Archives for 2008

The newly-renovated National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul has the following inscription on it: “A nation stays alive when its culture stays alive.” This statement should be the mantra accompanying visitors as they look around Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul, a globe-trotting exhibition of some of the war-ravaged country’s most precious artifacts, which opens at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum tomorrow.

More than a dazzling collection of beautiful objects from the crossroads of the Silk Road trading route dating as far back as the Bronze age, the exhibition represents the endurance of an ancient and extremely rich culture against all the odds.

To stare at the soberly-lit glass cases filled with such objects as a glowing pair of gold shoe soles found in the tomb of a nomadic princess or the smooth clay head of a temple sculpture from the Greek-influenced royal city of Ai Khanum, is to begin to grasp the deep heritage of a country that seems, owing to its near-constant presence in current new headlines, to have no past — just a destructive present.

It’s amazing that these objects, alongside some 226 others selected for public display — have made it as far as San Francisco (the only west coast city presenting the show) at all. Their journey from various excavation sites in Afghanistan to the present time tells an amazing story of survival and endurance.

National Geographic archaeologist Fredrik Hiebert, the guest curator of the exhibition and an expert on ancient trading routes like the Silk Road, was on hand at the Asian Art Museum’s press preview yesterday to provide some background.

Hiebert’s story begins in 1987 when he went to Turkmenistan, part of the former Soviet Union, to work with the Russian archaeologist Viktor Sarianidi on a desert dig. Sarianidi told Hiebert, then a grad student, about the greatest find of his career to date — the discovery of the Bactian Gold in neighboring Afghanistan ten years previously. Sarianidi had excavated six intact tombs filled with 22,000 pieces of gold jewelry and offerings, the first evidence of ancient nomadic life in Northern Afghanistan (known as Bactria).

Sarianidi would later write about his discovery in a 1990 issue of National Geographic Magazine. The final line of his article was particularly foreboding: “Look well at these pictures of the Bactrian masterpieces that follow. Who knows when they will be seen again.”

Immediately following Sarianidi’s discovery, Afghanistan fell into political chaos. The archaeologist hurriedly put the treasures into boxes before the onslaught of Civil War and hid them away.

The rise of the Taliban in the 1980s and the ensuing destruction of much of the country’s infrastructure and cultural sites (including the National Museum in Kabul which was bombed in 1993) caused most people, including Hiebert, to believe that the Bactrian cache, together with countless other Afghan artifacts, had been lost forever.

But in 2003, President Hamid Karzai announced that the Gold and other Afghan cultural relics had been found in unmarked boxes in the Presidential bank vault in Kabul. They had been secreted away by a group of daring conservationists, known as “key holders”, who vowed to preserve the treasures throughout their country’s decades of upheaval.

When he heard about the discovery, Hiebert approached National Geographic about allowing him to go to Kabul to follow-up on Sarianidi’s story. The Afghan government granted permission for the boxes in the bank vault to be opened if The National Geographic facilitated a scientific inventory of all the items. Both sides agreed to the arrangement and Hiebert flew to Kabul.

Working closely with 18 staffers from the National Museum, Hiebert and his colleagues inventoried 33,000 objects. “We had to get a presidential decree from Karzai to allow us to open up the boxes,” recalls Hiebert. “And when we finally pried them open, there it was — the Bactrian Gold. In this country which had experienced more than two decades of chaos, this stoic bunch of Afghans had saved the nation’s culture.”

Following the inventory process, the Afghan government agreed to put some of the items on display. The exhibition which traveled first to France and other European cities and then to the US (launching in Washington DC before coming to San Francisco) showcases objects from four different sites. These include the Bronze Age civilization known as The Oxus, the Alexandrian city of Ai Khanum, the 1st Century BCE trading settlement of Begum, and Tillya Tepe, the resting place of the Bactrian Gold.

Though modest in size (the entire show is more or less housed in 2 large rooms) the exhibition presents a radical view on Afghan culture to people like myself whose knowledge of the country extends barely further than news stories about suicide bombers, lost lives and destroyed cities. In these times of increasingly narrow thinking, Afghanistan broadens perspectives.

The exhibition is on display at the San Francisco Asian Art Museum from October 24, 2008 through January 25, 2009.

Friday nights are the night to visit the de Young Museum in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.

When the museum hosts its weekly “Friday Nights at the de Young” event, museum-goers can enjoy live bands, a full bar and, best of all, galleries that stay open till 8.45.

The Friday Night crowd don’t seem all that interested in art though. When I visited last Friday, most people congregated for the party, leaving the exhibition halls blissfully uncluttered. It was a real treat to wander around the African and Early American galleries with so much space and quiet. Even the sound of the Latin band playing in the cafe could barely be heard.

What I loved the most about experiencing the de Young collection in the evening was stepping into The Family Room (a modest space on the ground floor of the museum which is mainly used for gatherings such as board meetings) and reveling in the Swiss-born Italian-American painter Gottardo Piazzoni’s luminescent early modernist California murals — The Sea and The Land.

Architects Herzog and de Meuron created a special room for the paintings when the de Young was rebuilt earlier this decade. Ten of the 14 original paintings are on display in the room. The remaining four are on loan to n the state Treasurer’s building in Sacramento. The murals had previously been housed at what is now the Asian Art Museum in downtown San Francisco. (For an article about the controversy surrounding their upheaval and restoration, click here.)

Piazzoni created the paintings in 1931-1932. The lean frescos with their big open skies and yellow earth perfectly capture the spaciousness and softness of the California landscape. Tiny figures appear like ghosts staring out at the view. They seem as transfixed by the vista as I was by looking at the paintings. And the most remarkable thing about them is that they seem to imbue what would otherwise be quite a somber, relatively small room in the museum with light.

I stood in that room on my own for about 20 minutes. Later on I came back to spend another 10 minutes or so with the paintings. I think I’ll be spending more Friday nights gazing at Piazzoni’s Californian vistas with the sound of a band playing in the distance.

Conor McPherson’s tricksy play Shining City takes a musty formula and gives it a twist — or, to be more precise, a shoulder-dislocating wrench. But he does it so subtly that you don’t notice the brutality.

The play is set in in modern day Dublin, but looks like it could have been written 70 years ago. It’s an old fashioned psychological drama steeped in realism and coupled with a traditional bedtime ghost story. Both the ghost and psychological elements appear on the surface to follow the standard rules of their genres. But the play is so oddly structured — it’s rooted in a few very long, monologue-based scenes interspersed with what appear to be tangential “side show” scenes — that it ends up defying the status quo. I, for one, had not read or seen the play before I attended Amy Glazer’s pithy production at SF Playhouse, and enjoyed all of its eccentricities immensely, even feeling my stomach lurch in the final sickly moments of McPherson’s tall tale. 

The play is interesting because you think it’s about one thing — a middle-aged salesman’s psychological breakdown following the death of his wife. But it ends up equally being about the inner lives of several other characters — an ex-priest turned therapist, his girlfriend, and a young male prostitute.

What makes Glazer’s production powerful is the way in which she works with the terrific cast to bring out the drama’s profound meditation on human loneliness and isolation. Shining City is peopled with characters who cannot or are afraid to go home. They wander the streets, inhabit apartments where they’re not wanted and pace up and down rented bedsits and apartments, not sure what to do next. Like the ghost that haunts the margins of the narrative, they are all in limbo.

McPherson has a slightly different sensibility to his renowned Irish playwright counterpart, Martin McDonagh. McDonagh’s plays provide a series of nasty shocks; McPherson’s make the fingertips tingle in a way that isn’t entirely pleasurable but can’t be stopped. And whereas many of McDonagh’s plays (with the exception, perhaps, of Pillowman) feel like they couldn’t be set anywhere other than Ireland, McDonagh’s feel rootless, like the dramatist himself isn’t quite sure where to lay his dramaturgical hat.

Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal is as much a play for our age as it was a play for the age in which it was written – late 1920s America.

This country certainly seems to be heading towards a similar economic crisis, and like Treadwell’s seething worker-bee protagonist, Helen Jones, many of us are now experiencing the less-than-positive impact of so-called technological “progress” in our day-to-day lives.

Treadwell’s brutal-satirical view of a life lived according to the rules of “the machine” and the destructive effects of that life on a young woman, assault the theatre-goer with a primordial snarl in Mark Jackson’s stomach-clenching, gob-smacking, eye-opening production at San Francisco State University.

As with his previous SF State production of Don Juan last year, the director manages to take what many would consider to be an intimidating play — it’s written in an expressionistic style, is based on the the real life case of convicted and executed murderess Ruth Snyder and runs two hours with no intermission — and turns it into something scary, intimate and irresistible.

The entire production bores into the brain like a jackhammer. Jackson subtly presages Jones’ eventual fate at the electric chair for killing the husband she never loved through the use of some 300 sound effects perfectly calculated to jangle our nerves, from a shutting hotel door that sounds like prison bars slamming to a drill outside a hospital that more closely suggests machine gun fire. In the opening scene set in Jones’ workplace, the green hue of the office clerks’ 1920s garb boldly expresses the envy that the Jones’ co-workers feel for her as the latest object of the boss’ affections. And when the sparsely-designed production’s one main scenic element — a plain grey wall — descends down on the convicted Jones as she goes to her death by electrocution in the final scene, we feel like the entire sky is falling on our heads. It’s a Chicken Little moment, but it’s not in the least bit funny.

The production is far from heavy-handed though. In fact, apart from the very last moments of the play described above, it’s extremely witty. Commenting with a 21st century sensibility on the overblown physicality of expressionist theatre and the hammy mannerisms of early screen talkies, the actors push text and gesture as far as they will go, turning such mundane activities as washing the dishes or answering the phone into grotesque stereotypes of a bygone age. Victoria Rose’s telephone operator is almost Betty Boop-like with her nasal, cutey-pie vocal inflections and hammily-feminine gestures. Kenny Toll’s bent-over, arachnid prosecutor could be an evil character out of a Dickens novel. And Robb Siminoski plays the feckless businessman George H. Jones like wind-up W C Fields, hitting each of his bland catchphrases with wheezy self-importance and a blank, Cheshire Cat grin.

Led by the luminous Megan Hopp as Jones, Jackson’s cast of physically bold, textually astute undergraduate performers belie their relative inexperience. Once again, I came away from the theatre with my head spinning, wondering why “professional” companies rarely produce work as intelligent, emotionally disturbing and fresh as this.

As a Brit, the concept of the “pub crawl” has always been dear to my heart. What better way to spend a day than wandering about a city, stopping in at bars, sampling interesting drinks and having wonderful and increasingly drunken conversations with strangers?

Actually, I can think of one slightly better way to spend a day: And that’s when you take the pub crawl formula and inject into it a bit of live theatre.

That’s exactly what a bunch of innovative theatre companies in the South of Market (SOMA) district of San Francisco Under are doing tomorrow. Under the banner of the “SOMA Cultural Coalition” — a consortium created by SOMA arts organizations to pool resources and “put SOMA on the map” as Climate Theater artistic director Jessica Heidt puts it — the theatre companies are banding together to offer what sounds like a terrific afternoon of art and booze.

Involving just three of SOMA’s 11-or-so arts venues for this inaugural “SOMA Theatre Crawl” (the organizers hope to expand the concept to include more local companies in the future) the event kicks off with excerpts from the political fairy tale Animal Kingdom at Boxcar Theatre (1pm). Crawlers will then walk a few blocks to The Garage to sample new work by Denia Dance and Enrico Labayen, theatre by Performers Under Stress and Gregory Bartning’s photography (2pm), and finally stagger towards The Climate Theater for a reception involving improv, comedy and yet more libations (3pm).

By the time the evening shows roll around at 8pm, people will be in fine spirits, especially since the entire crawl is free of charge. If you’re putting on a play somewhere around town that evening, don’t be surprised if some hecklers show up.

For more information about the Crawl click here or call 415 776 1747.

Today is a special day for the U.S. non-profit theatre world: It’s the 4th annual Free Night of Theatre. Organized by the Theatre Communications Group, the Free Night aims to attract new audiences to the theatre by offering no-cost tickets to a wide range of performing arts events in many different cities across the country.

San Francisco (alongside Austin and Philadelphia) piloted the event in 2005. Since then, at least if the propaganda is to be believed, the Free Night has grown exponentially. On the first Free Night, held on Thursday, October 20, 2005, more than 150 theatre companies ushered close to 8,000 theatre-goers through their doors to see more than 120 performances.

In 2006, Free Night expanded to include an additional 13 communities such as Atlanta, Boston, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Seattle and Washington, DC. On October 19, the 2006 campaign offered 35,627 free tickets to 522 performances presented by 387 participating theatre companies from coast to coast.

Last year, the program was expanded to previously unrepresented parts of the Midwest and southeastern states. TCG presented Free Night 2007 in more than 70 cities. The event gave away more than 30,000 tickets to 600 performances that were presented by 398 theatres nationwide.

This is all very commendable, but I’m puzzled by one thing: the Free Night doesn’t seem to be a one-night stand anymore; theatre-goers can now get free tickets to see shows over several weeks. In the Bay Area, for instance, free tickets can be used to see events from October 3 to November 7.

While the generosity is admirable, I’m wondering if it might dilute the punch of the campaign? There’s little point in declaring October 16 2008 a Free Night of Theatre if every night between October 3 and November 7 is equally free. From a marketing perspective, I wonder if extending the dates in this way is a good idea? If people know they only have one night to see shows for free, they might jump into action more readily than if they’re able to say, “well, I can go anytime over the next few weeks, so I’ll just wait and see how my schedule pans out before organizing a trip to the theatre.”

And how does offering free tickets on multiple evenings affect the economic situation of the theatre companies involved? It’s not like any of these organizations are rolling in money.

I’m also curious to find out whether handing out free tickets over the past few years is really helping to build new audiences or whether people are just taking advantage of the free offer and coming to see plays just once rather than repeating the experience at other times during the year. I’ve contacted Theatre Bay Area‘s executive director, Brad Erickson, to find out if his organization has any information about the audience-building acumen of the Free Night program. When I hear back from Brad, I’ll post his thoughts here so stay tuned.

In the meantime, if you’re in the U.S. and happen to get out to see any shows as part of Free Night either tonight or at any other point during the “run”, feel free to drop me a line to let me know what you saw and whether the free ticket program will keep you coming back for more.

This news in from Brad at TBA in regards to the rationale behind expanding Free Night beyond a single date:

“The whole month aspect is one of our local innovations as implemented this fourth year of Free Night in the Bay Area. Nationally, Oct 16 (the third Thursday) remains the focal point for the campaign. We found that focusing on one night didn’t help us communicate the real scope of the initiative, with performances laid out over several weeks. But one of the fascinating aspects of Free Night nationwide is how individual communities are free to tailor-make the campaign to work best in their own regions. So there are now dozens of different ways to implement the initiative. All of which we will be studying and reporting on at the TCG conference in Baltimore next June.”

Brad is deferring to a colleague of his, Clayton Lord, to get back to me about audience-building facts. I’ll post again when I hear from Clay…

Don’t you love getting turned on to beautiful things in unlikely places?

The other day I was wondering around a store in the tiny touristy Northern Californian town of Point Reyes Station looking for a birthday gift for a friend when my ears pricked up at the sound of the music on the store’s stereo system. I was so transfixed that I lingered in the store for about half an hour. The shop keeper must have thought I was casing the joint.

The songs were instantly recognizable to me: Most of them were lovely, old Brecht/Weill standards that I had heard many times on stage before, including “The Bilbao Song” and “Surabaya Johnny” from Happy End and “Moon over Alabama” from The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahogany.

But the voice that was singing the songs, accompanied by maudlin strings and piano, was not.

It was a male voice — sweet, reedy and orgasmically pure. Having heard only fabulously oversexed, raspy female vocalists like Ute Lemper essay the Brecht/Weill cannon in the past, I was completely entranced by the contrast between the Brecht’s snarling-destitute lyrics/Weill’s blue-collar harmonies and the singer’s boyish, unsullied tenor.

My friend, who was equally mesmerized, went up to the lady who was standing behind the cash register to ask about the source.

Turns out the singer was Theo Bleckmann. Embarrassingly, I’d never heard of Bleckmann, though the German-born singer-songwriter is big on the lounge music circuit in New York and has played many famous stages around the world including Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall, the Sydney Opera House, L.A.’s Disney Hall, The Whitney Museum and the new Library in Alexandria, Egypt. He’s even been interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air.

As soon as I returned home, I bought the album which I’d heard in the store, Berlin: Songs of Love and War. That eerie-dulcet timbre is currently the soundtrack of my life. I can’t get Bleckmann’s Berlin out of my head.

The British playwright Mark Ravenhill just wrote about his experience of directing one of his own plays in Armenia. The process is apparently going well despite the language barrier: Ravenhill speaks neither Russian nor Armenian and the actors don’t speak English.

But when it comes to staging plays for English-speaking audiences in English, language can prove to be an issue. I’ve found this to be true on many occasions over the years as I watch American companies produce plays by British dramatists. (I’m sure the reverse is true too; I just haven’t experienced an American play produced by a British company in many years.)

I’ve been thinking about the linguistic barrier since the other day when I experienced a terrific San Francisco production of The History Boys, a play about a group of high school students applying to get into Oxford and Cambridge in the 1980s by the great Yorkshire playwright Alan Bennett.

There are many elements in this play that don’t translate easy for US audiences. If the audience hasn’t got enough on its plate coping with the play’s many references to T S Eliot, Auden, Larkin, Wittgenstein and obscure Reformation era monastic lore, there are also many impenetrable Anglicisms to parse. Examples include references to “sixth form” (the final two years of high school); the “Carry On” films (a series of popular, bawdy comedies made in England in the post-War years starring many of the same actors); Black Magic (a well-known brand of chocolate assortment made by Nestle that used to be considered fancy); and — best of all — “a bit of a pillock” (an insult roughly meaning “idiot.”)

I don’t think it’s necessary to be able to understand all of these expressions, but I wonder whether one’s enjoyment of the play is diminished by not getting such references?

Obviously, thousands of people — both British and American — cheerfully sit through productions of Shakespeare each year with no idea of the meaning of all of the Bard’s words. I also think that if a playwright’s writing is eloquent enough, a director’s direction clear enough, and an actor’s acting bold enough, the meanings of “foreign-sounding” words should come across to a degree anyway. It should at least be possible to follow the gist of any unfamiliar expressions.

So the inclusion of a glossary of terms in the program notes, though helpful in a way, may point to a slight shortcoming in the production.

If this country weren’t going to through what it’s going through right now, watching Barry Levinson’s 1990 film Avalon would probably just make me feel a bit misty-eyed and queasy. Based on the director’s memories of growing up around his immigrant grandparents who came to the US from Eastern Europe at the start of the First World War, the film is good, old fashioned sentimentality. It’s a bit like Woody Allen’s Radio Days but without the sense of humor.

But at this point in US history, as we watch the tenets of the so-called American Dream, with its cut-price goods, TV dinners and rags-to-riches can-do mentality, turn into a hideous joke, Levinson’s film looks darkly ironic.

Spanning three generations of one family, the film tells the story of an immigrant, Sam, who arrives in Baltimore in 1914 to join his three brothers in the wallpapering business. His son, Jules, grows up to become a successful salesman — he and his cousin are pioneers of the discount electronics trade. By the time Jules’ own son, Michael, becomes a man, the family’s fortunes have somewhat changed, as have their priorities. Jules loses his fortune when an electrical fire burns down his new (uninsured) warehouse store. He leaves the “roller-coaster” world of business empire building behind him and goes into media sales. We don’t learn much about Michael as a grown up, except that he is married and has a small boy. But it seems clear that his parents’ fortunes have left a deep impression on him.

Quite apart from leaving a bitter taste in our mouths for its portrayal of lines of shopping-frenzied Americans lining up for hours to buy their shiny, cut-rate televisions in the 1950s, the film is interesting for the way it charts the changing concept of community and family over three generations. The family in the story are extremely close-knit at the start. They all chip in to help each other come to the new world from the old one even though they don’t have much money at their disposal. They all live in adjacent houses in downtown Baltimore and are completely involved in each others’ lives.

But by the time Jules comes of age, attitudes have changed. With comfort comes a greater desire for privacy — and heightened selfishness. The family moves to the suburbs and gradually breaks up into smaller units; brothers who were once close allies, fall out over such trifles as the premature carving of a Thanksgiving turkey; when Sam’s wife wants to bring her long-lost, Holocaust-surviving brother to the US, the family refuses to chip in funds to help. “We can’t be paying for every Tom, Dick and Harry,” says one family member, disgruntled. Once the site of noisy discussion around a huge table, family dinners become silent affairs, consumed on trays in front of the TV. And Sam, in his old age, wonders if his family exists anymore.

Levinson’s movie is full of nostalgia for a lost time. But it’s also a sharp critique of the path that this country has taken over the past 60 years or so. I’m not suggesting that this country should try to return to the dreamlike concept embodied by the notion of the word “Avalon.” But the film certainly provides a crucial perspective on recent social and economic history in the run up to November 4.

A strange item in Ohio’s Springfield News Sun, via Yahoo News, caught my attention today.

The story concerns the punishment facing a 24-year-old man, Andrew Vactor, for playing rap music too loudly on his car stereo in July.

Champaign County Municipal Court Judge Susan Fornof-Lippencott absurdly offered to reduce Vactor’s $150 fine to $35 if the miscreant agreed to spend 20 hours listening to classical music. The thinking behind this idea was to give Vactor a proverbial dose of his own medicine by forcing him to listen to something he might not like, just as other people had no choice but to listen to his loud rap music.

According to the news story, Vactor managed to listen to only about 15 minutes worth of music by the likes of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven before giving up and agreeing to pay the full $150 fine, citing his need to get to basketball practice. “I didn’t have the time to deal with that,” the article quotes Vactor as saying. “I just decided to pay the fine.”

I don’t know who’s more worthy of ridicule here: Vactor, for assaulting peoples’ eardrums with his unnecessarily loud music, or Fornof-Lippencott for co-opting Mozart & Co as devices of torture. The thought of it makes me feel a little queasy. No music, not even angry rap, should be used to punish people. The idea reminds me of that hilarious scene in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy where the pan-galactic stowaways Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect are strapped to chairs and forced to listen to the captain of the Vogon spaceship reading his poetry aloud. Dent and Prefect almost die from being exposed to such thumbscrew gems as “Ode to a Lump of Green Putty I Found Under My Armpit One Midsummer Morning.”

The judge in the Vactor case apparently makes a habit of meting out similar punishments. According to the article, she has on occasion taped TV shows for defendants to watch on topics such as financial responsibility. As she sees it, they get the chance to have their fine reduced “and at the same time broaden their horizons.”

But Fornof-Lippencott is deluding herself if she thinks that forcing someone to listen to classical music is going to turn them onto the art form. If anything, it’ll have entirely the opposite effect.

An experience I had at San Francisco’s New Conservatory Theatre Center last night reminded me of seeing people file into the his and hers changing rooms at my local swimming pool.

The theatre, which specializes in putting on shows aimed at gay audiences, has two productions running in tandem at the moment: Alan Bennett’s play about a group of precocious British schoolboys revving up to take the Oxbridge entrance exams, History Boys, and That’s What She Said — a musical comedy revue starring two Los Angeles-based performers, Amy Turner and Kathryn Lounsbery.

What was striking was walking into the theatre lobby and seeing the playgoers literally sort themselves into two camps along gender lines before my eyes. Pretty much all the female audience members went through a door to the left to see Turner and Lounsbery’s “girl-on-girl comedy duet”, while most of the people heading through the right hand door to see Bennett’s homoerotic-tinged drama were men.

It’s good to see a company catering to a wide range of its core audience’s predilections simultaneously. But I wonder how many of NCTC’s subscriber base would go and see both shows?

It seems to me that you don’t need to be a believer in order to sing religious music masterfully. Plenty of great singers bring tears to the eyes of listeners while singing songs written within various world spiritual systems without necessarily subscribing to those beliefs. They do this by finding their own way to connect to the music and lyrics, which is, in a way, a form of acting. And no performance of any kind worth its salt is without some element of acting.

It was interesting, therefore, to interview a bunch of people from the gospel music community and hear their thoughts about the relationship between religious belief and the music they practice. Very few people I talked to think that it’s possible to sing gospel music convincingly without being a worshipper of Jesus Christ. Here are some examples of answers I received to the questions: “Is it possible to separate the music from the religious aspects of gospel or must the two always go hand in hand? Is it possible to be a great gospel singer if you’re not a Christian?”

Marvin Sapp, chart-topping gospel recording artist:

“I don’t know of any gospel artists who aren’t christians. Gospel music is about conviction. it isn’t easy to have a conviction about someone if you don’t have a relationship with them. I don’t know of any great secular artists that are gospel artists. Al green is a better secular artist than he is a gospel artist in my opinion.”

Donald Lawrence, gospel music songwriter and record producer:

“Someone who doesn’t go to church can respond to lyrics that share good news. On the other hand, the music tends to talk about Jesus and God, so you may not want to be a gospel artist if you don’t believe to avoid compromising yourself. Gospel music comes from heart so you have to have it in your heart to connect with it. It’s the same for all art forms from country music to opera: you have to make the connection and train hard to be successful.”

Rebecca Sherill, director of McCoy Memorial Baptist Church choir in Los Angeles:

“You have to feel and believe what your’e singing in order to make other people believe and feel what you’re singing. The essence of gospel is beliving what you’re singing. The two go hand in hand.”

Janet Sutton, director of ACME Missionary Baptist Church Choir in Chicago:

“Anyone can sing gospel music. The record stores are full of recordings of “Amazing Grace” created by people who aren’t believers. You can sing whatever you want to sing. But the message is more effective if you know what you are singing about. You can be a gospel artist if you aren’t a christian. But if you haven’t gone the whole way by declaring Christ as your lord you can’t fully engage with it.”