electrical engineer played with limpid-eyed sensitivity by Hugh Dancy, as a freak, the movie strives to demonstrate just how little distance separates the so-called "neurotypical" population from the "neurodiverse."

A bittersweet romantic comedy, Adam takes place at a turning point in the titular character’s life. Soon after the death of his father, with whom he shared an apartment, Adam meets Beth, a young schoolteacher and aspiring children’s book author (played by Rose Byrne) who’s just moved into his building. The two develop an idiosyncratic romance that takes an intense turn when events over which the lovers have little control threaten to unbalance their relationship with each other and with the world around them. Adam loses the job that his father got for him years before—a serious problem for someone who’s never sent out a curriculum vitae, much less had to pay a Manhattan mortgage solo. Beth, meanwhile, finds herself caught in the middle of a courtroom scandal concerning her well to do accountant father and his business partner’s daughter. As both characters struggle to makes sense of their lives, they grow together, then apart. Circumstances divide them, but the spark that kindled their relationship at the start of the film still flickers at its end.

Perhaps the most palpable quality of this boy next door romance is how normal and relatively well-adjusted its protagonist seems. Dancy’s performance refreshingly lacks the Hoffmanesque physical ticks normally associated with the portrayal of autistic characters on screen. Although his serious expression and permanently furrowed brow convey a state of general malaise, we very rarely see him lose control completely.

Uncomfortable situations frequently make his shoulders shake and his breath run short. But his inability to cope takes a truly dark turn only once. When Adam discovers that Beth told a tiny white lie in order to engineer a meeting between her father and her new socially awkward beau, he bursts into an uncontrollable, violent rage. His condition apparently renders him unable to distinguish between a harmless fib and a serious perjury, such as that committed by Beth’s father.

Mayer mostly plays Adam’s syndrome for laughs, viewing it more as an adorable quirk than a debilitating illness. In the movie’s opening sequence, the filmmaker offers us close ups of the protagonist’s obsessively tidy New York apartment, with its kitchen stuffed with rows of neatly stacked provisions and and closets hung with monochrome sports jackets of an old fashioned cut. Adam’s social ineptitude is similarly a cause for comedy. When Beth, laden down with groceries, accosts him on the stairs outside their building near the start of their relationship, he fails to help her with her load. At a party, he abruptly says "no thank you" when the host asks him and Beth if they’d like to meet her baby girl, and proceeds to talk some poor girl’s ear off about Dobsonian telescope lenses. Like many people with Asperger’s syndrome, Adam has an encyclopaedic knowledge of one or two subjects. Astronomy is his chief obsession, with New York theatre history running a distant second.

The result of playing down Adam’s condition while playing up the drama and emotional turmoil going on in Beth’s life further helps to "normalise" Asperger’s for the cinemagoer. This sweet if not emotionally or intellectually penetrating film is more about how people learn to cope with what life throws at them than it is about living with an acute developmental disorder.

Adam
Directed by Max Mayer
On general UK and limited US release
Rating: ***

Chloe Veltman talks about Adam in a BMJ Podcast at
http://podcasts.bmj.com/bmj.