Archives for August 2013

A question raised from the evening I spent with the Colorado Ballet.

The Denver-based company performed a mixed program last night at the Arvada Center Outdoor Amphitheater, which swung between classical pas de deux from Gisele and Don Quixote, and contemporary ballet pieces, including a setting for two dancers of Adele’s “Fire to the Rain” by choreographer Sandra Brown and a tango-infused triptych choreographed by Lorita Travaglia to music by Astor Piazzolla.

As I watched the performance, it struck me that ballet companies as a whole are unusual among arts institutions for continuing to revive very old choreography.

Conversely, outside of places like Russia, it’s rare to see an opera or a production of a play or musical that uses the blocking and acting style of more than a hundred years ago. Imagine watching a re-staging of a Shakespeare production by Herbert Beerbohm Tree today? Though perhaps interesting from an academic perspective, such an endeavor would appear pretty silly and anachronistic to most contemporary audiences.

Just as often as someone like Mark Morris will come along and create entirely new choreography around The Nutcracker, companies continue rehash the old Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov steps from the 19th century. The Colorado Ballet certainly isn’t alone in resurrecting moves by long dead choreographers like  Petipa (Don Quixote), Jean Coralli & Jules Perrot (Gisele).

Why do ballet companies continue to pay homage to old fashioned dance steps in such an explicit way?

 

The Clyfford Still Museum in Denver is developing unusual ways to engage its community — ways that stretch the subject matter of the institution as a center devoted to the life and work of a single artist — in somewhat far-fetched but nevertheless lively directions.

For instance, last night, the museum invited members to a baseball game at Coors Field. The reason? Still was a big baseball fan. The photo hear is of the artist attending a game. The museum also has a baseball mitt owned by Still in its collection.

I attended the game, a bout between the Colorado Rockies and the San Francisco Giants. The Museum party consisted of around 30 people. I chatted with a few of the Museum’s members at a pre-game reception held at a nearby bar. A love of the artist and of the game drew them out, though as platters of nachos and quesadillas came and went, the talk only occasionally touched on Still and/or baseball.

The mood was high. An older chap with a fine art background, William, even managed to make off with a baseball which fell into his lap somewhere around the top of the fourth inning. When asked by an envious onlooker whether he’d ever sell his prize, William replied that the item would never appear on eBay.

The event got me thinking about how particularly challenging it can be for organizations to engage audiences when their field of inquiry is so narrow. “ The idea here is to look at programs that makes the Still museum accessible to many audiences,” the museum’s public relation’s consultant, Regan Petersen, explained in an email. “We are exploring many programs that link to Still’s legacy and aiming to share his vision and art with the public.”

Still and baseball is a bit of a stretch, as was the case when the museum hosted a fashion show a few weeks ago. I never really thought of the painter as a fashionista. The rationale, then, for setting up a catwalk? According to Petersen, fashion designer Stephanie O, around whose work the show at the museum was created, sees Still as a great source of inspiration.

On the other hand, Still’s career as an “anything goes” abstract expressionist provides a  kind of license for the institution to make the most of even the most tangential links to Still’s life. After all, beyond the fact that the artist taught for a little while in Boulder and has a nephew living in the region, there’s no truly compelling biographical reason for the museum to exist in Denver at all. And yet I’m so glad it’s here.

I wonder what they’ll think of next? A Clyfford Still knitting circle? Wear Clyfford Still Spectacles Day?

Quite a few of the larger cities in the United Sates have their resident “knitting bombers” — that is, groups of hipsters who love to knit/crochet and spend time adorning various urban landmarks with bits of colorful wool.

But it’s not often the case that such a group will be embraced by major cultural institutions. In Denver, however, the needle wielding divas of the anachronistically-named Ladies Fancywork Society were up bright and early this morning adorning one side of the city’s premiere arts institution, the Denver Art Museum, with an enormous, crocheted garden landscape.

I went by on my bike at around 8am to watch the members of the LSF installing their latest creation as part of the museum’s current multifaceted “Spun” show dedicated to exploring fabric-based arts of all kinds.

The LSF vertical wool garden is made up of assorted patches of green crochet embellished with imaginative flora and fauna, including playfully phallic-looking toadstools. It took four knitters around two months to create the gorgeous piece and the planning extends much further back.

The garden is vividly eye-catching on the museum wall. I love the brilliant colors and cookie-ness of it. I also appreciate the way in which members of the public who attend the museum’s Final Friday event at the end of September will be able to take pieces of the garden, which will be deconstructed after a month or so on view, home for free. Nice.

I am coveting one of those phallic toadstools, myself.

I wonder, though, how the meaning of this kind of work changes when it goes from being the kamikaze creation of a group of underground handicrafters to being appropriated by a major arts institution?

I mean, It’s one thing for an enormous woolly garden to appear out of nowhere on the side of a building in an unregulated way, but quite another when the activity is sanctioned.

So far, the LFS has been involved with DAM in a variety of ways:

In March of 2010, LFS was invited to tag the massive bovine art installation outside the museum (“Scottish Angus Cow and Calf by Dan Ostermiller”.) Here’s a link to a photo of the escapade on the LFS site. And LFS has also done installations to promote “Spun” at locations such as IKEA and the Cherry Creek Mall. Here’s a twitter link to LFS members installing their work at IKEA. 

I’ll be curious to see how the collective’s relationship with the museum evolves. I am in favor of the collaboration, though the promotional work gives me pause for thought. I hope that the LFS will continue to produce work in a more spontaneous way all around the city and beyond and that the museum will continue to do the important work of finding other unusual, locally-based individuals and collectives to work with on thoughtful-delightful projects.

PS If you’re in Denver this Friday night and at a loose end, head to the latest “Untitled” arts soiree at DAM to hear LFS members talking about their process at 6:45pm and lead a public crocheting “knit tag” workshop.

 

It’s been a week of beginnings and endings on the theatre front here in Denver.

On the one hand, I witnessed the start of the national tour of Peter and the Starcatcher, an event which was pretty joyful and made me feel good (for once) about the state of commercial theatre in this country. On the other hand, I experienced the demise of a small theatre company that’s been producing shows in Denver for 40 years. Watching Germinal Stage‘s production of Peter Handke’s Offending the Audience was both poignant and torturous.

First, a few words about Peter. What’s remarkable about Rick Elice’s loose dramatic adaptation of a 2004 prequel to the classic children’s story Peter Pan by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson is that it’s a play. It’s not a musical. I don’t think I can recall the last time that Broadway produced a truly successful tour of a non-musical work that had no name recognition to it. It’s one thing to tour a Pulitzer Prize-winning show with famous actors in it, and quite another to run around the country with a production that has a young ensemble cast and only the slackest of ties to anything that people might recognize (the Peter Pan narrative.)

The show holds its own from start to finish with its inventive use of simple props (yellow rubber kitchen gloves become flapping birds; a ship and ocean waves are represented by lengths of rope…), brilliant comedic acting — perhaps most ostentatiously by John Sanders as the malign and misguided pirate Black Stache — and rhythmic writing that never ceases to tickle the eardrums.

I expect Peter and the Starcatcher will entrance audiences all over the country, as it did in New York and at the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego where it launched in 2009. Much of its box office success will probably come from word of mouth and strong reviews owing to the lack of name recognition and the fact that it’s a play rather than a musical.

At the opposite end of the scale, this weekend was the end of the line for the Germinal Stage. The choice of Handke’s obsessive 1966 meta-theatrical treatise on the nature of reality and artifice and life and death served as a fitting swan song for the organization, not only because of the poignant theme but also because the production involved a cast of 43 actors, many of whom seemed to be drawn from the company’s own community of friends and family. Each cast member was wearing a sign around his/her neck with his/her name on it and the year in which the actor first attended or otherwise experienced a Germinal show. Some of the signs had dates going way back to the 1970s and 80s.

It was odd for me, as someone who’s just turned up in Denver and was attending this theatre for the first time, to witness this organization’s finale. The play itself is a bold choice: Handke’s writing is didactic. There is no plot or characters. The actors all wear their street clothes and the house lights are on for almost the whole one hour and fifteen minute showtime. There’s nowhere  to hide and the experience of sitting through the piece, feeling like it’s never going to end, is sort of disconcerting because you also know that when it finally does end, it’s curtains for Germinal Stage. When the lights go off, they will go off forever and no more actors will  tread those boards.

I felt bad for struggling through Handke’s treatise. But that’s just the point. The play, excrutiatingly dull and badly delivered as it is by Germinal’s voluminous, self-conscious cast, is meant to make you feel ill at ease. I left the theatre feeling a curious mixture of ecstatic relief that the play was over and mild sadness that I wouldn’t get the chance  to see more of this company’s work.

Success is fleeting and nothing lasts forever. I leave you with the final lines of Handke’s play, which were delivered by the theatre’s founder and artistic director, Ed Baierlein, whom I hear is retiring. The sale of the auditorium, the director’s nest egg, will help to provide some measure of financial security for his future.

You ladies and gents you,
you celebrities of public and cultural life you,
you who are present you,
you brothers and sisters you,
you comrades you,
you worthy listeners you,
you fellow humans you.
You were welcome here. We thank you.
Good night.

It all began with a public art tour of Denver. I took the tour the weekend before last, thinking it would be a useful thing to do for an arts editor who’s new in town.

The tour guide, Rudi Cerri, is Denver’s Public Art Administrator. As I found out during the course of conversation in between tour stops on our genteel stroll through downtown Denver on a quiet Sunday morning, Rudi is also a trumpeter with Boba Fett and the Americans.

Less than a week later, I found myself playing oboe in a gig with Rudi and his crew. It was one of the most standout cultural adventures of my life to date.

It’s hard to explain what BFATA is and does. The closest I can get is to describe the outfit of assorted musicians — most of them brass players and percussionists — as a kamikaze Star Wars- / star-spangled-banner-themed marching band. The group was founded a few years ago by Shawn King, a multi-instrumentalist member of DeVotchKa,the darling musical ensemble of the indie movie scene. (DeVotchKa scored Little Miss Sunshine among other projects.) According to Rudi, BFATA presents a way for serious musicians like Shawn, who was on tour so not present for last weekend’s gig, to have unbridled fun and make a little musical mischief with no commercial strings attached.

The band’s schtick is to maraud around town dressed in thrift store red, white and blue, and swoop down on mostly unsuspecting music venues, bars, private parties and random public spaces with extremely loud and utterly funky renditions of singable and danceable pop covers like “Push It,” “Tricky” and “Bust a Move.”

The day after the public art tour, Rudi sent me the following email:

If you were serious about coming out for a night and joining in the mayhem that is Boba Fett and the Americans, the rest of the band would be more than happy to welcome you. We don’t play much these days but are set to go out this Saturday, our main hit for the night will be the Ogden Theater,  but we will  be crashing a few more places along the way. If you are free and are interested, let me know and I’ll put you in contact with Joe Grobelny, our “manager”, and amazing trombone player on the details for the evening. The band is all about having fun and making people happy.  If you do come out, wear something, red, white, and blue.

How could I say no to that?

We pitched up at the studio of visual artist Patrick Marold, where the band habitually rehearses, at around 7.30pm. I was wearing a red, white and blue dress that I hardly ever have occasion to wear but that was perfect for the occasion. I had a white felt fedora on my head and white cowboy boots on my feet. With the addition of the oboe, I probably looked entirely silly. Rudi had run some City of Denver art-making workshop that day and was wearing pants and a t-shirt that had been customized with various stars and stripes in regulation colors by someone at his workshop.

Around 10 musicians gradually assembled, dressed in various bits of star-spangled hilarity and wielding sousaphones, saxophones, trumpets, trombones and drums. The leader of the band, a mild-mannered chap named Ethan, rapped song lyrics and other stuff into a megaphone and wore a red super hero costume complete with cape and Boba Fett mask. I hear that the cape gets occasional solos when the group goes out gigging.

The sound of the band is ear-splitting but euphoric. I couldn’t hear a single note I was playing on my puny oboe. I was no match for the percussion and brass. But I was in a state of ecstasy improvising along with hits like “Billie Jean”. Oboists rarely have so much fun.

When we finally left Patrick’s studio in a convoy of cars (the band’s van was out of commission) things got more interesting. We started off the night at around nine-ish crashing a massive rock gig at The Ogden Theater, a venue with a capacity of 1,500 and which was packed. We ran in for about 10 minutes while the roadies were changing the stage between appearances by the  the groups Hearts of Palm and Yellow Second, and played a bunch of songs.

The crowd was dancing and whooping centimeters from my face. I had been told to “look after my horn” by several band members before we went out. I realized that they weren’t joking about the rowdiness levels and wished that I had a plastic oboe to use on these kinds of occasions, instead of my precious Howarth. I was a little scared for my instrument as we were doing our stuff right in the middle of the mosh pit. It was brilliant. And then suddenly we were done and dashed out as fast as we had dashed in. It was like a musical hit and run.

The next stop, at around 10.30 was a 30th birthday party at Dazzle, Denver’s premiere jazz club. Again, a very appreciative crowd. After we played our short set and were chilling outside the venue, someone came out and asked us if “we accepted small tips.” The guys gave us a hundred dollar bill.

After that, we sped over to The Highlands and played some songs for people hanging out at the Forest Room 5 bar. The bar was super busy and happy. I played the oboe from a wooden perch a few feet above the rest of the crowd. I felt like a songbird in a branch, even though no one could hear a thing I was playing.

At around midnight, we pitched up at the Little Man ice-cream parlor and played a random bunch of tunes for the people in the long line awaiting treats at the Denver frozen dessert icon. There were a bunch of cops waiting in line too at the time. They didn’t seem too thrilled at the amount of hubbub we were creating. We must have broken all kinds of noise ordinance laws. But they let us play anyway. And the people loved it. They danced and sang along and said thank you afterwards.

The night culminated with us blowing our entire $100 tip on ice cream. It was the perfect end to a perfect evening. I hope BFATA will have me back. Shouldn’t every marching band include an oboe?

I took a public art walking tour around Denver recently. The stuff is everywhere. I only saw a tiny fraction of the 350-plus pieces that the City of Denver has sponsored thanks to a special fund that allocates one percent of the cost of all public construction projects to art. And I’m now on an active lookout for more such encounters as I make my way around town.

The city has some iconic pieces, such as Lawrence Argent’s famous “I See What You Mean” (aka “The Blue Bear”), pictured here in butt view, that peers through the glass of the Convention Center, and the fiberglass and steel “Dancers” by Jonathan Borofsky, which can be seen grooving to a recorded soundtrack outside the Denver Performing Arts Center Complex.

What’s most interesting to me, though, are the pieces that go beyond the standard public art terrain of monolithic sculptures and WPA murals. On the two-hour walking tour I took with Denver Public Art Administrator Rudi Cerri, there were quite a few examples of pieces that go beyond the usual fare, helping to redefine the definition of what public art is and should be.

The city has commissioned several playful pieces from the sound artist Jim Green. These include “Soundwalk”, a series of recorded sounds like a dog barking and gurgling water installed under the ventilation grates of a sidewalk in downtown Denver, and the “Laughing Escalator,” which is what it’s called, and can be found in the Colorado Convention Center. These “humanized machines” catch the passerby unawares. They also make us pay attention to things we don’t normally pay attention to in our surroundings.

Some of the non-visual art offerings are performance-based and every bit as fleeting, which is strange to wrap your head around as most people tend to associate public art with permanence. I was intrigued to hear about Patrick Marold’s “Virga,” a light sculpture for which the City of Denver commissioned composer Morton Waller to write a 13-minute work for bagpipe ensemble built on a non-conventional scale. I went online to watch footage of the performance on Vimeo. Wish I could have been there in person.

Cerri is interested in continuing to explore more unconventional forms of public art, including live performances. I am looking forward to seeing what transpires on that front.

Of course, this opening up of the definition of “public art” begs many questions. One of the things that I’m intrigued by is what differentiates this “public art” from the “public art” created by the graffiti artist who paints a beautiful mural on the underside of a bridge, or the musician who performs a set in an urban park. It’s all public and it’s all art. The main difference is that one form is sanctioned and paid for — and the other isn’t.

PS I paid a visit to the Western Arts Federation (WESTAF) yesterday — a think tank based in Denver that fosters a bunch of interesting arts-related research studies, creates development programs for artists and builds software solutions for cultural institutions.  One of the cool projects they’re working on is The Public Art Archive, a repository for public art collections around the country. The Archive can be found online here.

 

 

On Saturday at the Vail International Dance Festival, I had the bizarre experience of watching a dance performance from two different perspectives at the same time.

Before the eyes of around 2,500 people packed into the Ford Amphitheatre and the lawn behind it, the celebrity urban dancer, Lil Buck, was performing one of his intricate Jookin pieces with the members of his dance crew.

The mostly white audience was going crazy for the lithe African-American performers as they glided on pointe in their sneakers across the floor like ballerinas and pretzeled their bodies like the tiny Asian contortionists that populate Cirque du Soleil shows around the world. The crowd whooped and cheered the dancers’ moves and seemed to find the whole spectacle extremely entertaining.

Balanced against this wildly ecstatic reaction was a completely contrasting view of what was taking place on stage. As I watched, my friend, Erika Randall (a smart and sassy choreographer, dancer and University of Colorado at Boulder professor)  was whispering her interpretation of Lil Buck and his crew’s performance in my left ear.

Erika explained that the appropriation of the moves (and music) of classical ballet by Lil Buck was a way of undercutting traditionally white culture, “like a modern day Minstrel show,” she said. And far from coming across as clever party tricks, the bodily contortions, especially the dislocated arm socket moves of one of the dancers, conveyed powerful images reminiscent of lynching.

I was forced to look again.

To Erika, the piece was far from circus-like entertainment. It was political satire, made all the more pungent by the fact that the meaning of the dance was lost on probably 99% of the audience, including myself until Erika shared her thoughts.

 

It’s quite common these days for orchestras to perform concerts in collaboration with indie rock performers. Classical music organizations consider these kinds of events to be a great way to bring in a younger crowd. For the rock musicians, performing with a symphony creates a certain caché.

It occurred to me not for the first time over the weekend while attending a Colorado Music Festival concert at the warm-sounding Chautauqua Auditorium in Boulder that featured the singer-songwriter Joshua Radin, that these endeavors, though laudable, are probably more satisfying for the indie musician(s) involved than for the orchestral musicians. I’ve had the same feeling at previous events organized along similar lines, for example at a San Francisco Symphony concert a while back in which Rufus Wainwright performed his settings of Shakespeare sonnets at the piano, accompanied by the “house band.”

Radin, an attractive guy in his early 40s with a sweet, soulful voice and a gentle way of strumming a guitar, played a selection of his songs backed up by the orchestra. Some were more interesting than others. I loved the musician’s lyrical “Lullaby for Will” but was less enamored of a nurdling song about one night stands.

While Radin chatted with the audience about his life and artistic inspiration and played his music, the orchestra looked utterly bored. The basic issue was that the instrumentalists were underused. Trundling their way through unchallenging arrangements behind an indie rocker wasn’t inspiring to these top of the line musicians. It was the same thing at the San Francisco concert mentioned above.

I spoke with a member of the violin section the following evening — I was coincidentally at a dinner party with her. She verified my impression, adding that she had tried her best to look engaged but that it was hard work. She also said that a concert the orchestra had performed recently featuring arrangements of Radiohead songs was much more satisfying for her and her fellow musicians. I can believe it: Not only is Radiohead’s material much more musically complex than Radin’s sincere-simple songs, but the orchestra also got to play Brahms that night.

I’m not saying that orchestras shouldn’t continue to explore interesting collaborations with artists from contrasting walks of musical life. I’m just advocating for more fertile, ballsy music, intriguingly arranged to give the musicians something to chew on. Otherwise, what you end up with is essentially open mike night with a very expensive backup band.

PS It would be remiss of me not to mention the excellent “classically-trained garage band” Time for Three, who also performed with the Colorado Music Festival orchestra on Saturday evening. I couldn’t get enough of this group’s virtuosic sound and  dynamic energy. When the trio played, the members of the orchestra emerged from their lethargy and the audience went wild. I wish that the trio had performed a little more, and Radin — who appeared at Chautauqua as a “special guest” at Time for Three’s behest — a little less. The balance would have been more satisfying.