Archives for 2009

Had an unusual performance experience yesterday which threw up some thoughts about the nature of the exchange that happens between performers and audiences. I was part of a small group of singers drafted under the auspices of a current member of the University of California at San Francisco medical faculty to perform songs for patients on the wards of the university cancer center. I jumped at the chance to sing with this group because I have been interested for a while in the efficacy of arts programs in hospitals and heard great things about the uplifting effect that singing can have on the spirits of people in poor health.

We spent a couple of hours in the afternoon wedged first in the corner of a waiting room and second in a small lounge area where we performed a selection of a cappella songs — madrigals, show tunes and standards mostly.

What was strange about the experience from a performer’s perspective was how seemingly disinterested or even absent our target audience was. In the waiting room, the listeners were all lined up against a wall wearing protective face masks. Hardly any of them looked our way and no one applauded. When we were done, we just shuffled out without a word. Everyone in the room stared blankly ahead of them. We did get an appreciative nod from one or two nearby staffers though. I was happy to sing, but I couldn’t help wondering if the patients would much rather we hadn’t been there interrupting their peace. After all, we were intruders; they couldn’t leave the room. The situation in the coffee lounge was possibly even weirder. The nurse seemed happy to see us and said she’d send word around. But for the first 15 minutes of our set no one came so we sang for ourselves. Eventually three people turned up but none of them were patients. I think one was a nurse and the other two, visiting relatives of a patient. They seemed to enjoy the music. But, again, these were not the people we had been drafted in to perform for.

Now, I don’t mean to sound like all I care about is audience attention. But it does seem a little odd to rehearse for weeks within the framework of an organized hospital arts program only to fail to connect in any way with the target audience. Perhaps patients who heard our singing down the hallway did get something (hopefully positive) out of the music. Maybe the fact that we showed up is all that matters. It’s not about us, after all; it’s about them. On the other hand, might our efforts be more useful to the hospital if we actually got to sing in front of patients, preferably ones who knew we were coming and wanted to hear us?

I’m going back to UCSF next Tuesday. I hear from our industrious and dedicated music director, Debbie, that every performance that the group has undertaken so far at the hospital is different. (I was in Los Angeles for the first few outings, so yesterday was my debut as part of the ensemble.) So maybe next time we’ll have a genuine audience. But here’s a question: Is it enough simply to show up and sing on a cancer ward? Or is the exercise pointless if your target audience is seemingly disinterested or completely absent?

Real sorrow is very hard to pull off on stage or screen. I often think that if you want audiences to feel the weight of a character’s woes as a screen or playwright, you’re usually better off getting them to do something funny, rather than give them a crying scene. It’s just really hard to act sadness convincingly. Even if we can see that a character is deeply upset about something, it’s a rare actor who can make us actually feel their pain.

Abbie Cornish, the young British actress who plays Fanny Brawne in Bright Star, Jane Campion’s new movie about the relationship between Fanny and the Romantic poet John Keats, somehow manages to take the audience to this place of absolute, gut-wrenching empathy. Despite positive reviews in the mainstream media, I found the film to be rambling and pretentious in general. But the one scene in which Fanny collapses at the news of her lover John’s death made me sink so deeply into my seat that I thought I was descending into a premature grave myself.

Cornish doesn’t simply sob and get a little moist around the eyes. What she does is not in the least bit pretty. Cornish convulses with uncontrolled grief. The noises and bodily fluids coming from the actress’ mouth and nose are not the sort of thing starlets typically allow. She snorts and snots and dribbles and hyperventilates.

This might all sound over the top as I describe it in cold black and white text. But, believe me, this sadness is as real as I have ever felt someone else’s trauma to be. In that moment, I understood how it could be that a person could love someone so completely unsuitable, and continue to wear his ring and walk the heath in remembrance of his name long after his death.

Perhaps the most interesting detail that came up in last night’s Theatre Critics’ Panel organized by Theatre Bay Area was the subject of presenting plays on unconventional days. Critics’ calendars tend to get very busy as the week moves towards the weekend. Thursday to Sunday nights are the fastest nights to get booked up with shows to see.

So one way of potentially increasing the chances of having a critic come and see a show as a producer, is by presenting it on a Monday and/or Tuesday. Intersection for the Arts and a couple of other companies have been in on this ruse for quite a while. Intersection for the Arts‘ upcoming opening night for The Erika Chong Shuch Performance Project & Campo Santo – The Future Project: Sunday Will Come – is happening next Monday, though performances ordinarily run from Thursdays through Saturdays (plus one Sunday). Very likely, most if not all the critics will be there on Monday, myself included, as Monday tends to be a free evening. Marine’s Memorial Theatre is going a step further by presenting the entire run of the first show in its its new New Works @ The Marines series — Rick Reynold’s Love, God, Sex (and other stuff I don’t have) only on Monday and Tuesday nights.

Then again, I wonder if audiences will generally be lured to go out to the theatre on a Monday night? Most people are kind of exhausted after the shock of the first day of the week. Monday Night Football probably seems like the most enticing option for many. Also, theatre critics have so little space these days to write about shows owing to the economic woes of the industry, that a Monday press night is not necessarily a guarantee at this point that the critics will show up.

Still, Monday night theatre is an interesting experiment. If I weren’t a professional critic, I think I’d prefer going out to see shows on unorthodox evenings like Monday or Tuesday. Friday and Saturday are not such a draw for me. Tickets are more expensive at the weekends and bars and restaurants are more crowded. There might be a place for Monday night theatre for anyone who feels the same way.

One of the least satisfying musical experiences I think I’ve ever had was catching Bob Dylan at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley in 2002. This is really saying something as the combination of Great Bob and the Greek ought to have been a recipe for perfection. But the singer sadly failed to deliver. He played the piano badly, slurred and bleated his words more than I’ve ever heard him do previously and generally made every song sound unintelligible. My friend and I spent the entire gig playing a game of “guess which famous Bob Dylan song the singer is singing right now?” More often than not, we couldn’t make out the titles of his most beloved hits until the songs were halfway through.

So it was rather a relief to attend the great jazz singer Paula West’s latest San Francisco Performances concert at the Herbst Theatre in San Francisco over the weekend and hear Dylan’s lyrics and melodies come through loud and clear. West often includes a couple of Dylan songs in her sets. Her interpretations feel startlingly fresh even though she sticks quite strongly to Dylan’s way of doing things — you won’t catch her attempting any over the top jazzy embellishments.

The main transformation that occurs when you hear the warm-granite-voiced West do Dylan is in the lyrics: You can actually understand every word that Dylan wrote, which is more than can be said of the auteur’s own performances of his songs. As West stood up on stage singing “LIke A Rolling Stone” alongside the rapturous George Mesterhazy Quartet, the song span around me in a way that was completely unlike any interpretation I’d heard before. For the first time ever, I heard fallen gods and descending night in Dylan’s music:

Princess on the steeple and all the pretty people
They’re drinkin’, thinkin’ that they got it made
Exchanging all kinds of precious gifts and things
But you’d better lift your diamond ring, you’d better pawn it babe
You used to be so amused
At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used
Go to him now, he calls you, you can’t refuse
When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose
You’re invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal.

The Kronos Quartet is more than 30 years old. Three of its members, including founding violinist David Harrington, are grey and ever so slightly stoopy. But the San Francisco-based string quartet continues to attract young audiences nonetheless. In a climate where chamber music is about as thrilling to the under 30 crowd as mortgage insurance, this achievement is remarkable.

At the ensemble’s latest San Francisco concert on Friday night (a benefit for the 40th anniversary of stalwart local classical music presenter Old First Concerts), at least half of the audience, by my estimation, was under 40 and quite ethnically diverse. Most of them were hipsterish in style. The girls wore vintage dresses and the guys, skinny jeans, plaid shirts, waistcoats and trainers (that’s vests and sneakers to US readers.)

How does Kronos do it? I think it’s the group’s unflinching combination of constant exploration, fearless use of electronic and other recorded sounds and global outlook. Brand plays a key role too. The fact that the ensemble has recorded music for such culty films as 21 Grams and Requiem for a Dream and regularly collaborates with pop artists such as Sigur Ros and the Nine Inch Nails helps its image among the younger crowd.

Kronos’ sound is constantly arresting. At intermission, the two young women sitting behind me were in ecstasies about what they had just heard, a freewheeling program of short works with a Middle Eastern outlook written by composers from that part of the world as well as elsewhere. They also chatted excitedly about such things as the way in which the players had swatted the air during selections from The Dead Man, John Zorn’s death rattle of an homage to Robert Mapplethorpe, creating whooshing noises that were at once threatening and funny. Like Zorn, most of the scribes on the evening’s roster, like the Azerbaijani composer Franghiz Ali-Zadeh and the late Nubian composer Hamza El Din, had been commissioned specially to write for the group. Knowing that Kronos can play anything, they went all out in terms of stretching the stringed instruments to their limits. Both young and old audiences in the house on Friday night seemed to revel in Kronos’ endless spirit of invention.

Of course, being the big brand in town has its downsides for the chamber music community as a whole. Kronos has such a strong reputation and growing following among the 20s and 30s hipster crowd, that people, especially young people, tend to think of the group as the only string quartet in town. This is a shame as there are many other high-class ensembles working in the Bay Area such as the Alexander Cypress quartets. I hear that it’s hard for these groups to attract younger audiences with Kronos stealing all the limelight.

It’s been a fiendish day what with hangovers and three hours of sleep to contend with. On the positive side, these signs point to the fact that Gustavo Dudamel’s debut at Walt Disney Concert Hall as the Los Angeles Philharmonic‘s new music director last night was a raging success.

I was especially impressed with the world premiere of John Adams’ City Noir, a blazing symphonic work which does nothing if not bring a looming metropolis to mind in all its gritty, engulfing splendor. I was breathless by the end of the piece.

I need to go nurse my hangover, so on this occasion, I’ll cop out of writing anything substantive about last night’s music and festivities and leave it to the inimitable Mark Swed of the LA Times instead.

Radio presenters — especially ones engaged in hosting cultural programs — are very particular about the way they pronounce proper nouns. This is of course very important: You have to get names right or you risk causing offense to the bearer of the noun in question and/or being completely misunderstood by listeners.

I was having a conversation about this topic yesterday over lunch in downtown Los Angeles with the classical music radio station KUSC‘s great veteran host, Jim Svejda (pictured). Jim talked about how annoying it is that radio hosts mispronounce names like John Barbirolli — turning the penultimate noun in the faous 20th century British conductor and cellist’s last name into a long “oh” instead of a short “o”.

Sometimes there’s a case to be made for mispronouncing proper nouns on the radio, though. A seasoned radio producer who listened to the pilot episodes of my vocal music radio series, VoiceBox, brought this fact home to me a couple of months ago when he pointed out the shortcomings of saying certain proper names in the way they absolutely should be pronounced. The name in question was Edith Piaf. On the radio, I had pronounced the French chanteuse’s name with a perfect French accent, instead of employing the fashion in which the singer’s name is usually pronounced in the US, with the stress placed on the first syllables, as in EEdith pEEaf. On the radio, I pronounced the name in this way: “edYt piAHf”, with a clipped “e” and “t”, and the stresses placed on the second syllable, rather than the first.

My pronunciation was correct by French standards. But because it sounded so different to how most American listeners would say and hear the name, it made more sense to mispronounce it on the radio than use the French articulation.

This all goes to stress one important point about speaking on the radio (or indeed any oral medium): Comprehension should be the ultimate arbiter of pronunciation.

Never before have I been in a theatre with so many sleeping people.

I think I dozed off for about ten minutes or so in the middle of UCLA Live‘s production of Medea starring Annette Bening as Euripides’ vengeful mother and wife. When I woke up to the sound of the black-rubber-suit-and-red-bustier-clad female chorus letting out a blood-curdling ululation, I noticed that my guest, the man sitting next to her, and the two people behind him were all out stone cold. To my right, the couple looked like they’d just been startled awake like me. Five minutes later, I overheard two people sitting in the row behind me a little to my left say to each other: “Should we wake Robert up?” After the play, my friend mentioned that one of the musicians on stage looked like she was in a stupor.

And here’s the kicker: The show is only an hour and 15 minutes long.

The people of the Rogue Artists Ensemble have a wonderful way of working with puppets. The Los Angeles-based theatre company is currently presenting a show based on three of Nikolai Gogol’s short stories — Diary of a Madman, The Overcoat and The Nose at the scrappy-wondrous Bootleg Theater space — which seamlessly grafts together human and marionette actors to take the audience into an off-kilter world where surreality rules.

The ambitious project was created on a shoestring budget, but you wouldn’t know it from the quality of the acting and story-telling and the cleverly manipulated and gorgeously constructed puppet creations. Among my favorite of the puppets were the two dogs from Diary of a Madman. The puppeteers handled the mutts so brilliantly that they seemed to have absolutely distinct personalities. Other puppets, such as the old office clerk with his big, angry cuboid head and the towering, spindle-armed tailor from The Overcoat, were slightly sinister. Meanwhile, puppets like the postal workers, constructed out of stationery, also from The Overcoat, and the enormous nose puppet from The Nose, were as comical as they were works of art.

I don’t often feel strongly enough about a theatrical production to think it merits the effort of touring to other places. But Rogue Artists Ensemble’s Gogol Project should be seen elsewhere. I think I am going to badger some of my Bay Area producer friends to get down to LA to catch the show before it ends its run on November 1. San Francisco audiences would adore the production.

Just about every minute of the five hours I spent sitting in the nosebleeds at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles was worth the one and a half hour slog in the broiling heat I undertook to reach the venue from my friend’s place in West Hollywood on Saturday afternoon. The occasion — Gustavo Dudamel’s inaugural appearance as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic — was a passionate, inclusive affair which filled the 18,000-seat arena by the time the orchestra sat down to play Beethoven’s Symphony Number 9.

I wasn’t crazy about the acoustic from where I was sitting. The Beethoven sounded much more sluggish than I expected it to. But the vistas of the huge crowds were something to behold from up high.

Some personal highlights of the afternoon/evening:

Actor/Comedian Jack Black coming on stage and remarking of the Venezuelan maestro: “Dude’s on Fire!”

The Silverlake Conservatory Ensemble’s take on several Stevie Wonder songs, sung with great verve by a group of young vocalists. The singers were backed by a crack team of musicians led by Flea, bassist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and violist, saxophonist and harmonica player Keith Barry. Barry and Flea are co-founders of the Silverlake Conservatory, a neighborhood music education center. I was really impressed by the energy and fun of this group. They performed with a lot of natural flair.

The community-mindedness of the event as a whole. The LA Phil did a pretty good job of highlighting local community music organizations, especially those that work with children. Performers other than the Silverlake group included The New Christ Memorial Church Adult and Children’s Choir, the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts Jazz Band, Los Cenzontles (A youth group specializing in Mexican musical traditions founded in the Bay Area) and the the LA Phil’s own YOLA Expo Center Youth Orchestra. YOLA obviously has a long way to go before it starts resembling anything like the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra that grew out of the Venezuelan El Sistema program upon which the LA Phil is basing its own education projects. Still, the young musicians, many of whom didn’t pick up their instruments until two years ago, did a serviceable job with Steven Venz’s arrangement of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”. If there was one major message to take away from the celebration as a whole, it’s that Dudamel is absolutely focused on music education and multiculturalism.

Last, but not least, here’s my favorite quote of the enire ¡Bienvenido Gustavo! celebration, overheard from a conversation between two nearby music journalists: “I’m glad this day is soon going to be over, cos I’m tired of looking for the upside down exclamation mark on my keyboard.”

The first ever National Arts Journalism Summit at UCLA’s Annenberg School for Communication took place this morning. It was a bit of a marathon for the 200 or so people present in the room — four hours of presentations and round table discussions with only two five minute breaks to catch our breaths and run to the loo!

I would like to say that the event was a thumping success, but to be honest, I left feeling somewhat disappointed. There was a lot of flashy technology and fluff (300 people Twittering as we speak!” It’s an exciting time!! I feel very positive about the future of arts journalism!) and at the end of the day not a whole lot of substance to the discussions.

Obviously, no one expected one four-hour-long summit to provide answers to the many pressing issues facing the field of arts journalism at the moment. But the main question on everyone’s lips — the one about business models — ended up being avoided almost entirely or trampled on.

The truth is that even the heads of the innovative and supposedly sustainable arts journalism-oriented projects presented at the summit don’t see a clear way forward. Business models, which range from paid advertising to foundation support to subscriptions, are hardly secure. When project presenters proudly declared — as several of them did — “we pay our journalists!” during the course of the morning, I felt my spirits sag. No one cared to admit how much they pay. To my mind, 150 dollars for an 800 – 1000 article is a pittance and, frankly, unacceptable if you’re looking to publish quality work by professionals rather than the hokey ramblings of amateur art enthusiasts. But I suspect that this sort of level of compensation is at the top end of writers’ pay for the projects presented at the summit.

Least satisfying of all was the final roundtable discussion between Richard Gingras, the CEO of Salon.com and Deborah Marrow, director of the Getty Foundation. Gingras basically said that arts journalists shouldn’t expect money for their endeavors until they build huge capacity and attract advertising and investment. But his success story examples had nothing to do with the arts. It’s one thing for a top political blogger to attract upwards of a million eyeballs a day, but even the most widely-read arts blogs can’t hope to gain this sort of traction. As for Marrow, she managed to skirt each of moderator Andras Szanto’s questions with a vague, empty comment and a half smile. I learned absolutely nothing about the potential role that philanthropy might play in the future of arts journalism from her. I felt quite frustrated on the moderator’s behalf!

Still, I don’t mean to sound so down on the event. It was a step in the right direction. Hopefully by having more of these conversations, we’ll start to find a way out of the fog. Thanks to the organizers and sponsors for making the summit happen. It was a privilege to be present. 

Tomorrow, – October 2 from 9AM-1PM PDT – The Annenberg School of Journalism, USC, is hosting its first ever National Summit on Arts Journalism. The summit will present ten projects in arts journalism from around America, each one geared towards saying something interesting about the future of how we cover the arts. The event will take place in the auditorium of the journalism school in front of an audience of 200 (I’ll be there!), but it’s primarily conceived of as a virtual online event. The Summit will be streamed here.

You can also watch the webstream right from this blog:

Live video by Ustream

And here’s where you can follow the chat stream: