There’s something enormously satisfying about experiencing impromptu art, whether it’s coming across a flash mob performance in a shopping mall or shirking off an afternoon in the office to experience a matinee concert at the Symphony.

I relished doing the latter yesterday when I decided at about 20 minutes notice to head around the corner to Davies Symphony Hall to hear Michael Tilson Thomas lead the SF Symphony and Chorus in a matinee performance of Mozart’s Requiem. Additionally on the program were two pieces that were new to me: Lacrimosa, a melodious five minute a cappella choral work inspired by the “Lacrimosa” movement from Mozart’s Requiem by the Lithuanian composer Mindaugas Urbaitis, and Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel, a sepulchral-meditative work for chorus, solo soprano and mezzo-soprano, solo viola, percussion, timpani and celesta.

The delicious naughtiness of taking unplanned leave of my laptop for a couple of hours probably enhanced the experience as well as the stormy weather outside, but I enjoyed the program entirely. The Feldman, in particular, took me to a different place, with its blues-tinged celesta harmonies, sparse vocal and viola lines and spirit of lonely calm. I also enjoyed the Requiem. The “Lacrimosa” stood out for me, not just because of Urbaitis’ quoting of it at the start of the concert. MTT took the movement at a clip, which stopped it from sounding like a dirge. But the musicians and singers managed to imbue the music, even at the faster pace, with longing, pity and regret. I was deeply moved.

In other news, I was sadly not impressed by Alison Moore’s soap opera-sitcom of a black comedy at The Aurora Theatre, Collapsed. The theme about how the stresses and strains of modern life are causing the world to fall about our ears is a tired one. The metaphor of a collapsing bridge to illustrate this idea is as obvious as the inane jokes that pepper the script. Even the talented ensemble cast couldn’t save Moore’s play from coming across as moronic.

There’s nothing quite like a good PR manager. The best of my colleagues in public relations make my job so much easier. They inspire ideas for articles, help connect me with the people I need to speak to to do my reporting and respond to my fact-checking questions and other requests promptly and efficiently.

A conversation I had last night with a friend who heads up a prominent arts group in the Bay Area on the theme of publicists made me realize that there are really two kinds of publicists. One kind you want to work with, and the other, you don’t.

I’m not talking about “good” PR people and “bad” PR people. Obviously there are a few incompetent boobs around who bungle even the smallest and simplest of media requests.

I’m talking about the difference between a publicist that has the best interests of their clients and the art those clients practice at heart versus those that do not. Very generally (though not always), the distinction lies between PR people who work for arts organizations and those that work for individual celebrity artists.

Because an individual artist has to have some clout and standing if not outright celebrity to have his or her own publicist (not to mention the ability to bring in quite a bit of cash to support the usual entourage of PR reps, managers, agents, fluffers etc), the people the individuals hire to meet their PR needs tend to be more focused on propagating the oversized celebrity egos of their clients and taking a defensive stance on even the tiniest details than serving the interests of the artists and the art those individuals practice. The PR people often have over-inflated egos themselves, though more often than not, they’ll think of their behavior as being solely motivated by the protection of their clients’ brand and work.

I bring this up because my friend, let’s call her Kara, was upset last night because the publicist who works with a major artist with whom Kara’s group is collaborating this spring, objected to the press release that Kara put out concerning the upcoming collaboration. Apparently the PR person thought that her client, who is a big name in the art world, should have higher billing / more prominence on the press release than Kara’s group.

It’s probably fair to say that Kara should have shown the press release she’d drafted to the PR person before she sent it out. The PR person was understandably cross about the lack of protocol. But a collaboration is a collaboration. The artists involved should be on equal footing, regardless of their household name status. And, as Kara told me, she’s had so much trouble figuring out which of the celebrity’s many aides to deal with — and how to reach them — that she wasn’t even sure where to send the draft of the release. The communications channels were apparently confusing and opaque. 

This kind of incident depresses me slightly. Journalists are used to getting the cold shoulder from celebrity PR reps. But the artists that work with those celebrities shouldn’t get the same treatment. None of us should, frankly.

We’re all working in service of culture. This is about art-making, people, not boosting celerity egos and putting other people down.

The way in which different arts events attract audiences of different age demographics occasionally strikes me as odd. It’s no surprise that a gig at a club featuring several DJs, a couple of live bands, live painting displays, breakdancing demonstrations and video projections will skew younger, age-wise, than a recital of 19th century German lieder at a concert hall.

But why should it be, for instance, that classical and contemporary dance performances as a whole should attract more diverse audiences including droves of younger people than classical and contemporary music events?

The reasons seem obscure to me, and yet time and time again, I find this to be the case. Is it that more young people dance than play musical instruments? I doubt it. Is dance a more approachable art form than classical music? Again, I don’t think so. Or is it that dance shows are more visually stimulating than concerts? This could be a reason, I guess, though it seems slightly superficial.

I wonder also whether dance organizations just market themselves to younger people more actively than their music counterparts.

The composer John Adams has said that it doesn’t matter that classical music attracts an older crowd. He thinks that classical music organizations should embrace this fact rather than constantly chafe against it and spend all of their marketing budgets on dreaming up ideas to bring in more people in their 20s and 30s.

I kind of see what Adams is saying. There’s no intrinsic reason why an art form has to have a broad-based appeal, except that the bigger and more diverse audiences an organization can attract, the more likely it is to stay afloat.

Figuring out what it is about certain art forms that makes them attract a broader scope of attendee may be a good way to help arts organizations that typically attract a narrower range build audiences.

Collaborations between local youth choirs and established professional performing arts companies seem to be all the rage these days in the Bay Area, in part I’m guessing as a result of special funding opportunities for these kinds of projects. There have been several such productions in recent years, such as the San Francisco Girls Chorus’ partnership with the Joe Goode Dance Company a couple of years ago and now “Fable & Faith,” a dance work steeped in children’s fairy tales created by the Robert Moses’ Kin dance company with the involvement of the San Francisco Boys Chorus.

I very much enjoyed last night’s performance at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, for the combination between the salty strength of Moses’ choreography, which involved angular, twitchy movements that gave the the Tale of the Pied Piper a suitably macabre aspect, and the sweetness of the children’s voices.

I must admit that I was skeptical when I heard about the way in which the choir planned to sing arrangements of standard repertoire like the “Lacrymosa” from Mozart’s “Requiem Mass” and the spiritual, “Motherless Child” in the piece. It sounded a little bit cheesy and I wondered why the composer Paul Carbonara who was responsible for the rest of the musical score, hadn’t gone ahead and written special musical lines for the chorus. But the incorporation of this familiar material, especially as sung with the purity of boys’ voices, helped to ground the more free-wheeling, experimental aspects of the production, such as Moses’ choreography,  Carbonara’s expansive, guitar-led electronic musical score, Ian Winters’ delicate video designs and Mary Domenico’s gorgeously decadent costumes inspired by the 18th century European theatre.

The combination of “Fable & Faith” and “The Cinderella Project,” a dance work which Robert Moses’ Kin performed on the first half of the program, also provided a great balance for an evening of thoughtful dance: Both shows grapple intelligently with the relationship between parents and children. “Fable & Faith” deals with what the two groups mean for the health of a community. “The Cinderella Project” looks at the relationship in a much more intimate and personal way — it’s a dance piece about people’s “right” to be parents and the struggles that many individuals undergo to have kids in the modern world.

As a person who enjoys food as a hobby and writes critically about the performing arts professionally, I love culinary experiences that are also dramatic.

I experienced one of the most theatrical meals on Monday night at Opaque, a basement restaurant in San Francisco which specializes in serving meals in the dark.

When I say dark, I mean blacker than pitch. It was so dark in the restaurant that I couldn’t see my hands two inches in front of my face, let alone the table laden with crockery and cutlery, let alone my partner and the other dining guests. All I could do was put up with the fact that my eyes were useless while working my way through an ahi tuna starter, a portobello mushroom-centric main course, a chocolate cake dessert, crudities and dips, two glasses of wine and a cocktail.

Without trying to alter the way I operated I found that the lack of light piqued all my other senses in a way which I had never experienced before.

Theatre also heightens the senses. When it’s good, your eyes and ears feel completely consumed by what you’re seeing and hearing. When it’s bad, the odor of the guy sitting next to you and the hard feel of the seat below you overpower the experience of the show.

People often talk about how “dining in the dark” restaurants (which have been around for the past few years) make the food seem even more delicious because your sense of taste is apparently heightened by the fact that you cannot see. I don’t know what the scientific evidence is to support this claim, but it’s true that my taste buds reacted more strongly to what I was eating and drinking than usual. This was also partly because I was consuming more slowly and carefully than usual owing to the lack of light. On several occasions, I put my hand in the butter dish and crudite dip bowls by accident.

But I was most surprised by how the experience affected my other senses beyond taste. I didn’t expect my hearing to change so radically. Eating three courses and drinking wine (out of stemless glasses to prevent spillages) in sepulchral conditions made me hear conversations going on all over the room with acute sensitivity. In lit conditions, I normally tune out other talk.

And the texture of the table fixtures seemed so much more tactile, from the grain of the cloth napkin on my lap to the cold metal of my fork.

Perhaps the most dramatic aspect of an evening at Opaque is how dependent a seeing person becomes. In the world of light upstairs, blind people often rely on the seeing to get around. But in the dark, the tables are turned.

All of the serving staff at Opaque are blind. Our waitress expertly guided us to our table, served the meal perfectly and helped us to find all the things we needed throughout. Though I’m deeply glad to have the use of my eyes, it was disappointing in some ways to be led back to the light after such an intimate, heightened experience in the dark. On the other hand, I felt pretty helpless. If it hadn’t been for our waitress, I’d probably still be sitting in the dark now.

P.S. When a diner drops a wallet or cellphone at Opaque and can’t find their valuables at the end of the night, someone on the restaurant staff (a seeing person, I assume) dons night goggles to look for the item in the pitch. You learn something new everyday.