Wednesday, December 17, 2008
"Opening Night" at BAM
The phrase Opening Night -- it's a noun, right? An occasion. An event.
Is it possible to think of opening as a verb?
To me, any art that's worth something leaves an image burned on your retina, and in the case of Ivo Van Hove's brilliant and daring "Opening Night", that image is the fantastic Elsie de Brauw's (Myrtle's) face.
Cinematically projected, full-screen and high above the audience, it's possible that we're seeing what she sees when she looks in the mirror -- her eyes, crinkled, sensitive and knowing; her porous powdered skin; and the baggy jawline-destroying beginnings of what my dear departed 84 year old mother-in-law enchantingly called her "wattles." This ecstatic and lonely face encapsulates all the production's emotions, nuance, humor, bravery, conflicts, bawdiness, brooding, passion, pouting, turmoil, consolation and humanity. Whew!
Working from John Cassavetes's 1977 screenplay, Van Hove and company use live video projection on and offstage, rolling props, curtains, cloth, paper and tape combined with genius physical staging to break down physical and symbolic barriers of stage and emotional space. As audience (in fact, there are two audiences) we're both witnesses and participants in this fictional/actual theater company's previews of "The Second Wife."
It's immediately apparent that Myrtle is the epicenter of this strangely functioning dysfunctional group. Myrtle is a woman. And, being a woman, naturally, we can view Myrtle's behavior as "hysterical", indulgent, and just plain irritating and counterproductive.
What concerns me just now is my own response: I found her behavior perfectly acceptable, touchingly familiar, almost lucid. Having recently been through my own 50-something mini-crisis of addlepated despair upon arrival at the inevitable youth/age threshold I say, "Let 'er rip, Myrtle. Use the only voice you have just now, the Diva pressure-cooker voice, to announce yourself as the current living representative of midcenturions everywhere."
To me the character of Nancy is real. She's the weight, figuratively and literally, that women hoist around throughout their lives and the perfect visceral embodiment of that hoisting. Taunting, amusing, rhapsodic, pleading, as a character, she lodges in the throat, the brain, the gut, and the groin. At least, in Myrtle's and mine.
I want her to lodge in everybody's so that they can bloody well understand what it feels like to be a perfectly competent, sane and relatively content human female being suddenly beside herself because she's finally noticed the tiny scratchings around her own upper lip that quietly repelled her when she noticed them on her beloved aunt twentyfive years earlier.
With its Coney Island funhouse atmosphere, the production gains strength as barriers keep breaking, fourth walls tumble, reasonable constraints fly away. Myrtle's professional etiquette is subsumed by a maddeningly insistent existential questioning. It matters. It matters deeply to her.
Ultimately, disorientation is freeing. Myrtle, the actress, a great artist, has built her career on that simple truth. By the end of the play, she emanates her own light. She is translucent.
And it becomes clear that, all along in this beautiful and insightful production, she has been in the process of fearlessly "opening" her own inner "night."
Is it possible to think of opening as a verb?
To me, any art that's worth something leaves an image burned on your retina, and in the case of Ivo Van Hove's brilliant and daring "Opening Night", that image is the fantastic Elsie de Brauw's (Myrtle's) face.
Cinematically projected, full-screen and high above the audience, it's possible that we're seeing what she sees when she looks in the mirror -- her eyes, crinkled, sensitive and knowing; her porous powdered skin; and the baggy jawline-destroying beginnings of what my dear departed 84 year old mother-in-law enchantingly called her "wattles." This ecstatic and lonely face encapsulates all the production's emotions, nuance, humor, bravery, conflicts, bawdiness, brooding, passion, pouting, turmoil, consolation and humanity. Whew!
Working from John Cassavetes's 1977 screenplay, Van Hove and company use live video projection on and offstage, rolling props, curtains, cloth, paper and tape combined with genius physical staging to break down physical and symbolic barriers of stage and emotional space. As audience (in fact, there are two audiences) we're both witnesses and participants in this fictional/actual theater company's previews of "The Second Wife."
It's immediately apparent that Myrtle is the epicenter of this strangely functioning dysfunctional group. Myrtle is a woman. And, being a woman, naturally, we can view Myrtle's behavior as "hysterical", indulgent, and just plain irritating and counterproductive.
What concerns me just now is my own response: I found her behavior perfectly acceptable, touchingly familiar, almost lucid. Having recently been through my own 50-something mini-crisis of addlepated despair upon arrival at the inevitable youth/age threshold I say, "Let 'er rip, Myrtle. Use the only voice you have just now, the Diva pressure-cooker voice, to announce yourself as the current living representative of midcenturions everywhere."
To me the character of Nancy is real. She's the weight, figuratively and literally, that women hoist around throughout their lives and the perfect visceral embodiment of that hoisting. Taunting, amusing, rhapsodic, pleading, as a character, she lodges in the throat, the brain, the gut, and the groin. At least, in Myrtle's and mine.
I want her to lodge in everybody's so that they can bloody well understand what it feels like to be a perfectly competent, sane and relatively content human female being suddenly beside herself because she's finally noticed the tiny scratchings around her own upper lip that quietly repelled her when she noticed them on her beloved aunt twentyfive years earlier.
With its Coney Island funhouse atmosphere, the production gains strength as barriers keep breaking, fourth walls tumble, reasonable constraints fly away. Myrtle's professional etiquette is subsumed by a maddeningly insistent existential questioning. It matters. It matters deeply to her.
Ultimately, disorientation is freeing. Myrtle, the actress, a great artist, has built her career on that simple truth. By the end of the play, she emanates her own light. She is translucent.
And it becomes clear that, all along in this beautiful and insightful production, she has been in the process of fearlessly "opening" her own inner "night."
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Monday, November 24, 2008
Memo to B re Memo 6b
Saturday night presented another opportunity to say bravo to our good friend and great composer Bernard Rands, who dedicated his newest piece to us ("us" being my husband Benjamin Barber and me.) Commissioned by Prism Quartet, and premiered at Symphony Space, it was such a pleasure and an honor and utterly cool to hear music that on some level derived its flavor from our relationship.
Prism Quartet is a chamber ensemble of four saxaphone virtuosos. True champions of new music, they commission works, both classical and jazz, by composers of Bernard's caliber to help them push the envelope of their instruments' capabilities.
Bernard's Memo series, initiated 30 years ago, is a series of works for solo instruments. The pieces contain qualities that are always deeply embedded in his large orchestral works -- his boyish fascination and delight in an instrument's possibilities of sound, its voice; affection for and trust in the musician's ability to bring a resonating mix of humanity and technical brilliance to music making; lyricism and historical context.
"Our" piece, Prism (Memo 6b) is a "transformation and transcription" of a previous work, Memo 6 (for saxophone). "This" can become "that" says Bernard in his inimitable way, using a simple idea as a starting point for elaboration into profound levels of depth and complexity.
Like friendship. Bravo B.
Prism Quartet is a chamber ensemble of four saxaphone virtuosos. True champions of new music, they commission works, both classical and jazz, by composers of Bernard's caliber to help them push the envelope of their instruments' capabilities.
Bernard's Memo series, initiated 30 years ago, is a series of works for solo instruments. The pieces contain qualities that are always deeply embedded in his large orchestral works -- his boyish fascination and delight in an instrument's possibilities of sound, its voice; affection for and trust in the musician's ability to bring a resonating mix of humanity and technical brilliance to music making; lyricism and historical context.
"Our" piece, Prism (Memo 6b) is a "transformation and transcription" of a previous work, Memo 6 (for saxophone). "This" can become "that" says Bernard in his inimitable way, using a simple idea as a starting point for elaboration into profound levels of depth and complexity.
Like friendship. Bravo B.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Thursday, November 13, 2008
La La Last Night at BAM
Edouard Lock reclaims ballet for the 21st century. My introduction to the company, La La La Human Steps, was at BAM previously where I was dazzled by the speed and mesmerizing vitality of Amelia -- this was ballet unlike anything I'd ever seen -- the visceral rush of vertigo and elation. This time, I was prepared, not just to experience but also to look more carefully. Last night's production, Amjad, provides an ideal opportunity for this analysis. A collaborative fusion of Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty, with its clear references to both choreographic and musical leitmotifs of the original 19th century ballets, it creates a context for viewing Lock's deconstructed and reworked ballet vocabulary. The dancers' arms, a willful and highly charged nod to swans of the past, the echappes passes from the dance of the cygnets, and the calm stately balances on pointe, conjuring images of the Rose Adagio, are a few of the direct references to the past.
With his collaborators, the dancers, composers, musicians and designers (video projections of pearls and overgrown vines come and go throughout the piece), Lock has created what seems to be a resetting of the familiar tales of good vs. evil in what really feels like a modern day chamber piece. There's something incredibly intimate in the darkness, with the musicians onstage, barely seen but vividly present in the music's surge of painterly sound, deep and lush, at times grating and otherworldly. This setting is not a book illustration of murky lakes, violent swans, and the moral perils of good vs. evil. It is a postmodern setting of light and sound and movement in which the dancers are not symbols or characters come to life, they are dancers engaged in the pursuit of a disciplined movement form that evokes a time and place without needing to literally recreate it.
One of the first things that stands out in the work, you love it or hate it, is the speed of the movement. The speed. An inexplicable tour de force of rapidity that, but for the fact that we're watching actual human beings execute it, seems humanly impossible. But it's not merely the speed, it's the clarity of motion that really resonates and takes this work beyond a trick or gimmick. For these dancers it seems to be a fundamental form of communication.
Like flying particles of split atoms, the dancers and their bodies seem propelled and constantly redirected and realigned in split seconds. In order to negotiate this new relationship to gravitational forces, they have to let go of comfortable dancerly habits that a modern audience identifies with virtuosity. In this mode, form follows function: leg extensions are rarely above the hip, the working foot is in coupe (against the ankle) rather than passe (at the knee) in pirouettes, arms are lowered in a chaine turn resembling the position used in the 18th century French noble style. Yet the movement develops and soars in its ingenuity and discovery.
At BAM's Gala dinner after the performance, I had the chance to talk to Edouard Lock who spoke about the experience of seeing; by compressing time you clarify perception -- because they're closer together in time, the mind's eye retains the image of the previous movement while it's taking in the new one. This idea reminds me of Boccioni's famous sculpture "Unique Forms of Continuity in Space", (the one of a man walking forward with a sort of drape of curving forms following him); you perceive the present and the trailing memory of the past simultaneously.
Ironically, in its modernism, this makes a case for the justification of the pointe shoe in postmodern dance. The pointe shoe has a place here as a highly evolved dancer's tool -- beginning in the 19th century when Marie Taglioni rose on her toes to create the feeling of romantic flight; Balanchine's dancers wore them as comfortable extensions of themselves; Twyla Tharp democratized the pointe shoe by using it alongside sneakers and jazz shoes; and now they are aesthetic instruments used by dancers to explore the compression of time and space and human movement -- highly effective pivot points -- the smaller surface area allowing for less friction and thus greater speed and spatial agility.
Some reviewers have complained that Amjad's approach is no longer "fresh", that there is too much repetition and the darkness is bleak. To me, this production looks back to the source, the original brothers Grimm, and reveals the warnings, sexual constraint and eery nightmarish qualities that pervade our classic fairy tales. The choreographer uses a postmodern reworked classical vocabulary to tell the tale, and in this way, reclaims ballet for the 21st century.
Performances continue at BAM through November 15th.
With his collaborators, the dancers, composers, musicians and designers (video projections of pearls and overgrown vines come and go throughout the piece), Lock has created what seems to be a resetting of the familiar tales of good vs. evil in what really feels like a modern day chamber piece. There's something incredibly intimate in the darkness, with the musicians onstage, barely seen but vividly present in the music's surge of painterly sound, deep and lush, at times grating and otherworldly. This setting is not a book illustration of murky lakes, violent swans, and the moral perils of good vs. evil. It is a postmodern setting of light and sound and movement in which the dancers are not symbols or characters come to life, they are dancers engaged in the pursuit of a disciplined movement form that evokes a time and place without needing to literally recreate it.
One of the first things that stands out in the work, you love it or hate it, is the speed of the movement. The speed. An inexplicable tour de force of rapidity that, but for the fact that we're watching actual human beings execute it, seems humanly impossible. But it's not merely the speed, it's the clarity of motion that really resonates and takes this work beyond a trick or gimmick. For these dancers it seems to be a fundamental form of communication.
Like flying particles of split atoms, the dancers and their bodies seem propelled and constantly redirected and realigned in split seconds. In order to negotiate this new relationship to gravitational forces, they have to let go of comfortable dancerly habits that a modern audience identifies with virtuosity. In this mode, form follows function: leg extensions are rarely above the hip, the working foot is in coupe (against the ankle) rather than passe (at the knee) in pirouettes, arms are lowered in a chaine turn resembling the position used in the 18th century French noble style. Yet the movement develops and soars in its ingenuity and discovery.
At BAM's Gala dinner after the performance, I had the chance to talk to Edouard Lock who spoke about the experience of seeing; by compressing time you clarify perception -- because they're closer together in time, the mind's eye retains the image of the previous movement while it's taking in the new one. This idea reminds me of Boccioni's famous sculpture "Unique Forms of Continuity in Space", (the one of a man walking forward with a sort of drape of curving forms following him); you perceive the present and the trailing memory of the past simultaneously.
Ironically, in its modernism, this makes a case for the justification of the pointe shoe in postmodern dance. The pointe shoe has a place here as a highly evolved dancer's tool -- beginning in the 19th century when Marie Taglioni rose on her toes to create the feeling of romantic flight; Balanchine's dancers wore them as comfortable extensions of themselves; Twyla Tharp democratized the pointe shoe by using it alongside sneakers and jazz shoes; and now they are aesthetic instruments used by dancers to explore the compression of time and space and human movement -- highly effective pivot points -- the smaller surface area allowing for less friction and thus greater speed and spatial agility.
Some reviewers have complained that Amjad's approach is no longer "fresh", that there is too much repetition and the darkness is bleak. To me, this production looks back to the source, the original brothers Grimm, and reveals the warnings, sexual constraint and eery nightmarish qualities that pervade our classic fairy tales. The choreographer uses a postmodern reworked classical vocabulary to tell the tale, and in this way, reclaims ballet for the 21st century.
Performances continue at BAM through November 15th.
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
What I did on election day
...besides voting for Barack Obama...
followed through on a promise to myself to actually go see some of the exhibits I read about in the NYTimes. At Talwar Gallery on East 16th Street, a mesmerizing group of drawings by Nasreen Mohamedi (1937-1990) took me completely out of the relentless whorl of politics. For half an hour or so, I entered the world of the grid, unplugged - a tour de force of drawings typified by lightly-drawn lines of varying thinness and thickness, and small markings, occasionally in deep desert colors, reminiscent of the work of Agnes Martin, with a (dare I say) lushness that captured me, mind and heart. Biographical facts reveal her long struggle with a neurological disease that rendered her motor abilities increasingly disfunctional. Perhaps this explains the omnipresence of depression alluded to in her diary, on display here as a video installation. But the drawings are evocative manifestations of a mind seeking enlightenment through objectivity. Inherent in each one is an emotional fusion of her narcissistic inner world with her formally examined outer world communicated to the observer by means of a practice of drawing that renders nature through a disciplined visual vocabulary of meticulous minutiae.
The exhibit is supposed to run through November 15th, but I think it's been extended.
followed through on a promise to myself to actually go see some of the exhibits I read about in the NYTimes. At Talwar Gallery on East 16th Street, a mesmerizing group of drawings by Nasreen Mohamedi (1937-1990) took me completely out of the relentless whorl of politics. For half an hour or so, I entered the world of the grid, unplugged - a tour de force of drawings typified by lightly-drawn lines of varying thinness and thickness, and small markings, occasionally in deep desert colors, reminiscent of the work of Agnes Martin, with a (dare I say) lushness that captured me, mind and heart. Biographical facts reveal her long struggle with a neurological disease that rendered her motor abilities increasingly disfunctional. Perhaps this explains the omnipresence of depression alluded to in her diary, on display here as a video installation. But the drawings are evocative manifestations of a mind seeking enlightenment through objectivity. Inherent in each one is an emotional fusion of her narcissistic inner world with her formally examined outer world communicated to the observer by means of a practice of drawing that renders nature through a disciplined visual vocabulary of meticulous minutiae.
The exhibit is supposed to run through November 15th, but I think it's been extended.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)