Archives for 2009

On July 4, as I was standing in a friend’s back garden in San Francisco stuffing my face with hotdogs and burgers and watching trails of sparkly lights fizzle their way across the sky, I heard about an unusual experiment in fake firework art.

A group of creative Welsh sheep farmers who call themselves the “Baaa-Studs”, practice a form of “extreme sheepherding”. Earlier this year, the shepherds took to the hills armed with several flocks of unsuspecting sheep, a truck-load of LEDs and a camera and proceeded to create a gobsmacking light display using all the resources at their command.

A short and hilarious video on YouTube demonstrates how the farmers attached LEDs to the sheeps’ backs. After nightfall, they sent their dogs in to herd the sheep into amazing formations and videotaped their efforts. Against the black hills, the sheep’s movements create the effect of a fireworks display. There are rockets and Catherine Wheels. The sheep even come together at the end to spell “FIN”.

This knocks the usual July 4 fare out of the baaa-park.

Edward Albee’s At Home At the Zoo consists of two one-act plays. The first, “Homelife”, was written in 2004 when Albee was 76 years old. The second, “Zoo Story”, was composed when the author was just 30. Though the two plays complement each other in some ways, I’m not sure they should be produced together. More to the point, I’m not sure if “Homelife” should be produced at all.

San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater does as fine a job with staging both plays as is conceivable. (In fact, the two Albee plays I’ve experienced at ACT have been among the best work that I’ve seen the company produce in recent years. 2005’s The Goat, Or Who Is Sylvia? was terrific.) Director Rebecca Bayla Taichman creates boldly contrasting moods between the two halves of the show. While almost everything about “Homelife” is careful, measured and internalized — like Robert Brill’s blandly stylish off-white living room set — “Zoo Story”, staged against a toxic green backdrop, bristles with animal energy, heart-on-sleeve passion and danger.

But while “Zoo Story” had me completely engrossed, “Home Life” almost made me go to sleep. I don’t think that the problem lies with Taichman’s production or the quality of Rene Augesen and Anthony Fusco’s acting. The play feels completely staid and stale and I’m not sure if there’s enough in it of interest to resonate in any particularly revealing way with the action in “Zoo Story.”

Albee wrote “Homelife” to “do justice” to the character of Peter. The only character who appears in both plays, Peter is a dead-from-the-neck-down, middle-aged man who sits on a park bench minding his own business until his life is suddenly thrown off-kilter by a talkative and strange young man by the name of Jerry (compellingly played in ACT’s production by a shifty yet lovable Manoel Felciano). Jerry does most of the talking in “Zoo Story” and Peter remains a shadowy, passive character. Albee attempts to readdress the balance between the two characters by helping us to understand Peter’s behavior in “Zoo Story” through showing us the character at home with his wife Ann in “Homelife, which takes place in real-time about an hour before he heads to the park for his fateful meeting with Jerry.

While meeting Peter before he meets Jerry helps us to understand and empathize with the character to a degree, “Homelife”, to my mind, has two enormous flaws. For one thing, unlike the apocalyptic “Zoo Story”, “Homelife” could never work as a standalone play. It’s just too plodding and cliche-ridden. For another, one of the wonderful things about “Zoo Story” is its strangeness. I like the mystery that enshrouds both Peter and Jerry. Why do we need to have Peter’s life explained away?

At Home at the Zoo plays at ACT until July 5.

Until a few days ago, I was one of those people who turned their nose up at the social networking site, Facebook. With three blogs and a website to maintain myself, I was very much against the idea of being tied to my computer even more by upping my “online presence”. And why would anyone in their right mind want periodic updates on my life along the lines of “Chloe is staring at a blank page on her laptop. Only 2,000 words to write before teatime” or “Chloe had soup for lunch”?

I broke down last week however, when I heard that a large number of participants of the Chanticleer Summer School — an amazing (and frankly life changing) choral workshop run by the San Francisco a cappella men’s chorus Chanticleer which I attended last week at Sonoma State University — had their own Facebook page. Suddenly I saw a good reason to succumb to the lure of the beast. Upon the prodding of two of Chanticleer’s singers (Eric Alatorre and Brian Hinman, I will hold you both accountable forever!) I signed up for an account on Friday afternoon and prepared to be unimpressed.

The site is of course a big time-waster. But in terms of being able to stay connected with singers from all over the country, I think Facebook might become invaluable.

For one thing, I’ve been enjoying reliving the workshop experience by checking out photos people took during the week and hearing about their various singing endeavors upon return from Sonoma. Here’s an example by fellow workshopper and music teacher Paulo Faustini who lives on the East Coast: “Vocalized the sopranos to a high F at 8:30 AM and then worked with the small group singing Hassler’s Dixit Maria, and is now taking a break before a masterclass at 1 PM, and then more lessons later in the afternoon and an evening rehearsal. Wine may be needed at the end of the day!”

For another, Facebook might actually end up being a great business communications tool for me as I develop my vocal music radio show, VoiceBox, and various other journalistic and musical endeavors. For instance, the day after I returned from the workshop, I wrote a blog post about Chanticleer music director Joe Jennings’ farewell concert. I was able to paste the link to the post on my Facebook page, which made it much more accessible to the people who were either at the concert and/or care most about it, but don’t necessarily follow my blog on ArtsJournal. Readers, in turn, were easily able to comment on the blog post. A few wrote to say they’d signed up for the RSS feed to receive my blog regularly through ArtsJournal.

And when VoiceBox starts up again in the fall, I’ll be able to alert a hopefully captive audience of singing buffs about the series and engage them as listeners.

The simple moral of the story: Sometimes it’s good to get suckered into something. I’ve been slow on the uptake. But Facebook (or F$*!book as I’ve affectionately come to call the site) really does seem to hold promise as a cultural resource.

Marty Ronish, the co-creator of the excellent classical music radio blog, Scanning the Dial, asked me to contribute some thoughts about what it’s like to be a rookie radio host. I recently launched my first radio series, VoiceBox, through NPR-affiliate KALW 91.7 FM San Francisco.

Reading over my responses to the questions Marty asked makes me feel like a Muppet. Did I really equate hosting a classical music radio show with good sex? The mind boggles.

In any case, click on this link to read my thoughts.

And on a completely unrelated subject, check out San Francisco Chronicle Theatre Critic Robert Hurwitt’s very informative piece about the history of the San Francisco Mime Troupe which turns 50 this year.

In his excellent article about Merce Cunningham’s decision to disband his dance company following his death (“Why Dances Disappear”) Wall Street Journal critic Terry Teachout does a brilliant job of explaining how dances are taught by choreographers to dancers and how this impacts the longevity of the pieces he or she creates. My favorite part of the article is where the writer compares the transmission of a piece of dance from choreographer to company to the transmission of a piece of classical music from its composer to an orchestra:

Dance notation is so complex and inexact that no choreographer has ever used it to create a new piece from scratch. In fact, most choreographers and dancers don’t even know how to read dance notation, much less write it. Instead of sitting at a desk and writing down the steps of a new dance, a choreographer makes them up on the spot in a studio and personally teaches them to his dancers, who then perform them from memory on stage.

No other art form works this way. Imagine that instead of writing down his Fifth Symphony, Beethoven had taught it to the members of the Vienna Philharmonic by playing it on the piano over and over again until each musician knew his own part by heart. Now suppose that the Philharmonic liked the Fifth Symphony so much that it continued to perform the piece for the next two centuries, with each succeeding generation of players learning the score by rote from its predecessors. Ask yourself this: What would Beethoven’s Fifth sound like today? Would it still sound the same way it did in 1808, or would it have undergone dramatic changes in the process of being transmitted by ear from musician to musician? Or might it have been forgotten altogether?

The only aspect of Teachout’s story which strikes me as odd is the author’s surprise at the idea that a choreographer might want to keep his company going on past his death (Cunningham is 90 years old.) “Why break up so solidly established an ensemble?” writes Teachout.

To my mind, the dissolving of performing arts companies as a result of the death or indisposition of its artistic creators is a natural thing. Companies ARE their directors in most cases. Without the charismatic visionaries at their core, they often lack the energy to continue. There’s just no point.

I believe that more companies should follow Cunningham’s lead. And I speak somewhat from experience: When I was in my early 20s, I worked right out of college for the London-based theatre company Cheek By Jowl. It was an eye-opening debut into the world of professional theatre. When I arrived, the company was in pretty bad shape. The relationship between the artistic directors and the executive director had turned sour, morale was low, and the artistic directors were being increasingly solicited by admiring producers to work outside Cheek By Jowl.

Instead of continuing with the charade of running their own company, they decided to close it down for a while. Eventually, Cheek By Jowl came back with the original artistic personnel (though without the original managing director) in place and went on with a renewed sense of vigor and purpose and continues to make inspired work to this day.

At the time when all the upheaval was going on, I was confused and sad. I was only 22 after all and I ignominiously lost my job after a year. But now that I look back at the artistic directors’ decision, it makes a lot of sense. Sometimes you have to raze the mountainside to make it grow anew.

The people that know Joe Jennings well say that he isn’t given to voluminous outward displays of emotion. The few times I’ve spent in the company of the great American chorus conductor, interviewing him for articles about Chanticleer, the world-famous all men’s a cappella ensemble he’s been directing since the mid-1980s, or on more general vocal music subjects, he’s remained piquantly understated to the point of terseness.

Jennings is, in fact, one of the most soft-spoken and taciturn interview subjects I’ve ever come across. But while his iterations are compact, they’re often profound, so you have to get in close and tune in your ears to listen.

This was definitely the case during most of the past five days which I spent singing with Chanticleer and around 60 other choral music enthusiasts at the annual adult singing workshop which the ensemble holds in conjunction with Sonoma State University up in wine country.

During our daily afternoon rehearsals, Jennings, who is officially retiring this summer, cut an almost spectral presence. The choral director would shuffle into the room very quietly and painfully slowly behind the walker he now regularly uses to get around owing to an illness that is slowly but surely taking a toll on his mobility. Taking his place before the assembled choir, he would mutter a couple of words under his breath. The people sitting nearest him seemed to catch his drift and this would set off a ripple effect of communication until we all figured out what piece he wanted us to work on, at what measure he planned to start and what exactly it was that he wanted us to do with the music once we had it ready before our eyes. On occasion, though, the Chinese whisper mechanism didn’t work and he’d end up repeating himself several times, each with more volume and better articulation. Then, after a couple of hours of concentrated effort, he would say something like “mmm-hmm” or “that’s all” and shuffle on out of the room on his walker without further comment.

The hushed, self-effacing demeanor belies the sonic miracles that Jennings creates on stage. Chanticleer itself of course gets as close to nirvana as a choral ensemble can get. But what he managed to pull out of the workshop choir at yesterday’s concert was profoundly moving — not just because of the music which we performed, but also because of the powerful emotions that welled up and surfaced in this amazing and outwardly reserved conductor.

We had caught a glimpse of Jennings’ secret superhero nature at rehearsal the day before, when he led the Moses Hogan spiritual, “Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel” with such ferocity that he seemed demonically possessed. He threw his arms up in the air, he gyrated, his conducting roared. At one point, Jennings leapt carnivorously at the piano and played the entire score from memory thumping the keys on his feet like Jerry Lee Lewis going at “Great Balls of Fire.”

I’m sure the members of Chanticleer, who were all present throughout the workshop, have experienced this side of Jennings on occasion before. But it was electrifying for someone like me, who’d only ever encountered him sitting before a tape recorder in an interview room or sitting statuesquely in the front row of a concert hall while watching Chanticleer perform, to see the music course through the conductor in this way.

When it came to yesterday’s afternoon concert, the explosive outburst of the previous day’s rehearsal mellowed into something quite different. During our set, Jennings face started changing. The poker expression he so often wears, with eyes blinking impassively from behind glasses, softened. His lips, which are usually pursed in an expression of vague disapproval, opened slightly. Jennings looked — surely not, but, yes, actually, yes — like he was on the verge of crying.

By the time we reached the last song in the set, Franz Biebl’s “Ave Maria”, the conductor’s eyes were full of tears. They trickled down his cheeks as he moved his body to shape our singing. And all around the stage, the chorus responded to his gestures, in turn giving voice to Biebl’s angelic music and the spontaneous surge of his emotions.

This was Joe Jennings’ final official appearance on a podium with Chanticleer. And no one in that concert hall yesterday afternoon will forget it in a hurry.

I’m off to the Chanticleer Summer Choral Workshop in Sonoma for the rest of the week. I’ll be too busy singing to blog, most likely. So please find me here again next Monday.

An actress friend of mine in New York who spends most of her time these days teaching voice at prestigious universities, told me a while ago that she had a fansite. She hadn’t been in a stage production in some years. But a group of theatregoers were nevertheless enamoured enough with her work that they decided to dedicate a website to celebrating her career.

The idea that actors who work exclusively or at least predominantly in the theatre can have groupies used to seem a little odd to me. Theatre is such a localized medium and the people who work on stage, though admired within the performing arts community itself, don’t generally make a big splash beyond its cliquish enclaves. So when my friend told me the news, my first reaction was: “I hope your so-called fans don’t know your home address.”

But since then, I’ve come to realize that you don’t need to be Angelina Jolie or George Clooney to inspire groupie-like behaviour in theatre-goers as an actor. I make my living (or at least part of it) as a hard-headed theatre critic. While I probably won’t be buying up the URL “BayAreaActorFansite.com” any time soon, there are certain performers within this community that I practically fall over myself to go and see in action.

I was thinking about this over the weekend when I went to see Aurora Theatre Company‘s production of Bob Glaudini’s Jack Goes Boating. The main reason I went to see the show was because of the cast. Three of the four actors in Joy Carlin’s whipcracker of a production — Beth Wilmurt, Gabriel Marin and Danny Wolohan — are local performers whose work I follow like a hungry dog sniffs out a bone. Amanda Duarte, the fourth actor in the production, is someone whose acting I had not seen before Jack Goes Boating. But I’m quickly becoming a fan.

It’s not that I am in raptures about every single thing these actors do on stage. But there’s just something about their approach to characterization and the way they throw themselves at their work that keeps me coming back for more.

This seems obvious I guess. After all, casting is something I always think about when I go to a movie — I tend to choose films more on the basis of the actors appearing in them than on any other factor (e.g. director, theme etc.).

But somehow when it comes to theatre, I don’t tend to make my decisions about what to see in terms of actors as much. I guess directors, playwrights, designers and themes play as great a role in determining my attenance of a live theatre event as the people performing in the show do. Also, when I’ve been to see productions on the basis of actors — usually A-list starry types, the most recent example being Janet McTeer in Mary Stuart on Broadway (a dull effort) — I tend to come away disappointed.

The thing about the cast members in Jack Goes Boating is that even when they appear in work that isn’t great, they always manage to bring the level up a notch. And when they do perform in terrific productions (such as Carlin’s slick and creative take on this tempestuous-sweet Glaudini play) the magic they manage to create on stage is palpable.

After performing amazing music by the Milanese Benedictine nun
Sister Chiara Margarita Cozzolani (1602-c1678) with my early music vocal ensemble, San Francisco Renaissance Voices, in Berkeley yesterday afternoon, I toddled off in the sunshine to the Julia Morgan-designed Chapel of the Chimes columbarium in Oakland to experience a musical event which I will not forget in a hurry.

Organized by the innovative Berkeley-based concert pianist and radio broadcaster Sarah Cahill, the Garden of Memory is a yearly event which invites members of the public to stroll through the crazy-beautiful maze of Morgan’s home for human ashes and happen upon dozens of miniature live concerts by contemporary musicians and composers of all stripes.

I spent a few happy hours listening and wandering around and could have stayed all night, had the event gone on past 9 pm.

Though I relished the the performances by the likes of Kitka, The Paul Dresher Ensemble, Amy X Neuberg, Pamela Z and Cahill that I made an actual bee-line to hear and see, one of the most enchanting aspects of Garden of Memory is the opportunity the event affords to chance upon music rather than plan to hear it.

The map provided by the event’s organizer’s is fairly useless, which in a way is a good thing. At first, I tried to make my way to specific rooms in the Chapel. But then I gave up trying to read the tiny writing on the map, stuck it in my back pocket and took off in a random direction to see what I could find.

Many rooms in the columbarium offered up sonic surprises. In one space, a clarinet quartet played long, throbbing notes while a guy sitting in the back with a doctored trumpet attached with two very long tubes that snaked all the way around the room made voluminous honking noises. The sound was as eerie as it was captivating. Elsewhere, a group of studious-looking individuals dressed in black sawed and scraped an electronic wire using bits of bone and other implements. In a third enclave, a solo guitarist created a luxuriously ambient soundscape.

At one point towards the end of the evening, I found a little nook overlooking one of the Chapel’s many cloisters and parked myself down on a chair. I sat there for about 10 minutes resting and listening. As the sounds of footsteps and quiet conversation mingled with with spiraling music coming at me from all sides, I felt a sense of complete and utter happiness.

Dinner theatre need not be a bland mix of naff entertainment, cheap cocktails and wilted greens. Here‘s a YouTube clip of a Dutch performance company that takes the genre to new and apparently tasty heights…

Arts organizations are forever commissioning research papers to test the validity of their various endeavors. Quite often though, the time, money and effort that goes into producing a study fails to be put to good use. The research is published, journalists sometimes write articles about the findings and then, the organization which funded the research might use the results in grant applications. But then, more often than not, the information quietly gathers dust in a filing cabinet or on a hard-drive somewhere.

When I heard about Theatre Bay Area‘s new study aimed at measuring the impact of the Free Night of Theater (FNOT) — a now-national, annual event offering free theatre tickets to many shows in the region between designated dates in October and which the Bay Area was the first metropolitan area to pilot several years ago — I was anxious to find out why TBA had commissioned the research and what the local performing arts umbrella organization hoped to gain by it.

Commissioned by TBA, the “Assessing the Intrinsic Impacts of the Bay Area Free Night of Theatre Program” study results, which were released on June 9, sets out an ambitious goal — to “measure and demonstrate the inherent value of the arts.”

Based on the study results, TBA concludes:

1. Regardless of ticket price, patrons who make it through the doors of the theatre and are captivated by the live performance do exhibit measurable signs of intrinsic impact from that art. The most notable of these signs include increased intellectual and emotional engagement, social bonding and aesthetic growth.

2. The FNOT program serves to create social accessibility by providing an opportunity for theatergoers with unsupportive social networks to attend the theatre. The data reveals that the lack of a social network can be a major barrier to theater attendance. However, by lowering the perceived cost (offering performances for free), theatre companies can generate large numbers of new patrons and foster new social networks – with a high number of patrons promising to return and pay due to the inherent and social impacts of the experience.

All well and good. The study results backing up these claims are published on TBA’s website here. But what does TBA hope to gain by all this work? I asked the organization’s marketing director, Clay Lord, for his thoughts:

“This first round was really just a pilot study to refine the survey and develop what we’re calling the “dashboard,” which is a dissemination device designed to be read by non-researcher-types. We’re now in the last few days of writing a proposal for phase 2, which would run over the next 2 years in 5 cities across the country and would be used to both gather more data and build the infrastructure for us at Theatre Bay Area to take the data processing and analysis out of the hands of our consultants and make it accessible for a much cheaper price to just about any theatre company in the country. This scaling up is vital to the data actually being useful. We’ve gotten interest from a variety of foundations both locally and nationally, and assuming the funding comes through, Round 2 would kick off in the Bay Area, LA, Chicago, New York and one other city TBD this fall.

In a larger sense (which you may have been actually asking about), the question “What is this data good for?” is foremost in our minds. We do not believe this is just data for data’s sake. As part of phase 2, we’ll also be developing with our consultants a pre- and post-survey discussion process with the participating companies to help them understand the usefulness of the information, set goals and expectations on the work, and then look at where the goals and reality matched up (and didn’t) post-study. As part of this, we’ll be developing a series of potential strategies (and small test projects) to address what we think are going to be some of the issues that emerge from the results based on our consultant’s prior work – issues like how to increase captivation/involvement of audiences following the show, which seems to be pretty correlated to audience retention rates, or how to minimize the number of impediments to captivation in the theatre (everything from ushers being friendly to making sure there aren’t lights glaring in audiences’ eyes to giving out a free glass of wine). By taking these intrinsic impact measurements and beginning to pair them with certain concrete actions, we move from abstract data into actionable steps.

Over time (following this study period), we hope to use a centralized database (to be built as part of this proposal) to be able to see trends, thereby hypothetically helping companies anticipate what types of shows will have what types of impacts (and of course, what outside-theatre impacts are the most affecting on audience engagement).

From my perspective as a marketing director, I can’t wait for this data to be more widely gathered and used. To be able to actually see on paper if marketing materials are increasing anticipation, or if certain perks instituted in the venue are actually helping captivation – it would be a whole new way of working with audiences.”

Like any study, it will be a while before the research can actually be put to positive use. At least Clay and his colleagues are thinking beyond the limits of the the data.

Anna Netrebko’s turn as Violetta in Verdi’s La Traviata at San Francisco Opera is a big deal. The great Russian-Austrian soprano launched her American career at SF Opera in 1995, when, as the age of 24, she made her US debut as Lyudmila in Glinka’s Ruslan and Lyudmila. Audiences in the Bay Area feel proud to have played a part in nurturing the singer’s formidable talent. So, unsurprisingly, every performance of La Traviata in which Netrebko is appearing, is sold out.

By the third act of the company’s performance of Verdi’s opera last night, however, quite a few seats in the orchestra had been vacated. There are always a bunch of strange individuals who would rather avoid the after-performance traffic than stay for the denouement. But I regrettably couldn’t blame the premature departures on this occasion and think that the seats may have been vacated for reasons other than congestion on the roads.

Set in the 1920s, Marta Domingo’s production (originally created for Los Angeles Opera) is undeniably beautiful to look at. The Roaring Twenties set designs are among the most elegant I’ve ever seen on an opera stage. And, like many stage and screen productions coming out in the current recession, the luxurious sheen of the setting perfectly (if somewhat obviously at this point) presages the Great Depression and personal doom in Violetta’s life.

But the diva did not seem on form last night. Despite the soaring clarity of her tone throughout, some of Netrebko’s long held notes had cracks in them. She occasionally swooped up to make a high entrance rather than hitting the required note head on. Worst of all, was Netrebko’s approach to depicting Violetta’s illness. Although the character devotes quite a bit of time in the first two acts to explaining that her days are numbered, you wouldn’t really guess that there is anything wrong with the character at all from Netrebko’s lusty performance. All warning signs seem completely obliterated from her body language.

When Netrebko’s Violetta faints at the end of act 2, she appears to do it more out of fear and shame as a result of being spurned by her lover than because she’s expiring from consumption. As a result, the performer’s sudden transformation into a dying swan in the final act seems completely unbelievable.

Perhaps Netrebko was just having an off-night. The house felt positively chilly when she appeared on stage at the start of the performance. By rights, the moment when the singer emerges from the back of a glamorous white Bentley like a movie-star should have aroused waves of applause from the audience. People in this city show their appreciation for a lot less. But Netrebko’s arrival on stage didn’t so much as elicit an appreciative “ah!” The dynamics of a theatre are strange.