Archives for 2010

Why are arts organizations so obsessed with anniversaries? Every day it seems, some museum, presenter, dance troupe, alternative arts space or theater company is celebrating a milestone birthday, be it 25, 50 or 75 years with a retrospective or special series of events of somesuch. But to what extent are anniversaries really worth observing from an artistic perspective? Or are they merely crutches for programming, pegs to attract media coverage or excuses for amping up fundraising efforts?

In a sense, an anniversary is definitely something to make a fuss about, especially in this country. Arts organizations often have to weather extreme hardship from a financial perspective every few years and face competition from the endless new forms of entertainment that can have the effect of distracting audiences. There’s little about the current cultural climate that favors longevity, so to make it through even five years without going under deserves some form of recognition.

But all too often it seems to me that anniversaries and the hooplah that organizations make around them are artificial constructs. Is it enough that an organization is turning 30 to merit an exhibition of photographs covering its years of existence? Why should we all be as excited that a museum is turning 75 as the museum is itself?

Some organizations, such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, seem to have put a lot of thought into their anniversaries. The museum is at least as concerned with looking backwards through its history as it is in thinking about the next 75 years of its future. The anniversary tagline “75 years of looking forward” is well met by balancing exhibitions that highlight the organization’s legacy eg “The Anniversary Show” with activities like commissioning local artists from a variety of different disciplines to create audio tour material.

But not all organizations come up with anniversary celebrations that are as well-thought-out. Perhaps it’s time for arts institutions to move beyond marking time, either by finding more organic ways of celebrating key milestones rather than bland “let’s raid the attic”-style retrospectives. I love an excuse for a party as much as the next culture fan. But really there’s nothing wrong with letting a jubilee pass quietly by once in a while without a fanfare.

The world is full of madcap ideas that don’t come to fruition. But thankfully there’s always a place to talk about them, even if they end up not getting realized.

Here’s a concept for an art installation which I came up with to accompany The Berkeley Symphony Orchestra‘s upcoming concert next Thursday of works by Paul Dresher (Cornucopia), Esa-Pekka Salonen (Five Images After Sappho) and Beethoven (Symphony No. 3, “Eroica”).

The orchestra’s music director, Joana Carneiro, asked me to think of a way to help contextualize Salonen’s work for audiences. The idea turned out to be far too ambitious to realize in the limited amount of time we had. But, hey, a girl’s gotta dream.

Concept for an installation to accompany Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Five Images After Sappho by Chloe Veltman:

Historical Background:

The idea for the installation stems from an account in Margaret Reynolds book The Sappho Companion of an excavation that took place in Egypt at the end of the 19th century. The findings greatly changed our level of understanding of Sappho. Reynold’s account describes an archaeological dig by British scholars Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt who set out for Egypt in 1895 in the wake of news that Egyptian farmers had turned up pieces of papyrus as they ploughed new fields. Reynolds writes:

“They settled on a site at a small town about 120 miles south of Cairo, Oxyrhynchus (now called Bahnasa). On the outskirts of the town was a group of low mounds. Almost as soon as they began to dig, Grenfell and Hunt realized that it was the huge rubbish dump of a once-thriving town dating from the period of Hellenistic Egypt. The rubbish had been thrown out in about the 5th century AD, but quite a lot of it was much older, often dating the from the 2nd to 3rd centuries AD.”

Among the scraps was a tiny fragment of dating to the 3rd century AD — a copy of Sappho’s poem, then previously unknown, named “To the Nereids”. Gradually, more Sappho Fragments showed up in the rubbish pile, scraps of which had been shipped back to Oxford by Grenfell and Hunt in biscuit tins. 213 Fragments have surfaced from the dig to date.

Musical Background:

Fragmentation is one of the central ideas in Salonen’s Five Images After Sappho. In the program notes for the 1999 world premiere of his work, the composer wrote:

“If we imagine the history of art as some kind of Darwinian survival game, Sappho stands out as a genetic miracle. No (almost no) whole organism (poem) has survived; instead we have a couple of dozen pages’ worth of fragments. Some of them are almost complete little poems, most of them are isolated groups of words or single words far apart. 

Almost every generation of poets has tried to translate these scattered messages from a woman of whom we know very little. As always, interpretation tells more about the interpreter, and his time and culture, than the work itself…It is the fragmentary nature of the material, and therefore an almost open form, that makes Sappho so fascinating to set to music.

Using tiny fragments of Sappho’s poetry, Salonen captures the multi-faceted, interpretatively-open nature of Sappho’s legacy. In the Images, we come to understand the poet as boasting many identities – wife, lover, mother, sage, debutante, poet, suicide, heretic, devotee…

The Installation:

The installation seeks to bring together these historical and musical components of Sappho’s legacy by marrying a visual representation of Grenfell and Hunt’s rubbish heap with writings, images and sound/music excerpts from the cannon of artistic works inspired by Sappho.

The Experience:

A huge rubbish pile made of tiny scraps of papyrus* will greet concertgoers when they enter the lobby of Zellerbach Hall for the concert. The bigger the heap, the more awe-inspiring. Each bit of visible papyrus will have text on it e.g. lines of Sappho’s poetry, lines from poems/plays/novels/non-fiction works etc. by other poets through the ages inspired by Sappho. Visual depictions of Sappho by artists through the ages (paintings, etchings etc) will also be added to the pile. Some of these texts and images will look like they’re flying from / falling off the pile, by being suspended from wires above and to the side of the heap. A soundscape of musical and poetic works inspired by Sappho as well as voicings of translations of Sappho’s poetry will be piped through speakers into the lobby to add to the atmosphere. The cumulative effect should be one of infinite interpretation and fragmentation.

In addition, a papyrus scrap bearing a small piece of Sappho’s poetry could be included inside every concertgoer’s program.

*The papyrus pieces can be made from bits of tea-stained white sheeting. Foam, papier-mache or some other lightweight, bulky material can be used to make the base of the sculpture.

Do classic plays always lend themselves to adaptation into different cultural idioms? What makes a certain story resonate in particular with a particular setting? Luis Alfaro’s Oedipus el Rey, currently receiving its world premiere production at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco in a production directed by Loretta Greco, made me ponder these questions.

After about ten minutes of sitting their with a slightly furrowed brow as I watched a bunch of tough-looking guys doing the cliched prison inmate posturing thing, I found myself completely immersed in Alfaro’s transposition of the great Sophoclean tragedy Oedipus Rex into a contemporary Latino barrio landscape. The ensemble cast moved with lightness around the bare stage. They acted the scenes like they meant them without resorting to histrionics more than on a couple of occasions. The text snapped along with its musical combination of English and Spanish (though I could have done with a little less of the “madre dios”-style sturm-and-drang exclamations.) The emptiness of the set reflected the blindness of Tiresias and eventually Oedipus himself, while the bold use of naked lightbulbs throughout the taut one and a half hour long, intermissionless drama suggested the light within. All in all I think The Magic gives us a well-thought-out production of a compellingly adapted narrative.

Yet there’s nothing intrinsic about the Oedipus story that lends itself to adaptation into the Latin idiom really. To say that “the narrative works because Latino culture is passionate and tragic and therefore lends itself to this kind of overwrought soap opera of a story” is to make a superficial generalization. And yet the translation succeeds with the same amount of drive and vigor as Sondheim-Laurents-Bernstein’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to 1950s barrio New York.

In less capable hands, I suppose Oedipus el Rey would probably make me cringe. The commitment and talent of the production team is responsible for the work’s ability to communicate. I don’t suppose the play would stand on its own as powerfully as something like Westside Story,though. The barrio does not always great theatre make. Campo Santo’s adaptation of Hamletinto a contemporary barrio setting in Oakland a few years ago at Intersection for the Arts left me completely cold. Part of the reason for this was that the connection between the story and the setting seemed completely arbitrary to me, perhaps because the staging didn’t rise beyond cliche.

When I was growing up, I used to think it strange that the mother of a close friend of mine had empty antique picture frames covering almost every spare bit of wall in the entrance hall of her Victorian townhouse. The walls above the stairs were also covered in frames, making the surfaces of the house look like they were adorned with the whites of eyes.

I couldn’t understand why my friend’s mother liked empty frames so much. I had grown up in a home where my mother sometimes made picture frames, but always filled them up with art of some kind. But now when I visit my friend’s mother’s house, I think of the empty frames as being rather beautiful.

We have, as a culture, lost interest in the art of framing pictures. The artworks that hang in my apartment don’t have frames. If I come across frames in other people’s homes, they are often cursory wooden squares from IKEA. If you want to see a beautiful frame these days, you have to go to an art museum. Even picture frame stores don’t sell lovely frames anymore. The one around the corner from me has a decidedly ugly collection which it is currently flogging off for as little as $10 a pop. I don’t think many people are buying them though — the same frames have been gathering dust in the window since last summer when I moved into the neighborhood.

I can understand why frames have fallen out of fashion — they’re heavy, nice ones are expensive, and they “hem” work in, rather than giving it a more expansive feeling and connection with the environment around which the art hangs. But there’s so much craftsmanship that goes into making a beautiful picture frame. In some museums, like the ones in Moscow I visited a few years ago, the frames are sometimes more enticing than the paintings they contain.

The National Portrait Gallery in London is one institution that is working to preserve the art of the picture frame. Back in 1996-1997, the museum held an exhibition about frames and then developed a website devoted to developing research and interest in the subject. The organization continues to update the site regularly.

Maybe someday picture frames will make a comeback. In the meantime, I might start trawling thrift stores and art galleries for interesting specimens.

PS This blog post has elicited some wonderful responses over the past few days. One of my favorites is from Kary Schulman, director of Grants for the Arts in San Francisco, who wrote to say that the post reminded her of a scene in the Steve Martin comedy, Picasso at the Lapin Agile:

As one character, the art dealer Sagot shows off his Matisse, he points to the frame as its most important feature. He says, “Otherwise, anything goes. You want to see a soccer game where the players can run up into the stands with the ball and order a beer? No. They’ve got to stay within the boundaries to make it interesting. In the right hands, this little space is as fertile as Eden.”

The British TV show, Popstar to Operastar, has been taking a lot of heat from critics who think that the series is inane and demeaning. The critics are not wrong. The show is really just good old fashioned gladiator stuff: put a bunch of pop singers in the ring with Mozart and Puccini and see who wins. It’s really a fait accompli though the panel of judges – which includes the celebrated Mexican tenor Rolando Villazon (pictured) act as if the stakes are high.

But as dumb as Popstar to Operastar might be, it performs a serious function: In showing that you cannot train a pop singer to pull off an opera aria in a few weeks, the program demonstrates that learning to be an opera singer is extremely hard work and requires a large amount of time and talent. It also might get people who don’t normally pay attention to opera to get out and see a few productions or maybe listen to some recordings by great singers.

I would be curious to see the ITV network do a reality series which operates in the opposite direction: I wonder if a bunch of trained opera singers could pull off fronting a rock band convincingly with only a few weeks of coaching? My guess is that the journey from “Operastar to Popstar” might be easier to manage than the other way around. But I don’t suppose that it would make such compelling viewing.

One opera, two concerts, and a drag review. Just your average San Francisco weekend.

1. Pearls Over Shanghai at the Hypnodrome: San Francisco’s current obsession with all things to do with Shanghai in light of the city’s twin-city relationship with the Chinese port town and the upcoming Shanghai Expo this summer in which San Francisco will feature prominently, finds its antidote with the Thrillpeddlers’ zany, gender-bending homage to misplaced Chinoiserie. There’s nothing politically correct about Pearls over Shanghai, a show which originally premiered in 1970 under the auspices of the legendary drag performance group The Cockettes. Just a lot of drag kings and queens wearing glitter and singing about opium. This latest version even features some original members of the Cockettes troupe. The show has just been extended as is well worth catching.

2. Sharon Knight at the Noe Valley Ministry: I would have liked to stay at the Glass House music event on Saturday evening to catch Voicestra alumni Dave Worm’s Sovoso ensemble performing. But I had to get to a friend’s party so only caught the singer Sharon Knight performing a bunch of Celtic, pirate and other bits of folk music. I love this repertoire, but I didn’t feel very inspired by Knight’s performance. She and her guitarist were out of tune for the first song and I generally found the musical arrangements to be lacking in originality.

3. Wozzeck at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts: Ensemble Parallele’s production of John Rea’s chamber orchestration of Alban Berg’s hard-hitting opera based on a real-life murder is packed with vivid visual images and rich singing. Baritone Bojan Knezevic brings the perfect combination of manly softness to the title role. And I love Rea’s orchestration. Its intimacy increases the compact tension of Wozzack fraught work.

4. Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610 at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church: American Bach Soloists assembled a remarkable trio of soloists (tenor Derek Chester and sopranos Jennifer Ellis and Abigail Haynes Lennox) for this crisp, dancing and warm performance of Monteverdi’s great work. The venue was sold out. Apparently all four of ABS’ concerts are also at capacity, which is well-deserved.

The winner of the 2009 Will Glickman Award for best play to have had its world premiere in the Bay Area is playwright Sarah Ruhl for In the Next Room (or the vibrator play). The work premiered last February at Berkeley Repertory Theatre in a production directed by Les Waters and then transferred to New York.

It’s always such a privilege being part of the panel of local theatre critics that selects the winner of the prize each year. I am absolutely thrilled about our decision, though there was some tough competition from such contenders as Charlie Varon for Rabbi Sam and Ann Randolph for Loveland (both of which premiered at The Marsh.)

The Vibrator Play was one of the theatrical highlights of 2009 for me for its combination of brashness and delicacy, its exploration of the pros and cons of so-called “technological advancement” and its playful-soulful take on human sexuality.

The Will Glickman Award has been given annually since 1984. Created to honor playwright and screenwriter Will Glickman, the goal of the award is to encourage new plays and their production as invaluable investments in American theatre. Theatre Bay Area, the nation’s largest regional theatre service organization, has administered the award since 2004.

Berkeley Rep debuted three previous winners: Hurricane / Mauvais Temps by Anne Galjour; The People’s Temple by Leigh Fondakowski with Greg Pierotti, Stephen Wangh, and Margo Hall; and Yankee Dawg You Die by Philip Kan Gotanda. Other playwrights who have been honored include Liz Duffy Adams, Adam Bock, John Fisher, Brian Freeman, Doug Holsclaw, Dan Hoyle, Denis Johnson, Cherrie Moraga, Brighde Mullins, Peter Sinn Nachtrieb, Octavio Solis, Charlie Varon, and Erin Cressida Wilson.

The selection committee for this year’s award included the following journalists: Robert Avila, SF Bay Guardian; Karen D’Souza, San Jose Mercury News; Robert Hurwitt, San Francisco Chronicle; Sam Hurwitt, Marin Independent Journal; and yours truly.

Here is my review of the play from SF Weekly.

Patti Smith only heard the news about her friend Howard Zinn’s death shortly before going on stage at the Herbst Theatre in San Francisco last night to talk about her new book, answer questions and sing a couple of songs.

Most people in the audience including myself, hadn’t yet caught wind of Zinn’s passing. A wave of sorrow and shock spread across the City Arts & Lectures audience when moderator Kevin Berger mentioned Zinn.

Many people know about Smith’s close ties with the likes of Robert Mapplethorpe and Sam Shepard. But her friendship with the activist and author of The People’s History of The United States was less familiar. Smith stayed composed throughout her presentation, even though, according City Arts & Lectures director Sydney Goldstein, she had reacted strongly to the news when she first heard it.

In the most touching moment of her talk, Smith recited the lyrics to her song “People have the Power” in honor of Zinn. Smith said Zinn was particularly fond of that song and would often ask her to sing it or recite the words when their paths crossed.

Smith’s recitation came from deep within her. As the verses rolled on, her breath became deeper and the words more rounded and full. What started off as a quiet poem ended up as a full-blown incantation.

Backstage after the talk, Smith remained calm. Slumped on a couch in a wool beanie over her long wavy brown hair, baggy blue jeans tucked into scuffed worker boots and several shapeless sweaters, the great singer and poet was on the phone when I entered. Eventually she looked up. “I was just texting my daughter with the news about Howard,” she said, before politely shaking my hand.

People Have the Power

I was dreaming in my dreaming
of an aspect bright and fair
and my sleeping it was broken
but my dream it lingered near
in the form of shining valleys
where the pure air recognized
and my senses newly opened
I awakened to the cry
that the people / have the power
to redeem / the work of fools
upon the meek / the graces shower
it’s decreed / the people rule

The most palpable thing about watching Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax perform a recital of works by Schumann, Chopin and Peter Lieberson last night at Davies Symphony Hall was the rapport between the two artists. They behaved like they were sitting in the living room of one of their homes playing together for fun. They looked at each other almost more often than they looked at their music. Beatific smiles crossed their faces every now and again. The pleasure of their music-making was as evident as the gorgeous, sensitive sound they made together.

The second most palpable thing about the concert was how the pair managed to transform Davies Symphony Hall (which was packed to the gills) into an intimate space. Having witnessed many recitals in the venue in the past, I did’t think this was possible — I’d written it off as one of the least convivial spaces for small ensemble or solo music in town. Now I am forced to reevaluate my opinion.

I’m on a campaign to document street art in San Francisco. There is some beautiful work out there but it comes and goes so quickly that I fear that if I don’t document it, it will be forgotten. At the moment, it seems like the lifespan of most of the pieces I see is between one and three weeks. One of these pictures (the one with the two women embracing) was gone the day after I snapped it.

It’s so often the case out here on the West Coast that by the time an arts happening reaches us, it’s been so talked about that it can feel stale or overexposed before it even arrives. This happens a lot with touring Broadway shows (e.g. Doubt and August: Osage County.) The hype can have an adverse affect on the productions, setting expectations too high which often leads to disappointment.

This weekend’s appearance of Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts could have had the same negative results. The starry British choreographer’s company has been the toast of the London and New York dance worlds since being founded in 2007. But despite the hype, I found myself completely engrossed in the company’s performance.

With the exception of the poor acoustics which made the recorded music in two of the pieces sound very tinny, the four works presented by the company consumed the senses. Live piano and harpsichord accompaniment in the Wheeldon-choreographed “Continuum” and “Rhapsody Fantasie” created a sense of fullness and spaciousness. There’s a wonderful mix of refinement and earthiness in Wheeldon’s approach to choreography. At one moment, limbs are fully extended and toes perfectly pointed; the next, the dancers are flexing their feet in crumpled postures or moving around on the floor like insects.

I also was completely engrossed by the variety of the program, which veered between the purity of line in “Continuum”, the lush romance of the duet “Distant Cries” (choreographed by Edwaard Liang), humor and bravura in “Bolero” (choreographed by Alexei Ratmansky) and the fiery boldness of “Rhapsody Fantasie.”

Believe the hype: I hope the company comes back this way again soon.

It seems odd to me that an artform should be defined by the space in which it is presented rather than anything intrinsic to the art itself. But this seems to be the case with cabaret. The word literally means “room”. Here’s the definition from the Merriam-Webster online dictionary:

Main Entry: cab·a·ret
Pronunciation: \ˌka-bə-ˈrā, ˈka-bə-ˌ\
Function: noun
Etymology: French, from Middle French dial. (Picard or Walloon), from Middle Dutch, alteration of cambret, cameret, from Middle French dial. (Picard) camberete small room, ultimately from Late Latin camera — more at chamber
Date: 1655
1 archaic : a shop selling wines and liquors
2 a : a restaurant serving liquor and providing entertainment (as by singers or dancers) : nightclub b : the show provided at a cabaret

There’s only a small scene here in San Francisco. Mostly it’s based out of a venue called The Rzazz Room, a low-ceilinged nook in a corner of the Hotel Nikko downtown. But other venues host cabaret-like events such as Yoshi’s, Bimbo’s, The Exit Theatre, The Eureka Theatre and the Marine’s Memorial Theatre.

It’s really a very amorphous artform that seems to feed on the outer edges of other more well-defined genres such as musical theatre, jazz and singer-songwriting. Few artists these days can be said to be truly indigenous to cabaret. I suppose that’s not surprising when the word itself means a container for art — the walls between which it exists — than the art itself.

Yet at it’s most pure, cabaret isn’t a place to get tipsy while watching washed-up Broadway people slug their way huskily through “Summertime” and “Somewhere Over a Rainbow.” Although cabaret attracts artists from many, many different backgrounds, there are in fact specific parameters to presenting a cabaret performance that help to define the artform beyond its existence in a particular space.

One factor is the structure of a cabaret show which often, though not always, vacillates between comic and serious songs.

Another consideration is the choice of a signature song which comes to define an artist and acts as a sort of calling card for him or her.

A third staple of many cabaret performances is an overarching theme. This helps to give a show shape and sends over a strong message, instead of being a meandering collection of songs, which would make the experience a concert rather than a cabaret. For example, a recent show I attended at the Rzazz Room by Andrea Marcovicci, focused exclusively on the composer Johnny Mercer. Meanwhile, a performance I saw by Carly Ozard took a more personal theme — the artist built her lighthearted “Bewitched Bothered and Bipolar” program around the highs and lows of being bipolar.

And another defining characteristic of cabaret is the artist’s rapport with the audience. Speaking is as important a feature of a performance as singing. The best artists can effortlessly riff with their audiences and find the perfect segues into and out of each song.

These days, cabaret seems to attract an older or gay crowd. It’s largely ignored by everyone else. This is a shame. There’s something so special and intimate about sharing a performance with a true cabaret artist. “Share” is the operative word here — I can’t think of another type of performance that enables the audience to be as closely entwined with the artist as does cabaret.