Archives for 2010

If you’re going to stage a theatrical happening in a non-traditional location with parts of the performance going on simultaneously in multiple spaces, you need to think carefully not only about the relationship between the setting and the production, but also about the audience’s experience from a theatrical perspective.

One organization that does this very well is the UK-based company Punchdrunk. The sheer theatricality of its 2008 production The Masque of the Red Death at the Battersea Arts Center in London made my head spin. It didn’t matter that I could only sample a fraction of the entire experience of the story, which unfolded in dozens of nooks and crannies of the venue. I felt swept along by events and like I could piece together my own enigmatic narrative because the drama was as coherent as it was dense and magical. You can read about my experience of the show here.

Get This Go, a production which I saw at the Pacific Heights Inn, a motel in the Marina neighborhood of San Francisco, last night by the Mugwumpin experimental theatre company, was on a much smaller scale than Punchdrunk’s effort. It was also on for only one evening, which makes it hard for the company to perfect its work.

But I was so underwhelmed by the half-hour performance that I wondered if I was experiencing theatre at all. I felt like I had merely walked into a display of public indolence and confusion.

The company commandeered three rooms at the motel and in half hour increments, invited a groups of about 20 audience members to look in on their activities. Before we went in, we were told to think about what it would be like if we were marooned indefinitely in a place like this with nothing but the possessions we had on us at that moment in time. From the debris that the performers managed to scatter around the motel, it seems that most people wander around San Francisco with a great deal more stuff than I do.

In one cramped room, a group of actors slouched around lethargically, painting their toenails, knitting hats and twirling umbrellas. In another, someone who appeared to be off her hinges, played mournful cello melodies and looked vacantly into space amid scattered belongings. In a third, an uptight man and woman charged around picking stuff up, writing notes and generally being frenetic. The whole thing was mildly interesting to witness for 25 minutes, but hardly made me think or feel interesting thoughts or feelings, which is what theatre at a minimum should do.

That being said, I was grateful to be able to see the piece — the event was sold out. (Tickets, though limited in number, were free.) And it’s wonderful that this kind of activity goes on on a Monday night around here, if only to bring people together and give them an excuse to head off afterwards for a drink.

One of the many delights of experiencing the music of the Paul Dresher Ensemble (pictured) live is the opportunity it affords to check out some very unusual and beautiful musical instruments. The Bay Area-based composer and his collaborators have created a number of instruments over the years, some of them electronic, some acoustic and some a combination of both (“electroacoustic.”)

Over the weekend, audiences at Old First Concerts in San Francisco got to hear the Quadrachord and the Marimba Lumina, two instruments that create a kaleidoscopic array of sounds and overtones.

The highlight of the concert for me was the duet Glimpsed From Afar which involved Dresher playing the Quadrachord, a narrow, 15-foot-long bench-like structure that resembles a very stretched out xylophone, and the percussionist Joel Davel on the Marimba Lumina, which looks like a regular marimba but with flat, two-dimensional-looking keypads. The sounds that these instruments make range from loud, percussive whacks, to deep, ocean-floor groans to weeping melodic lines. 

I went looking online for information about these two amazing musical inventions and found some interesting descriptions on the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s website. (The LA Phil performed Glimpsed from Afar).

Here is what Dresher has to say about the Quadrachord: “The Quadrachord is an instrument invented in collaboration with instrument designer Daniel Schmidt as part of my music theater work Sound Stage. Of all the instruments created for this production, the Quadrachord is to me the most compelling invention and the only one whose sonic attributes have continued to inspire me to explore and develop its compositional potential. The instrument has a total string length of 160 inches (though smaller versions have been built), four strings of differing gauges but of equal length and an electric-bass pickup next to each of the two bridges. It can be plucked like a guitar, bowed like cello, played like a slide guitar, prepared like a piano, and hammered on like a percussion instrument.”

And here is what the composer wrote of the Marimba Lumina: “A recent instrument design by synthesizer pioneer Don Buchla in collaboration with Joel Davel and Mark Goldstein, the Marimba Lumina is a sophisticated electronic instrument that has more expressive control than a typical electronic keyboard. Modeled somewhat after its acoustic namesake, it is a dynamically sensitive electronic mallet controller. The Marimba Lumina’s playing surface includes a traditionally arrayed set of electronic bars. Each bar is made up of two overlapping antennas that receive proximity information from each of the four mallets. This allows the Marimba Lumina to respond to new performance variables such as position along the length of each bar. In addition, each mallet is tuned to a unique frequency, which allows one to program different instrumental responses for each mallet. This all augments the potential for expressive control with easily implemented pitch, volume, and timbre modulation.”

these descriptions obviously don’t do the instruments justice. You have to be in the room with them, and not only marvel at their construction but also at their sound.

One of my editors sent me this fascinating link to a video created by the University of Southern California’s electrical engineering and linguistics department. Researchers at the university asked an opera singer and a beatbox emcee to sing and create beats respectively inside an MRI machine.

It’s incredible to see how different the vocal apparatus works for the emcee versus the opera singer.

The soprano’s tongue is fat, it doesn’t move a lot. Her lips also remain fairly still. There’s a huge space inside the mouth and the larynx is lowered. You can also see her vibrato going.

Meanwhile, the emcee’s tongue and lips are working overtime. They actually look like drumsticks whacking skins and the cavity inside the mouth and throat are quite closed.

It would be interesting to see the technique applied to other forms of vocal artist such as Tuvan throat singer, blues singer, professional whistler, yodeller etc. The mind boggles.

With her new drama In the Wake at Berkeley Repertory Theater, playwright Lis Kron has attempted to write a work of the magnitude and scope of Angels in America. I wonder if the theatre’s artistic director, Tony Taccone, encouraged this as one of the original producers of Tony Kushner’s seminal drama?

The play, which takes place in the George W Bush years and revolves around a thirty-something “thought leader” whose passion about the politics of the tax system rivals her passionate personal life, is dense, sprawling and multi-faceted.

I love the way in which Kron, just like Kushner before her, tackles together the personal and the political and shows how inextricably linked they are.

It’s also about an hour too long and the playwright has difficulty maintaining the plot and the characters’ trajectories. We never really find out what the central character Ellen does for a living or what motivates her to travel to Boston to visit Amy, a woman whom she vaguely knows but ends up falling in love with.

In the Wake is a sort of lesbian Angels in America, really. Only less expertly handled. It’s still worth seeing though, because the performances are great, the pacing is lively and the play, as messy as it is, makes a bold move by tackling a part of American history that happened, really, just yesterday.

There’s nothing like teaching a class on something to make you think more clearly about it.

Yesterday evening, while teaching a seminar on press release writing to a bunch of artists and arts promoters at the Luggage Store Gallery for the non-proit new media incubator, Independent Arts and Media, it dawned on me that the “Art of the Press Release” rubric that I had created on this blog early in 2009 (and which I used as a jumping off point for the class) was missing perhaps the most basic tenet of all: namely, that it’s only worth writing a press release if you actually have something press-worthy to tell the media about i.e. an item of news.

This sounds terribly obvious, but it’s amazing how often I receive releases that don’t tell me any news whatsoever. In fact, sometimes it’s difficult to tell why the person who drafted the release bothered at all. A baffling missive I received in my inbox just yesterday, which consisted of several paragraphs of purple prose about an artist called Tucky McKey (“The first thing you experience when viewing Tucky McKey’s paintings is his uncanny sense of perspective”) followed by a lengthy Q&A with the painter, provided no news at all. I’m still confounded as to why the Artist Guild of San Francisco sent it out. Is the organization hoping that media organizations will lift the Q&A right out of the email and reprint it? Nuts.

I’m not saying that it’s only worth sending out a press release if you or your client has won a Pulitzer Prize, sold a painting at auction for more money than has ever been reaped for a work of its kind, or become the longest-running show on Broadway. More modest happenings, such as the opening of a new musical, a ground-breaking ceremony for a new arts building, or the receipt of a big grant in economically tough times are also worth telling the world about.

And one more thing: It’s not enough to tell the media the news. Make us understand why we should care about it too.

One of the issues I’ve encountered as I produce and host a new weekly public radio series all about the art of singing, VoiceBox, is the confusion surrounding the term ‘podcast’. To most listeners, it seems, a podcast version of VoiceBox means making the entire show available for download for free, 24-7 via iTunes.

But like most public radio shows operating under limited public radio music usability right agreements, allowing the content of a full hour-long show to be available in its entirety on demand is not legally possible.

Different programs get around the issue in assorted ways. The Thistle and Shamrock’s “Thistlecast” podcast, for example, plays snippets of content from the upcoming show to whet listeners’ appetites. The VoiceBox podcast is a completely different beast: created in collaboration with two San Francisco State University students, the “VoiceBox: The B Sides” podcasts feature chat and music clips that take an “underground” view of the radio show topic. The idea is to give the theme of the week a slightly different spin and reach out to a younger audience.

Many listeners have been confused about this though. They think they’re getting the radio show that I produce when they click on the podcast link. The muddle is only exacerbated by the fact that the KALW website now allows the radio show to be streamed on demand for an entire week after its original airdate which means that people can in fact listen to the original radio content even if only for a few days in addition to downloading the podcast.

The issue points to the complex relationship between traditional radio and digital formats. Terms like “webstream”, “on demand” and “downloadable” are all so samey. Yet they mean distinct things. Education seems to be the best way to get people to understand the difference. This is going to take some time, however.

I wonder if there might be an inverse correlation between places of outstanding natural beauty and bad visual art?

When there are mountains and trees and lakes that take the breath away, then who needs breathtaking paintings and sculptures?

The greatest works of art tend to be produced in gritty urban settings, it seems. There are a few exceptions to the rule of course, such as environmental artists like Andy Goldsworthy and Robert Smithson, whose works make us see nature in a new way. And there’s a lot of very beautiful Native American art that’s produced away from big urban centers.

Over the past few days, however, all I’ve seen up at Lake Tahoe (where I’ve been sojourning over the long weekend) have been inept life-sized bear sculptures fashioned out of concrete or glazed wood.

Ben Davis’ incisive slide-illustrated meditation on the state of street art in Slate poses fascinating questions about the tipping point between art and commerce. “Part of the lore of street art is that it is about the individual taking on the system,” writes Davis. “Yet today, rather than feeling anti-commercial, the scene represents a kind of parallel-universe art world, with its own thriving cast of stars and set of commercial values. Street art’s anti-establishment posture often shades seamlessly over into scrappy entrepreneurship…These days, it can be hard to tell where marketing ends and art begins.”

Documentation has perhaps been the strongest force in helping to disseminate and turn into “product” what used to be a renegade art form. Without being endlessly photographed and disseminated on the web, a work like Banksy’s 2005 project on Israel’s West Bank separation wall would not pack anything like the same political punch that it does. And yet at the same time, the documentation is killing the lithe, underground nature of street art by making it commercial and turning it into a product of the art establishment.

I mulled over these ideas in a recent article about the Bay Area street art scene for the New York Times, but I think Davis’ illustrated essay is much more thoughtful and penetrating than my own attempt to unpack some of the tensions and forces at play in this realm.

I don’t think street art is over, but it’s perhaps entering the early stages of a slow demise.

It never ceases to amaze me that people who know that I make my living as a journalist share interesting bits of news with me and then are taken aback by the idea that I might like to make the information public.

It struck me the other day as I was flying back to San Francisco from Los Angeles that there’s an art to producing a great airline safety video. I think Virgin America has cracked it with its wonderfully tongue-in-cheek animated film.

The four-minute-thirteen-second film, which was created by Wild Brain animation in San Francisco and produced by Anomaly in New York, was made three or four years ago and I’ve seen it on Virgin flights many times. It’s the only safety video that I’ve ever really paid attention to and the other airlines still have a lot to do to catch up.

The main goal of any airline safety video should be to grab people’s attention as the information on them is important (even if passengers think they know it all.) But few airlines both to create a video that keep eyeballs on the screen.

The reasons that the Virgin film succeeds are:

1. It plays up the fact that people are bored of these announcements and makes a virtue of the yawn factor. For example, the instructions about how to buckle and unbuckle a seat-belt come with narration that’s delivered in a patient tone and goes something like this: “For the 0.000000001 of you who’ve never worn a seatbelt…” And the images on screen show a sweetly clueless matador attempting the maneuver while his bull looks on in vague disdain.

2. The animation is imaginative and whimsical. The characters are very two-dimensional and have a sketchy, pencil-drawn look, but they have funny, incongruous features such as a fish head in a suit.

3. For the two reasons stated above and many more, the film is funny. It managed to turn a dry and boring subject into something entertaining.

The video can be viewed on YouTube, here.

Virgin America released the film in 2007 but other airlines haven’t followed suit with interesting films. I know the airline industry isn’t in a financial position these days to spend a lot of money refreshing their safety videos. But perhaps they should start to make this a priority. Passenger safety is, after all, no laughing matter 🙂

The environmental sculptor Noah Purifoy moved from Los Angeles to the desert in 1988 and set about creating one of the most surreal and startling sculpture parks I have ever seen. The park is located on a 2.5 acre site at Joshua Tree. To get to the remote location, you have to drive down some dirt roads and follow several hand-painted signs carefully. But the journey is well worth the trek to the back of beyond.

The park contains more than a hundred of Purifoy’s works made mostly out of scavenged and donated materials. From a distance, the site looks like a dump, with piles of trash bleached white in the sun. Up close, though, it’s an artist’s playground packed with surprises. Many of the pieces on display, which visitors can roam around freely, are abstract constructions made out of anything from tattered old paperbacks to old toilet seats. Some, such as an enormous executive desk toy made of a metal frame, ropes and bowling balls, are whimsical and display the artist’s sense of absurdist humor.

My very favorite work on display is a small but perfectly formed theatre fashioned from old pieces of mouldering wood. The theatre looks like it can hold an audience of 20 or so. There are two sets of covered wings which performers can walk along by the sides of the auditorium to get to the stage. The stage itself is only slightly raised off the ground. It’s a delightful spot. It would be fun to view a show there.

In fact, the entire park would be a great venue for a large-scale performance art piece. I’m not the first person to have thought of this — according to the friends I visited Purifoy’s site with, various groups from LA have created performance pieces around the artist’s sculptures.

A site like this could only exist in the hinterlands. Anywhere else and the artist would be subject to all kinds of tedious rules and regulations. As bizarre as the sculpture park is, it very much fits into the landscape. The junk feels weirdly organic.

There’s a whole branch of neuroscience dedicated to exploring the healing properties of sound. Music therapy comes in many forms. One of the most fundamental takes the form of simply lying back and letting sound vibrations course through your body for a while.

The hour I spent at the Integratron over the weekend, a sonic experience based in a space-age-looking dome structure in the middle of the desert near Joshua Tree National Park in California, had somewhat of a restorative effect on my body and mind. But the experience left me thinking that sound, though a powerful form of therapy, doesn’t always work its magic on the listener, especially when the environment isn’t perfectly conducive to allowing the vibrations to take you over.

This is how the Integratron is described on the organization’s website:

“The Integratron is the creation of George Van Tassel, and is based on the design of Moses’ Tabernacle, the writings of Nikola Tesla and telepathic directions from extraterrestrials. This one-of-a-kind building is a 38-foot high, 55-foot diameter, non-metallic structure originally designed by Van Tassel as a rejuvenation and time machine. Today, it is the only all-wood, acoustically perfect sound chamber in the U.S.”

My friends and I arrived at the Integratron just in time for the public “sound bath” session, which happens just once a month. We each paid $10 and made our way into the dome. We walked up some steep wooden steps and found ourselves in a round room, brightly lit with desert light streaming through the windows. About a hundred people lay on their backs in the space, with their heads facing the center of the room. It was packed. I found a wedge of room near the leader of the experience, a middle-aged woman surrounded by several large crystal bowls. After a brief explanation about what was going to happen next, the leader started playing the bowls.

The sound was intense. It rang through my ears and I could feel the energy of the vibrations thrumming through different parts of my body. But it was hard to immerse myself completely in the experience. I was cold because the floor was cold and by the time I arrived there were no blankets left to borrow. Also, there were too many snoring, shuffling people. Finally, the music didn’t go on long enough, it seemed to me. I would have needed about an hour of continuous play to really fall under the spell of the vibrations. The 20 minutes or so of music wasn’t adequate, though it clearly made quite a few people in the room go beyond a state of meditation and into sleep.

If I ever end up wanting to visit the Integratron again, I think I would arrange a private session (assuming it’s affordable to do this) and I would definitely wear a sweater and bring a yoga mat. As it stood, the experience was a bit like going to see a play or a concert where the air-conditioning in the room is on too high and the people behind you keep coughing and the guy in front is too tall so you only have partial view of the stage.

But I don’t want to discredit the therapeutic properties of this form of healing. I think it can be very effective if experienced the right way.