Archives for 2008

MSNBC ran an intriguing article a few days ago about a new study which suggests a link between pre-historic cave paintings and singing.

“Analyzing the famous, ochre-splashed cave walls of France, scientists found that the most densely painted areas were also those with the best acoustics,” wrote MSNBC LiveScience reporter Heather Whipps in her story. “Humming into some bends in the wall even produced sounds mimicking the animals painted there.”

Researcher Iegor Reznikoff, a specialist in ancient music at the University of Paris X in Nanterre, suggests that cave dwellers used sound to communicate with each other as the cave systems were so dark, with light from torches only extending a few feet. “Because Paleolithic humans had a deep connection with the melodic properties that helped them navigate in a cave, they likely celebrated the unique acoustics by singing in conjunction with their painting sessions,” Whipps reports. “Why would the Paleolithic tribes choose preferably resonant locations for painting,” Reznikoff is reported as saying in the article, “if it were not for making sounds and singing in some kind of ritual celebrations related with the pictures?”

It’s an interesting idea. It’s also sort of appealing, in a Hollywood screenplay-minded way, to think of groups of ancient people gathering in a brightly-adorned nook to celebrate and perform rites accompanied by music. But I wonder if the connection between the resonance of particular parts of a wall in a cave and the presence of paintings has a simpler explanation? Perhaps it’s just a case of “whistle while you work” — of ancient artists simply enjoying the sounds of their own voices while undertaking an art project?

Another July 4th. Another sunburn. Another fireworks display. Do I sound like I’ve been in this country for too long?

It’s actually been ten years, almost to the day, since I first arrived on these shores — a mere slip of a girl with little idea that cheese could be squeezed out of a tube, let alone that skyscrapers were capable of collapsing if hit by a couple of exploding planes.

The world has changed a great deal over the past decade, so it seems to me. And yet some things, like Independence Day fireworks, never seem to change. And yet, in a sense, they do.

I experienced my first ever July 4th display of pyromaniacal derring-do on the shores of the Charles River in Cambridge, MA. That was in 1998. I was overwhelmed by the crowds and the power of the Boston Pops Orchestra coming at me from the opposite bank.

This year, as I sat with equally humungous crowds watching the fireworks display at the Marin County Fair in San Raphael California, I couldn’t help but feel a bittersweet twinge for my salad days on the east coast.

Back then, I sat on the banks of a great river, watching an amazing display of lights to the sound of a live orchestra. I was embarking upon a new adventure and there was a credible president in office. This year, I sat by a glorified pond watching the ducks run for cover in a patch of nearby reeds as the red, white and blue lights went off against a backdrop of canned rock music blasting above my head from a set of mammoth speakers.

What’s the cliche about “viewing the world through rose-tinted spectacles”? Perhaps I’m a little guilty of that. Yet I love this country. In wouldn’t have stayed so long if I didn’t. But while I’m still on an adventure, the man in office never lit my fuse.

Once upon a time, people — at least the rich ones who lived in England — journeyed into the Great Hereafter to the divine music of Henry Purcell and William Byrd. These days, it seems that Celine Dion and Queen are the favored choice for bidding the world adieu.

According to an interesting item in the Melbourne, Australia-based Herald Sun “The funeral industry has reported a growing movement away from traditional hymns and sombre songs towards more joyful – even humorous – music, such as ‘Another One Bites The Dust’, ‘Highway to Hell’ and even ‘Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead.'”

I’m all for injecting a sense of humour into the somber business of death. But I’d personally come back to haunt, mercilessly, anyone who saw fit to play the simpering Andrea Bocelli/Sarah Brightman ‘Time to Say Goodbye’ or Dion’s equally asinine theme song from Titanic,  ‘My Heart Will Go On,’ at my funeral.

Having recently made a recording of 16th – 18th century dirges by some of England’s great funeral music composers of the period — Purcell, Byrd, Tallis, Parsons etc. — with my vocal ensemble San Francisco Renaissance Voices, I think that I’d personally enjoy some of that gorgeous, heavy old stuff when I go. Those Jacobeans and Carolines: They did death with a flourish. They understood it in a way that we don’t anymore.

What I like best about this largely homophonic music, besides its moss-covered tranquility and chilly stateliness, are the words. All those wonderfully creepy lines about worms devouring human flesh. I’m not a religious person, but I’m still moved by the idea of “seeing God” even after the body disintegrates.

My favorite piece from the dirge pack, however, has little to do with religion, really. It’s Byrd’s lament at the death of his great mentor Tallis. It’s a beautiful, bitter-sweet homage with a rapturous refrain: “Tallis is Dead! Tallis is Dead! And Music Dies.” I’d be very happy to have that piece sung as they fling my ashes to the four winds, because it’s so damn ardent.

What songs would you want played at your funeral?

A new operatic adaptation of David Cronenberg’s 1986 sci-fi horror movie, The Fly, is receiving its world premiere tonight at Paris’ Theatre du Chatelet before arriving at Los Angeles Opera on Sept. 7.

I’m interviewing Cronenberg about the work for a magazine profile next week, in preparation for which, among other things, I’ve been re-acquainting myself with the movie.

On the face of it, The Fly doesn’t look like it would necessarily lend itself to operatic treatment. Telling the story of a scientist (played by Jeff Goldblum in the film) who accidentally manages to fuse himself with a housefly, Cronenberg’s film is packed with gory moments, cheesy lines and steampunk-like technical contraptions.

But upon closer scrutiny, I think the subject matter might make for a very good opera. For one thing, there’s the film’s exploration of the universal and increasingly-pressing theme of man versus nature. This idea has been explored on the opera stage many times, from Wagner’s Das Rheingold to John Adams’ Dr. Atomic. For another, the film is so intense in terms of its characters and emotions, that the story plays itself out like a quintessential tragic opera plot. It starts out with a casual meeting between a handsome and mysterious scientist and a pretty, go-getterly journalist and ends up in disaster, death and tears. Finally, the movie’s straightforward linear narrative, handful of characters and clear three-act structure would work easily on stage.

Add to this the opera world’s obsession with attracting people in their 30s and 40s (as opposed to today’s standard 50+ opera goer) and The Fly, with its cult-like status, starts to look like a very sensible proposition. And if Philip Glass, Christopher Hampton and Robert Woodruff can get away with making an opera out of the signing of the treaty of Appomattox, then I think Cronenberg and his collaborators have every reason to create arias and recitatives out of bugs.

According to an Associated Press story, the audience at a dress rehearsal in Paris on Monday apparently broke out in giggles when a mezzo-soprano belted out the film’s catchphrase: “Be afraid. Be very afraid.” I wonder if it will be possible to take this operatic insect seriously? Or will it end up being a buzz-generating curio — a theatrical freak of nature like the BrundleFly?

I’m generally not a great fan of audience participation sequences in theatrical productions. I’m all for theatre-makers finding inventive ways to engage audiences and get them invested and involved in productions. But most of the time, when it comes to making some poor unsuspecting schmuck get up on stage, the laughs are cheap and the audience members’ parts are poorly integrated into the action.

Over the weekend, though, I caught one of the wittiest and interesting uses of audience members on stage that I’ve ever seen. The production was Point Break Live!, a theatrical spoof of the 1991 Kathryn Bigelow action movie starring Keanu Reeves as an under cover FBI agent who infiltrates a gang of bank-robbing surfers, led by Patrick Swayze.

The play’s central conceit revolves around the fact that theatre budgets are tight, and as a result, Reeves isn’t available to participate. So every night, the show casts a member of the audience in the role of FBI agent Johnny Utah.

People “audition” for the part and the cast selects the evening’s Utah by asking the rest of the audience to clap for the person they most want to see play the role.

The conceit works because it plays off Reeves’ unfortunate reputation as a terrible actor. The actor may have gone on to do great work as the lead character in the Matrix series and even reputedly pulled off a decent Hamlet in Winnipeg in 1995. But, with the possible exception of his po-faced rendition of John the Bastard in Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado, his performance in Point Break is probably the most cardboard-like of his career to date.

As such, it makes perfect sense for an audience member with very likely no acting experience to read Utah’s lines of cue-cards and play the action hero for an evening. The result is surprisingly clever and engaging. The audience member goes on a wild ride with the rest of the cast throughout the show. This includes being swung around above the audience’s head in a harness in the scene where Utah and the surfers jump out of a plane (one of the most creative bits of staging in the show) and chasing a bank robber down the street outside the theatre — we can see what’s going on from inside the auditorium thanks to a live video feed.

Never before have I been so fully engaged in a show that makes such plentiful use of audience participation. It’s no wonder that this scrappy spoof has garnered a devoted following since first being staged in Seattle in 2003. Since then, it’s played in New York and Los Angeles and arrived in San Francisco in April.

Needless to say, Point Break Live is a lot of fun. And it breathes new life into the tired audience participation idea.

Usually it’s easy to tell when a film makes use of non-professional actors. The untrained actors are supposed to imbue a movie with a rough edginess, perhaps a greater sense of “the real” (whatever that means.) More often than not, though, the performances come across as wooden and self-conscious, as was the case with the recent movie Once, for instance.

So I was quite surprised to emerge from a screening of the Golden Bear Award-winning Mongolian movie, Tuya’s Marriage, at the weekend, to discover that I had been watching a cast of mainly non-professional actors at work. All the male characters in this absorbing film, directed by Wang Quan An, are played by non-actor, I found out from reading a synopsis of the film by New York Times movie critic Stephen Holden. These characters have the same names as the people who play them. Only the female lead, Tuya, is played by a professional actress — Yu Nan.

What’s curious is that unlike most English-language films that use non-professional casts, I couldn’t tell the quality of the performances apart. Every character in this film depicting the harsh lives of Mongolian sheep herders living trying to eke out a living in an inhospitable world, touched me. The character played by Yu Nan does most of the “heavy lifting” in the film — both literally as Tuya’s family depends upon her for income, as well as as figuratively as she is the emotional center of the drama and is in the most scenes. But the supporting cast members all kept up with her in terms of engrossing us in their characters’ journeys.

But I wonder if I would feel the same way if I could understand Mongolian? In the past, I’ve been similarly taken with foreign language films which use non-professional casts. One example is Carlos Sorin’s moving Spanish-language film set in Argentina, Historias Minimas. If my knowledge of Spanish were as good as my knowledge of English, would I be more sensitive to the quality of the performances?

My guess is probably yes. In Tuya’s Wedding, I was unable to detect halteringly-delivered lines, tripped-over phrases or intonation problems, whereas these linguistic issues stand out to me when I can unerstand what’s being said.

Of course, an actor’s performance, from a vocal perspective, isn’t just about delivering words. There are all sorts of non-verbal elements that convey meaning such as the actor’s facial expression on any given line. Audiences latch on to these cues, even if they can’t understand the language. But beyond reading subtitles, which rarely convey the detailed nuances of speech, there’s no telling how the body language truly relates to what’s being said.

A couple of years ago, I did something that few self-respecting persons with graduate degrees and aspirations to literary careers dare do in this country: I cancelled my subscription to the New Yorker.

The reasons for cancelling were largely to do with a bad case of New Yorker Fatigue (NYF). The magazine’s reporting style is so uniform that by the time I reached the Financial Page, I would frequently run out of steam. I didn’t see much point in paying all that money for a publication that remained largely unread every week. And there was quite a bit of guilt associated with not getting around to swallowing those long, worthy articles about the war in Iraq and the latest shenanigans at the White House. So I decided to cut myself loose.

Following a two-year break, I recently found myself ready to subscribe again. And I’m happy to report that this time around, I’ve come up with an effective strategy for preventing NYF. It’s quite simple, really: Instead of opening the magazine at the masthead, I turn it around, as one might a Hebrew Bible, and read it from back to front.

The New Yorker‘s critics have such individual voices and methods of approaching their respective art forms thtat I find myself sailing through their reviews. Then I’m all juiced to launch into the big, fat reported pieces in the middle of the book. And the Talk of the Town and arts listings make surprisingly nice chasers.

I definitely recommend this approach to anyone suffering from NYF.

On another note: It’s been a while since I’d read Anthony Lane’s movie criticism. I was turned off the writer a long time ago when I realized that if he likes a movie, he’s quite boring to read. He’s only ever any good when he’s tearing a film he hates to shreds, which basically means he’s only ever any good when he’s writing about big, summer, Hollywood blockbusters.

Like the Mad Dog who walks out in the midday sun, the Englishman revels in Hollywood’s sunny summer movie madness. Lane’s review of the Angelina Jolie flick Wanted from last week’s issue is a case in point. Lane’s opening paragraph is one of the best film review ledes I’ve ever read. Here it is:

“What is it like being Timu Bekmambetov? No artist should be confused too closely with his creations, but anybody who sits through Wanted, Bekmambetov’s new movie, will be tempted to wonder if the life style of the characters might not reflect or rub off on that of the director. How, for example, does he make a cup of coffee? My best guess, based on the evidence of the film, is that he tosses a handful of beans toward the ceiling, shoots them individually into a fine powder, leaves it hanging in the air, runs downstairs, breaks open a fire hydrant with his head, carefully directs the jet of water through the window of his apartment, sets fire to the building, then stands patiently with his mug amid the blazing ruins to collect the precious percolated drops. Don’t even think about a cappuccino.”

If only Lane could come up with this kind of stuff for movies he actually likes.

An inspiring architectural news item caught my eye today. Architect David Fisher unveiled plans for the world’s first rotating skyscraper. 70- and 80-storey buildings are in the planning stages of being built in Moscow and Dubai respectively.

What’s really exciting about these buildings is the combination of sublime aesthetics and energy savings. The skyscrapers will be powered by the sun and wind and continuously change shape as each floor rotates around a central axis driven by wind turbines, one between each floor.

A demo video clip attached to the story in the UK’s Guardian provides an idea of just how sleek, aerodynamic and unique these buildings will be. And imagine the views!

The only thing that worries me about the project is the kitsch factor. In the video, Fisher uses a pretty cheese catchphrase to describe his concept: “designed by time, shaped by life.” And I wonder if people might be put off by the idea of living in a Vegas-style rotating restaurant?

Question: How do singers memorize plainchant?

Answer: Generally, they try to avoid it.

Lacking melodies, rhythms or any of the typical “pointers” that
musicians use to commit songs to memory, plainchant is one of the trickiest
musical forms to learn off by heart.

This issue has been on my mind a lot lately as I embark upon the process of memorizing Hildegard von Bingen’s Ordo
Virtutum, the oldest known musical drama of its kind in the western
world, in preparation for a series of performances of the work with my early
music ensemble, San Francisco Renaissance Voices, in August.

Telling the story of the devil’s and virtues’ battle to possess the soul, Ordo was written in the middle of the 12th century by the visionary German abbess, scientist, poet, musician and mystic.

As I start to delve ever more deeply into Hildegard’s music, patterns are slowly emerging. But I’m progressing at a snail’s pace. Learning this piece, which balances meandering, loose-limbed phrases that possess the improvisational quality of jazz solos with precise Germanized Latin diction, is harder than committing the Periodic Table to memory.

I’ll be writing an article about the process of memorizing difficult musical works for the Los Angeles Times down the line. For now, here is a list of the techniques I’ve been using so far to try to commit Ordo to memory.

1. Writing in all the translations of the words under the notes throughout the score.

2. Nailing down pronunciations.

3. Learning the notes by singing through the score while looking at it.

4. Making a recording of myself singing all the different sections.

5. Playing back the recording over and over again whenever I drive somewhere or feel like walking around with headphones on.

6. Dissecting each phrase and repeating it over and over again.

7. Singing as much of a phrase as I can back without looking at the music.

8. Going over corners where I constantly get stuck.

9. Looking for patterns within an individual section to help jog my memory e.g. a repeated word or musical motif.

10. Repetition, repetition, repetition until I get to the point where I can sing a chunk off by heart while undertaking a completely different task like mowing the lawn or taking out the trash.

11. And lastly, my favorite way of testing my powers of memorization: singing as much as I can remember of Ordo quietly to myself as I jog around the lake.

I’m interviewing some vocalists and instrumentaliists about their memorization processes for my LA Times story. If you have anything you’d like to add to the mix, please feel free to chip in.

Until last Friday night, when I attended San Francisco Opera‘s live simulcast of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor at AT&T Ballpark in San Francisco, I didn’t realize that the baseball anthem “Take Me Out To The Ball Game” was something of a national anthem in this country.

The song, which happens to be celebrating its 100th anniversary this summer, was cloned during intermission on Friday night, as c. 23,000 opera-goers joined together in singing SF Opera’s spoof version:

Take me out to the opera,
Take me out with the crowd.
Buy me seat at the Opera House.
I don’t care if it’s Mozart or Strauss,
For it’s “root, root, root, for the divas,
Bring a friend or a spouse,
For it’s “one, two, three cheers for you”
at the Opera House.

This was just one of the many moments that will make last Friday evening last in my memory for a long time. It helped that the weather was beautiful. San Francisco summer evenings can get pretty arctic. But last weekend boasted T-shirt weather even after dark. (Compare this to last year’s inaugural live ballpark simulcast of Samson and Delilah: the weather was so chilly that some people I spoke to were put off coming again this year.)

The experience of watching the great Natalie Dessay perform Lucia was sublime. Even when viewed at a great distance on a relatively small screen with planes flying over head, people lining up to order beer a few feet away, and a slight delay on the sound, causing the singer’s lips to move slightly faster than the words that came out of her mouth, she made the role vast, dark and unbelievably raw.

23,000 people gazed up at her in awe during her descent into madness at the end. Given that it was about 11pm and San Franciscans don’t stay up late and are worried about things like getting to their cars in time to avoid getting stuck after a show, I was amazed at how few of the audience members moved around or got up to leave.

I was also impressed with the responsiveness of the ballpark audience. When Lucia signs her fateful wedding contract, picknickers sprawled out on the baseball diamond yelled “NO!!! DON’T DO IT!!!” Everytime a singer finished a big aria, the crowd behaved like Barry Bonds had just hit a home run. Ah, I thought to myself. This is what it’s all about.

I was going to devote today’s blog entry to describing the fun I had at the weekend when I attended a simulcast of San Francisco Opera’s Lucia di Lammermoor alongside 23,000 happy pinickers/opera-goers at the city’s ballpark, and the brilliance of the partnership between SF Opera and the SF Giants in general.

But woeful tidings concerning the announcement of the demise of Theatre de la Jeune Lune are forcing me to postpone my perky blog post for another day.

The news that the seminal Minneapolis-based theatre company is shutting its doors shouldn’t have come as a shock to me. After all, stories about the company’s lamentable financial situation have been circulating for a while and imminent closure was on the horizon months ago.

Yet I was thrown completely off-balance this morning by the realization that the company’s shut-down was no longer a rumor that probably wouldn’t come to fruition, owing — I was certain — to some knight in shining armor stepping in to pull the company out of debt, but a horrible truth.

Jeune Lune is one of the best companies working in this country today. I count the troupe’s production of The Miser, which I caught at Berkeley Rep a couple of years ago, as one of the five best theatre experiences I’ve ever had in my life.

Jeune Lune’s stopovers in the Bay Area have long been a highlight of the local theatrical calendar. Promises of the company’s arrival to these shores kept me going through some hard times.

Now what? Can nothing be done to save the company? Surely someone somewhere must have a few million to keep artistic director Dominique Serrand and his amazing collaborators afloat. If this company ends up going down, then it will take a piece of what’s glorious about this country’s theatrical imagination with it. In short, this lunar eclipse must be stopped.

I leave you with Serrand’s statement concerning the closure from the company’s website:

In 1978 Barbra Berlovitz, Vincent Gracieux, and Dominique Serrand began an adventure called Theatre de la Jeune Lune. They were soon joined by Robert Rosen and eventually Steve Epp and innumerable other collaborators. Over the past 30 years we have created nearly 100 productions, performed for hundreds of thousands of people in cities across the United States and in France, but primarily and most importantly in Minneapolis. For the first 14 years we were itinerant, making the most of any venue we found ourselves in. Then in 1992, with an amazing groundswell of support, we purchased and renovated the Allied Van Lines building in the Minneapolis warehouse district. We excavated the interior of this historic building to create a stunningly innovative and award winning performance space, opening our new artistic home to the public on November 18th of that year.

Sixteen years later we are faced with an excruciating decision. With the organization burdened by mounting and unmanageable debt, the Board of Directors has voted to put Jeune Lune’s home up for sale. After much soul searching and extensive fundraising and debt management efforts, we have determined it to be the only prudent and fiscally responsible choice. What has been acclaimed, as one of the most striking and unique theatre spaces in the country will go dark. It is a huge loss, a loss for us, for all of the artists who work with us, for our audience and for the community at large, both locally and nationally.

And with the building, we have decided that the time has come to bid adieu to the theatre ensemble we have all known as Jeune Lune.

We have always believed that the making of theatre is an important and essential act. We have always believed in the power of theatre to provoke, inspire, and excite. We have always created our work for and because of our audience. Over the years we have cultivated a loyal audience locally, regionally and nationally. We have garnered numerous awards and accolades, and of course at times we have elicited criticism and consternation. We have benefited enormously from the support of foundations, corporations, state and national organizations, all those who have served as board members, staff and volunteers, the incredible generosity of thousands of individuals, and especially all of the artists. Without all of you we would never have survived this long or created as much. We can never thank you enough.

It has been an amazing thirty years. Few theatre companies last as long. We never sought nor desired to be an institution. Our home was always intended to be a playground in which we could gather with other adventurous souls and create the unimaginable. A place in which to grow, change and evolve. The theatrical experience is an event truly of the moment — immediate, fleeting and ephemeral. Yet in the space of that moment something takes place that is transformative to the human spirit and remains indelible in our memory — the stuff that dreams are made of, the stuff we carry with us forever. We hope you will treasure well the memory of Jeune Lune.

But, as this story ends, a new one begins. We live to create. To do what we know best, what the artist’s responsibility in society has always been — to invent, to dream, to imagine.

Starting today, we begin imagining a new way of working. What should a theatre-generating organization of the 21st Century look like? How can artists create truly groundbreaking art in a fast changing world? Times have changed and so have we. Building upon our artistic legacy, and facing a different future, we are exploring ways to reinvent an agile, nomadic, entrepreneurial theatre with a new name. One that can embrace the concentric circles of artists we have worked with over the years. Together we will create essential and innovative theatre for today’s changing audience. It’s an exciting new journey and we hope you’ll join us with your support, with your presence, with your belief. Fear not: the art is alive and coming soon to a theatre near you. Keep in touch.

A few days ago, I blogged about an interesting experiment that’s just been conducted by The Guardian newspaper in the UK. The publication asked its sports and arts critics to swap jobs for a day. The arts journalists were sent off to write about sports events, and the sports journalists reviewed various arts happenings.

After reading the arts writers’ impressions of cricket, soccer, darts and other sports events, I had mixed feelings about the point of The Guardian’s exercise. Some of the writers did a good job of bringing their own perspective as an arts writer to bare on the business of exploring sport. But many of the critics just seemed beffuddled, bored and/or naiive. I didn’t gain any fresh insights into the sport they wrote about as a result, besides a sense of a wide and unbreachable gulf separating a sports event from the art of writing about culture.

I’m happy, however, to report that the Guardian’s follow-up instalment late last week, in which sports writers covered everything from a Louise Bourgeois exhibition to a production of Tosca at the Royal Opera House, made for a much more interesting read.

It’s not that the sports critics were better informed about the art they were covering. On the contrary, a few were open about their lack of knowledge. For example, soccer writer Kevin McCarra thanked his wife a couple of times in his piece about a contemporary dance performance at The Queen Elizabeth (Tero Saarinen Next of Kin): “There was a pas de deux in there (thanks again to Susan for keeping me informed), but melodramatic gesturing was the staple. It felt more like mugging than acting.” But with the exception of golf correspondent Lawrence Donegan’s boringly clueless piece about Yefim Bronfman playing Brahms with the San Francisco Symphony, all the writers rose to the challenge of bringing their own unique sensibilty as sports reviewers to the experience of writing about an arts event.

I particularly liked cycling and rugby writer William Fotheringham’s article about a pop music concert by Metronomy for its sense of humor and wry (albeit fairly shallow) comparisons between the art of pop and the art of cycling:

“Be it an Olympic cycling team or three guys from Totnes playing music, there are always personalities on show, always a particular way of working. Here, the creative force, Joseph, is somewhat eclipsed on stage (if the gazes of the girls in leggings are to be judged) by the bassist, Gabriel, with his tortured cheekbones. Oscar, the one playing the sax, simply looks round and cuddly.”

In short, The Guardian’s sports writers mostly put the paper’s arts writers to shame.

I don’t think the experiment was terribly valuable on balance. Reading the articles certainly put a stop to my ambitions to persuade my editor at SF Weekly to attempt a similar stunt by rotating all the critics for an issue. But I’m glad The Guardian gave it a go anyway.